Our mission is to enable the next generation of scientists to develop the skills needed to make the world a better place.
The six principles below represent our pedagogical ethos and approach to meeting this vision, enhancing student learning through our resources, platform and community.
Our focus on active learning puts students at the centre of each resource, ensuring they are learning-by-doing through a variety of tasks and activities, rather than just passively consuming. This approach can be highly beneficial to students’ meaningful learning and performance.
Genuine learning requires effort, so it’s important to keep students engaged in their tasks. We aim to make enjoyable, authentic and achievable activities to give your students motivation and confidence to progress through their learning experiences and finish with a sense of achievement.
Regardless of your students’ career aspirations, we want to help start them off with the skills they’ll need to succeed. Our specialisation in laboratory techniques and procedures will benefit those who go on to become scientific researchers. Furthermore, we strongly focus on skills in data handling, analysis and problem-solving, which are desired graduate capabilities in all lines of work.
In all areas, we recognise the value of well-defined, student-centric learning and skills outcomes. By designing resources with carefully chosen and clearly defined learning and skills outcomes, you and your students can more readily evaluate their learning and achievement potential.
Our resources are used by students at many different points in their personal learning journey, and we want to provide learning opportunities for all. Our resources are well-scaffolded to start learning off right, fostering a growth mindset by allowing students to learn from their mistakes in a safe environment.
To help embed learning into long-term memory, our resources encourage review and repeat usage, incorporating randomised elements for more enjoyment and variation. Students can demonstrate progression and mastery by continuing to solve problems as challenge level smoothly increases and questions become more complex, tackling the topic from different angles.
Feedback is so important to learning, but it needs to be done right. For feedback to be effective, the student needs to be both willing and able to make use of it. Our feedback is timely (often immediate), motivating and meaningful, allowing students to try again and put it into practice at the source.
Drawing from our in-house and community knowledge base, we create targeted feedback based on each student’s answer input and the learning context, addressing specific errors and common misconceptions. With the right guidance given in the right way, your students can become confident, safe scientific practitioners.
Our resources’ crisp and clean style creates a visually coherent experience, helping students focus on the learning tasks in a healthy flow state with minimal distractions or cognitive overload. Content is broken down into chunks and clearly defined sections to keep things manageable and help students monitor their progress.
Our extensive libraries are here to help you meet your teaching needs: to help students prepare before a lab session, or practise afterwards. They are available any time for asynchronous learning, and are easily embedded and used either within your VLE or hosted on our own Direct Access platform.
We value the diversity of our partners and their students, and believe our resources should be comfortably usable to as many as possible. We are continually exploring accessibility improvements and seek to foster inclusive environments throughout everything we do.
We thrive on academic collaboration, and the LearnSci community has grown into something truly wonderful. Through our Community Groups, events and awards, we celebrate teaching excellence, support educational research and actively seek feedback to help us drive innovation and improvement.