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UCLA’s Marine Biology Quarter (MBQ) is an intensive, hands-on, immersion field research experience abroad for undergraduates. During the 2010 MBQ in Moorea, French Polynesia, undergraduates developed broad skills in marine ecology research, including exploring ecosystems, designing projects, scouting locations, performing fieldwork, and analyzing and interpreting data.
The MBQ partnered with COSEE-West to include an outreach component, instilling in young scientists the importance of communicating research. Students wrote research blogs and created a range of outreach products. COSEE-West ran a concurrent online workshop that connected MBQ scientists at professor, graduate, and undergraduate levels to teachers and informal educators, and live webcasted the concluding MBQ Student Research Symposium.
Evaluations showed immense value of these experiences for students, scientists, and workshop participants. Students learned “new ways to present my project to different groups of people in a clear way” and 82% rated blogging an A/B grade. One professor commented the online workshop “allowed me to bridge the gap between scientific research and public education”, and 84% of workshop participants learned content they could use in teaching.
Presented by Tonya L. Kane, Peggy Fong, and Patricia Kwon with Gwen Noda, Lynn Whitley, Jane Lee, Linda Chilton, Linda Duguay, Peter Tuddenham, Tina Bishop, William Bragg, and Ranjan Muthukrishnan at the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT
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