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| Rebecca S. Burton, PhD |  |
|---|---|
| Associate Professor
Dept. of Biology |
I teach ecology, animal behavior, zoology, human anatomy &
physiology, environmental science, non-majors and majors biology, and
science methods. When I design a course, I ask myself:
What do the students need to know?
What do the students want to know?
What must they be able to DO with their knowledge? I use these questions to help formulate outcomes for my class.
Then I design assessments and assignments that are as similar to actual practice as I can make them.
I develop criteria so that students know their performance targets, and design learning experiences so that they will have
the knowledge and skills they need to meet criteria.
I really enjoy designing learning experiences that help students to
teach themselves, with me as a guide rather than a lecturer. My goal is
to help my students go beyond mastering certain concepts, to developing
strategies for analyzing and solving problems in any area. As a member
of the Problem Solving Competence Department, I have an
opportunity
to work on this with colleagues from many disciplines.
My involvement with the Alverno Latin American Studies Initiative allowed me to travel to Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay in the summer of 2004. In 2005, I was fortunate to China with my colleagues from the Alverno Asian Studies Initiative. In 2006 I travelled to Costa Rica with colleagues and students. These projects and my own travels to Russia, Tanzania, and Rwanda have helped me to infuse my courses with a more international perspective.
I'm primarily interested in behavioral and evolutionary ecology.
Specifically, I
study ways in which animals cope with variable environments. For my
doctoral research
I examined
winter fasting and adaptive weight loss in eastern woodrats (Neotoma
floridana).
During my postdoctoral fellowship I studied seasonal changes in body mass, metabolism, and immunocompetence of dusky-footed woodrats (N. fuscipes) at Sedgwick Reserve. Some of my colleagues at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis extended this research and analyzed den characteristics and use patterns. This has enabled us to make recommendations about placement of artificial dens during relocation efforts involving endangered subspecies of dusky-footed woodrats (N. fuscipes riparia). I also also conducted a survey of the mammals of Sedgwick.
In addition, I was part of a team that was experimenting with management strategies to encourage native plants found on California's serpentine refuges to reinvade the alluvial soil, which is now covered with introduced grasses. These days I'm developing our own prairie site here on the Alverno campus.
Of my
research papers, my
favorite was based on an experiment to examine the effect of immune
challenge on hibernation in Turkish hamsters (Mesocricetus brandti).
It appears that the hamsters spend more time in torpor if they are
exposed to a novel antigen during the hibernation season. This
mechanism may allow them to defend themselves
against pathogens, which can't proliferate at low temperatures.
I'm currently researching factors that influence undergraduate students' ability to learn from biology textbooks. Is it the use of technical terms? Is it the length of words and sentences, as many reading indices assume? Are the factors different for college biology than for other kinds of reading material? These are the questions that really interest me right now.