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Part A:

Part B:

Uark Course: CHEM 3603 Organic Chemistry


Uark Instructor: Dr. Wei Shi
Part C:

Thesis/Dissertation One:
1. The author of this dissertation is Karen E. Bailey.
2. The dissertation title is: Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Reforming
Classrooms by Training Current and Future Faculty.
3. The year of the dissertation is 2018.
4. The author attended Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.
5. The purpose of this study is to reform STEM classrooms by training current and future
faculty.
6. The conclusion states that these data support the need for continued research to
understand how to use what we know about successful professional development to
develop effective pedagogical training for future faculty. Training future faculty to
implement evidence-based practices before they enter their first position will help
disrupt the pattern of producing an academic workforce that is prepared for only half of
the expected duties of the job.
7. This study is very important in my field. As a current STEM student, I can see for myself
the usefulness of better preparing our SI’s and TA’s for their jobs. How students are
taught has a large effect on their success.
8. If I were to recreate a similar study on my own, I would only have a few differences. I
would still have the TA’s take a “scientific teaching orientation” course at before they
teach any course themselves. Also, rather than videoing each TA’s class for a peer
review, I would randomly place other TA’s in classrooms for their peer review survey. In
addition to surveying the TA’s on their peer’s teaching methods, I would also survey the
students. I would want to hear the students opinion on how a certain method of
teaching helped them learn. I would also include on section of the survey for students to
include any teaching methods or exercises that the TA’s did that made it harder for
them to learn. I think the student’s experience is just as important than the peer reviews
of the TA’s.

Theses/Dissertation Two:
1. The professor who’s dissertation I have chosen is Dr. Adam Siepielski, who taught my
Ecology class last semester.
2. This dissertation is from 2007.
3. “The ecology and evolution of seed dispersal mutualisms between nutcrackers and
pines” is the name of the dissertation.
4. The dissertation was published while he was attending the University of Wyoming.

5. The conclusion states that the findings have broad implications for understanding both
evolution in response to temporal variation in the environment and the consequences
of such variation to the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species interactions.
First, our results indicate that infrequent selection imposed by varying environmental
conditions can be important for shaping the evolution of traits and species interactions.
Because the seed pulse caused by masting is a prominent source of environmental
variation for both seed dispersers and seed predators of many plants, we suspect it may
be a widespread factor underlying the tempo of adaptive evolution of plant
reproductive traits via their interactions with seed consumers. Our results reveal a novel
consequence of masting that should apply equally well to interactions with strict seed
predators: that it mediates the intensity or opportunity for selection. Second, although
temporal variation in the form of interspecific interactions may be common, our results
indicate that this variation does not always correspondingly translate into
microevolutionary processes (i.e., nutcrackers may be antagonists, but during such
times they exert weak or no selection) capable of driving trait evolution. Infrequent
events can thus be more important than common events in shaping the long-term
evolutionary trajectories of some species and their interactions with other species.

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