2013 OUSTA Winner

2012–2013 OUSTA Win­ner Announced

 The 2012–2013 win­ner of the Soci­ety for Col­lege Sci­ence Teach­ers (SCST) Out­stand­ing Under­grad­u­ate Sci­ence Teacher Award (OUSTA) is Dr. Michael Klymkowsky.

Dr. Klymkowsky is a Pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar, Cel­lu­lar, and Devel­op­men­tal Biol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado Boul­der. Dri­ven by a recog­ni­tion of the defi­cien­cies in stu­dent under­stand­ing due to defects in course and cur­ric­u­lar design, since the early 2000’s he has been involved in devel­op­ing assess­ment meth­ods, includ­ing the NSF funded Biol­ogy Con­cept Inven­tory, and edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als, includ­ing a re-designed intro­duc­tory mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy course, Bio­fun­da­men­tals, and an on-line lab­o­ra­tory course (virtuallaboratory.net). These projects led to a on-going col­lab­o­ra­tions with Melanie Cooper (a pre­vi­ous OUSTA win­ner) to develop a rad­i­cally new intro­duc­tory chem­istry cur­ricu­lum (Chem­istry, Life, the Uni­verse and Every­thing or CLUE), with Sam Bryf­cyn­ski and Cooper on a novel, graphic-based for­ma­tive assess­ment sys­tem, BeSo­cratic (used exten­sively in CLUE and Bio­fun­da­men­tals), and with Highlighter.com to make Bio­fun­da­men­tals a socially inter­ac­tive text. Cur­rent projects involve devel­op­ing more coher­ent and effec­tive cur­ric­ula by extend­ing CLUE and Bio­fun­da­men­tals, devel­op­ing more infor­ma­tive test designs, and devel­op­ing strate­gies to improve learn­ing out­comes, specif­i­cally in terms of stu­dents’ abil­ity to syn­the­size facts and prin­ci­ples to induce a rig­or­ous and use­ful frame­work within which to address sci­en­tific prob­lems. He has devoted time to out­reach, address­ing stu­dent ques­tions through the Mad­Sci net­work. He is a Fel­low of the AAAS, a recip­i­ent of a Best Should Teach Award, a Co-Director of the CU Teach Sci­ence Teacher Recruit­ment and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram, and on the man­age­ment team for the new Cen­ter For Stu­dent STEM learn­ing at UC Boulder.

SCST estab­lished the OUSTA to rec­og­nize the achieve­ments of schol­ars who have enhanced the pro­fes­sion as out­stand­ing teach­ers of sci­ence. This year’s award is co-sponsored by the Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com). This annual award is based upon a selec­tion process that eval­u­ates nom­i­nees accord­ing to the fol­low­ing cat­e­gories:  1) teach­ing excel­lence, as demon­strated through teach­ing phi­los­o­phy and effec­tive­ness, teach­ing inno­va­tions, and course and cur­ric­ula devel­op­ment; 2) schol­ar­ship, demon­strated through pub­li­ca­tions in sci­ence edu­ca­tion, pre­sen­ta­tions, grants received, and other forms of schol­ar­ship includ­ing discipline-based research; and 3) ser­vice to sci­ence edu­ca­tion, stu­dents, the pro­fes­sion, sci­en­tific and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tions, the nominee’s insti­tu­tion, local teach­ers and their school sys­tems, and the gen­eral pub­lic with the over­all goal of enhanc­ing under­stand­ing of sci­en­tific issues.