This award honors an individual or a research team that has significantly contributed to the scholarship of learning communities.

Scholarship may include publications that are technical papers, conference proceedings, journal articles, capstones, theses, or dissertations that have been published, accepted for publication, or submitted and in review during the past two years.  

The recipients of the Scholarship Award this year are Jenny Aune, Senior lecturer and Learning Community liaison in the Department of English and Nancy Boury, Assistant Professor in Microbiology. Jenny and Nancy have worked together to design an English course that features nature of science in nonfiction narratives describing the early days of epidemiology, hygiene awareness, and the current controversy surrounding vaccinations. Using a validated assessment of student understanding of nature of science, the Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI), they were able to determine that this course has been effective in teaching these students. As the nominator explained, discipline-specific coursework may teach the factual information of science, but it falls short on teaching scientific literacy. Through the implementation of this course, the study showed that student understanding of nature of science had increased between the beginning and the end of this course. Their article – Using Nonfiction Narratives in an English Course to Teach the Nature of Science and Its Importance to Communicating About Science - was published in the March 2018 edition of the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education.

Congrats Dr. Boury!