Cal Poly Wild

The push for active-learning in the classroom has been an aim for K-12 and college-level education in order to improve student involvement and engagement. It is a key mechanism for improving student success and helping to decrease opportunity gaps for minority and first-generation students (Ballen et al. 2017; Theobald et al. 2020). Incorporating research projects into the classroom can do just that with added benefits of retaining science content, identifying potential research careers, developing communication skills, and even understanding the research process (Bangera & Brownell 2014).

Cal Poly Wild is a long-term remote camera monitoring program at the Voorhis Ecological Preserve on Cal Poly Pomona’s campus. In remote camera monitoring when the cameras are triggered, a photo or video is taken of the passerby. These cameras are meant to capture wildlife and give us a sense of what is out there, their activity, and what parts of the preserve they are using without humans physically interacting or disturbing the wildlife. This project is student-ran in that both graduate and undergraduate students are the ones who are setting up, checking, taking down cameras, and entering data. Their involvement in and out of the classroom is important for their development as scientists and future collaborators. The use of camera trap activities and projects within the undergraduate classroom has been successful in allowing students feel a sense of ownership over projects, developing collaborative skills, fueling enthusiasm, and providing field-based experiences (Karlin and De La Paz 2015; Edelman and Edelman 2017).

Cal Poly Wild increases the relevance and impact of such activities, the project is a local example and data generated will be available for use by Cal Poly Pomona students. This activity and project emphasizes Cal Poly’s “learn by doing” motto and directly addresses the priority areas of our funding source: student interactions with virtual tools and environments, inclusive engagement, student-faculty and student-student interactions, and teaching for different learning modalities.

References

Ballen, C. J., Wieman, C., Salehi, S., Searle, J. B., & Zamudio, K. R. (2017). Enhancing Diversity in Undergraduate Science: Self-Efficacy Drives Performance Gains with Active Learning. CBE life sciences education, 16(4), ar56.

Bangera, G., & Brownell, S. E. (2014). Course-based undergraduate research experiences can make scientific research more inclusive. CBE–Life Sciences Education, 13(2014), 602–606.

Edelman, A. J., & Edelman, J. L. (2017). An Inquiry-Based Approach to Engaging Undergraduate Students in On-Campus Conservation Research Using Camera Traps. Southeastern Naturalist, 16(sp10), 58-69.

Karlin, M., & De La Paz, G. (2015). Using camera-trap technology to improve undergraduate education and citizen-science contributions in wildlife research. The Southwestern Naturalist, 60(2-3), 171-179.

Theobald, E. J., Hill, M. J., Tran, E., Agrawal, S., Arroyo, E. N., Behling, S., ... & Freeman, S. (2020). Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(12), 6476-6483.