Associate ProfessorAngela Ziebell

Higher education learning and teaching for STEM students. Especially using industry/workplace contexts for learning and career readiness. This includes cultural intelligence as a transferrable skill. Including;

Career development learning
Due to the generic nature of the Science degree in many parts of the world, science students are not directly linked into their profession while studying (unlike courses like teaching and health). This can result in a poor understanding of workplaces which can be challenging for institutions to
address. After all which workplaces do the students need to learn about? Where will the students end up? Placements can make a huge difference but issues of scale and equity (if placements are unpaid) mean that other complementary approaches are needed. In-curricular career development learning which is contextualised for science students is one option. We are looking at the impact of a unit which was designed specifically to fill known gaps in student knowledge. We are looking at self-perceived changes across the unit and measurable differences to the Graduate Outcome Survery for those same students one and three years post-graduation.

Industry-linked context-based learning for career belonging
Using context-based learning and authentic assessment in science can increase engagement in the classroom and helps with aspects of employability especially if educators are conscious of embedding and communicating the importance of transferrable skills. We are talking this work one step further and looking at the impact of this environment on student belonging and the link between employability and belonging in this undergraduate context in Australia.

Tolerance of Ambiguity
One very important facet of learning and teaching is the extent to which their students will tolerate uncertainty. The ability to tolerate uncertainty as a personality variable was first identified by Budner (1962) who described an individual's tendency to see ambiguous or uncertain situations as either desirable or as a threat. Further to this, uncertainty tolerance (UT) is a psychological construct referring to the way an individual(s) perceive(s) and process(es) information about ambiguous situations or stimuli when confronted by an array of unfamiliar, complex, or incongruent clues. Tolerance of uncertainty is now recognised as being an important determinant of an individual's ability to function successfully in both the class room and the workplace. We are looking at how high achieving educators manage ambiguity in the classroom and what we can learn from them about helping students see ambiguity as part of the way systems work as opposed to a negative.

Indigenous cultural competency before and after studying an introduction to Indigenous Science.
We look at the impact of studying a semester long unit on the Indigenous cultural competency of science students in an for-credit elective. Using
Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews Indigenous Graduate Attribute evaluation instrument we are looking at students perceptions and beliefs before and after the unit to determine, first where these students start, and then what the impact of the learning is. This work is incredibly important as poor attempts to introduce Indigenous perspectives and content, can lead to the use of stereotypes by educators and actually decrease cultural competency.

Knowledge Areas
Work Integrated learning, Context-based learning, Career development learning, Laboratory learning, WIL in the laboratory classroom, Embedding Indigenous perspectives in Science curricular, Biomass utilisation, Biomass for biofuels, Biomass characterisation

Projects
I'm excited to soon be releasing my book "Building your Career in STEM" through the Royal Society of Chemistry (anticipated release October, 2024). Thank you to all the contributors and Dr Rebecca Yee as Co-editor.