Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education最新文献

In introductory microbiology courses for non-biology majors, it can be difficult to ensure that students gain a functional understanding of the interplay between the host immune system and an invading infectious agent. Immune Battle is a board game that allows students to explore pathogen evolution and the immune system's response to incursions in a captivating way, leveraging battleship and worker placement styles of gameplay. Students play in teams as either a pathogenic microbe attempting to reproduce and transmit itself to new hosts or as the immune system trying to defend the host from infection. Immune Battle seeks to mimic real-world interactions between immune cells and microbes using board game mechanics. For example, students will quickly find that adaptive immune system actions are better at fighting off microbial incursions than innate immune actions but require more time to activate. In this way, Immune Battle reinforces student's understanding of the immune system and pathogenic virulence in an exciting and interactive way that keeps them thinking about host defenses long after the end of the class period or exam. This board game is well suited for advanced high school courses and introductory college-level courses that have only limited time to cover the immune system and microbiology. Documents containing the necessary components of the board game (not including a six-sided die) are included in the supplemental materials, so educators can print out their own copies and use this board game in their classes with no cost to themselves or their students.

Numerous quantitative studies in science education found that student engagement declined after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but analyses to identify the factors that drove emotional engagement down are lacking. Emotional engagement is a multidimensional construct composed of interest in an academic discipline, value in an academic course, and anxiety. Here, we use qualitative analysis to examine how and why the emergency shift from face-to-face to online classes during and after the pandemic-induced emergency remote transition impacted student emotional engagement. We coded student responses to open-ended questions using an emotional engagement framework and compared them between March and May 2020. Students' survey responses indicate that their positive attitudes toward science and value in the course declined. In contrast, more students expressed negative values of the course in the post-survey, with students mainly critiquing instructors and learning. This qualitative analysis offers a deeper understanding of students' emotional challenges during this educational upheaval and suggests effective teaching strategies for future crises.

Learning in undergraduate immunology requires students to be able to retain knowledge, to apply information to new contexts, and to self-assess their understanding of concepts. These core competencies strengthen students' critical thinking and metacognitive skills which, in turn, enhances their ability to identify knowledge gaps and strategies to support future learning. Retrieval practice and feedback-driven metacognition are evidence-based teaching strategies that have been demonstrated to enhance knowledge retention and metacognition in a range of academic disciplines and levels of education, although their implementation and impact on learning in undergraduate immunology remain largely unexplored. To this end, I designed a modular "practice session" activity for a 12-week, upper-level, undergraduate immunology course that incorporates periodic retrieval practice and feedback-driven metacognition to support students' knowledge retention, application of information, and metacognitive skills. Near the end of the course, a survey was conducted to assess student perceptions on whether the activity supported learning and metacognition in immunology. Instructional resources are provided to facilitate easy adaptation of this modular activity to courses of diverse science disciplines and levels of study in higher education.

Student experiences learning chemistry have been well studied in chemistry courses but less so in biology courses. Chemistry concepts are foundational to introductory biology courses, and student experiences learning chemistry concepts may impact their overall course experiences and subsequent student outcomes. In this study, we asked undergraduate students enrolled in introductory biology courses at a public R1 institution an open-response question asking how their experiences learning chemistry topics affected their identities as biologists. We used thematic analysis to identify common ideas in their responses. We found that while almost half of student respondents cited learning chemistry as having positive impacts on their experiences learning biology, students who struggled with chemistry topics were significantly more likely to have negative experiences learning biology. We also found significant relationships between prior chemistry preparation, student background, and the likelihood of students struggling with chemistry and negative experiences learning biology. These findings emphasize the impact of learning specific content on student psychosocial metrics and suggest areas for biology educators to focus on to support learning and alleviate student stress in introductory biology.

Promoting diversity in the scientific workforce is crucial for harnessing the potential of available talent and ensuring equitable access to Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEM-M) careers. We have developed an innovative program called Postbaccalaureate Research Opportunity to Promote Equity in Learning (PROPEL) that provides scientific and career development training for postbaccalaureate scholars from historically excluded backgrounds in STEM-M fields with an interest in pursuing a PhD or MD/PhD degree. Our program is distinct from other postbaccalaureate programs in that scholars are hired by individual labs rather than funded centrally by the program. This funding mechanism removes the idea that central funding is necessary to encourage faculty to train diverse scholars and allows the program to scale dynamically according to the needs of the scientific community. The PROPEL program started in 2020 with six scholars and has since grown to an enrollment of over 100, making it the largest postbaccalaureate program for biomedical research in the country. Here, we describe the program structure and curriculum, our strategy for recruitment, the enrollment trends, the program demographics, metrics of scholar engagement, and outcomes for scholars who completed the program in 2023. Our experience demonstrates the strong demand from both scholars and faculty for programming of this type and describes the feasibility of implementation.

Community college transfer students face numerous challenges, including gaining access to undergraduate research experiences. In this Perspectives piece, we articulate the benefits of undergraduate research experiences for community college transfer students, some of the common barriers for engaging transfer students in undergraduate research, and how 4-year institutions can address these problems through the development of transfer-specific programs. We specifically discuss the LEAP Scholars program, which we designed for low-income community college transfer students. The LEAP Scholars program helped students learn about undergraduate research through their participation in a science education course-based undergraduate research experience and facilitated student access to undergraduate research experiences in science faculty member research labs.

Mental health interventions can help mitigate the unique challenges that individuals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) face as they navigate these disciplines. We developed the "Mental Health and Wellness: Our Community and our Identity in STEM" workshop, which emphasizes leveraging our STEM community and promoting self-compassion, to foster a conversation among members of the STEM community on how to support mental health and wellness. This interactive workshop begins with a short lecture to define mental health and wellness and introduce evidence-based methods to increase self-compassion. Participants, who are often from diverse backgrounds and various career stages, then explore case studies that highlight experiences related to mental health across STEM career stages. Pre- and post-assessments of workshop participants suggest that participants had positive shifts in their ability to show compassion toward themselves as well as an increased comfort in discussing mental health within their STEM community. This workshop not only provided participants with practical tools and insights but also cultivated a supportive environment, underscoring the importance of mental health awareness and collective well-being within STEM fields. In this paper, we share tips on how this workshop was executed and lessons we have learned from our years of sharing similar workshops in the broader STEM community. We hope this paper serves as a valuable guide for potential facilitators to initiate conversations about mental health and wellness in their respective STEM spaces.

Undergraduate students majoring in the life sciences benefit from experience with data analyses that connect mathematical calculations to the biological systems they are studying. Monitoring the optical density and cell number of Saccharomyces cerevisiae liquid cultures allows students to gain quantitative experience generating standard curves and trendlines that capture the relationship between optical density and cell concentration for a given S. cerevisiae strain. Data comparisons across multiple strains can yield insights into the biophysical properties of cells that drive light absorbance and scattering. In this Tips and Tools article, we share a laboratory module that allows students to experience cell biology tools, laboratory measurements, and data analysis to determine the mathematical relationship between optical density and cell concentration in liquid microbial cultures. This module could be integrated into undergraduate classes ranging from general biology to upper-level cell biology or microbiology and can be a starting point for more complex investigations of microbial growth.

Institutions of higher education play a major role in teaching undergraduate students. Historically, most courses have been taught by tenure-track (TT) faculty who may also be responsible for research or scholarly activities. However, a recent shift from "teaching-intensive" TT faculty to "teaching-only" contingent faculty off the tenure track has highlighted the importance of understanding the experiences of contingent faculty. While there have been an increasing number of studies examining the experiences of part-time contingent faculty, few studies have directly surveyed the increasing number of full-time, non-tenure-track (NTT) teaching faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to capture their experiences, nor are we aware of any study that has examined the roles of NTT teaching faculty within one discipline to examine any potential disciplinary differences that may arise across STEM fields. Here, we focus on the experiences of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty in biology whose primary responsibility is teaching. We conducted a random stratified sampling of institutions using the Carnegie classifications to identify potential full-time NTT teaching faculty at over 10% of all institutions in the United States. Our results from surveying these faculty found both positive and negative themes, including (i) NTT teaching faculty being less diverse than the STEM professoriate at large; (ii) NTT teaching faculty reporting mixed feelings on institutional support, identifying a range of opportunities to better support NTT teaching faculty; (iii) NTT teaching faculty often having limited participation in voting for department and institutional matters and reporting mixed feelings of belonging and value; and (iv) NTT teaching faculty having high amounts of autonomy over their teaching but still struggling in key areas. We end with specific implications and recommendations for our field to better support NTT teaching faculty in biology.

Engaging students in biology courses can be enhanced through assignments that introduce research relevant to course content. Despite their potential, such assignments are often underutilized due to the time required to identify suitable research and to create assignments. Here, we address this issue by proposing the use of TED Talks as a resource for introducing research related to scientific topics commonly taught in undergraduate biology courses. The extensive TED Talk library offers numerous options, but selecting appropriate content can be daunting for instructors. Here, we provide a curated set of TED Talks and field-tested discussion prompts aimed specifically for Microbiology and Cellular Biology courses. These assignments were implemented in both asynchronous online and synchronous in-person formats using discussion board forums, although alternative assignment formats can be easily adapted. Student feedback about these activities indicates that TED Talks helped students connect classroom material to real-world applications and enhanced their overall learning experience. Overall, TED Talks are an enjoyable and versatile tool to diversify biology curricula, relate content to real-world issues, and improve student engagement and comprehension. Here, we provide a framework of TED Talks and discussion prompts that instructors can adapt to their courses.