Advancing Waterfowl Ecology and Management: Assessments of an Online Course, Professional Credentials, and Graduate Student Publication Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
University programs with waterfowl teaching, research, and outreach in the United States and Canada have decreased from approximately 55 to 33 programs (~40%). A reduction in these programs may lead to a loss in professional capacity of waterfowl and wetlands specialists working for science and conservation of these resources. Three research projects were conducted: (1) the creation and assessment of inaugural online course in waterfowl ecology and management, (2) identifying academic and experiential credentials perceived important for a successful career in the waterfowl profession by professionals and current students, and (3) identifying waterfowl graduate students’ performance in publishing in peer-review literature. In the assessment of the online course in waterfowl ecology and management, students indicated that pedagogical components of the waterfowl course maintained similar effectiveness in helping them learn material when compared to both in-person and other online courses. Significant differences observed between graduate and undergraduate responses suggested opportunities to modify current theoretical models in online learning. A survey of waterfowl professionals and students revealed that technical field and practical skills, such as animal capturing and handling and species identification, as well as traditional coursework in ecology and wildlife management, are important for a successful career in the waterfowl profession. A separate survey of waterfowl professionals and students identified strategies are most often used to motivate graduate students to publish and the most common barriers to publication. Professionals and students indicated that a combination of encouragement and assistance in editing manuscripts could improve student publication performance. Most common barriers to publication were lack of time during and outside work hours, as well as lack of job incentives to publish. The results from these three studies can aid university waterfowl programs to advise and prepare their students for success in their future careers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".