Life Science Courses Embedded with Active Learning Activities: Opportunities for Developing Higher Order Thinking (HOT) Skills and Graduate Employability Skills-Attributes (GESA)

Developing Soft Skills in Life Sciences

Abstract

The need to equip our graduates with HOT skills and GESA becomes essential in this post-truth world and automation era. The learning of HOT skills and GESA can be embedded in our curriculum using active learning strategies. To reflect on whether our Life Science (LS) curriculum has opportunities to develop HOT skills and GESA via active learning, we conducted and analysed an online survey on 90 LS courses. Among the 20 learning activities, “Report/Essay Writing” (62%), “Project Work” (58%), “Critical Reading & Critique” (58%), and “Case Studies” (56%) are the most embedded activities. As for the four HOT skills based on Bloom’s taxonomy, i.e., “Apply”, “Analyse”, “Evaluate”, and “Create”, there are respectively 91%, 90%, 87%, and 72% of the LS courses perceived by the course coordinators to have “Good” to “Very Good” opportunities for developing them. Among the 14 GESA items, 54% to 99% of the LS courses are perceived to have “Good” to “Very Good” opportunities for developing them; “Analytical & Critical Thinking” and “Problem-solving” skills are among the highest. An indirect comparison with another independent survey on our graduates’ perception of learning GESA suggests comparable findings, although there is room for improvement. Overall, the findings suggest that our LS curriculum, embedded with active learning activities, offers good to very good opportunities for developing HOT skills and GESA.