Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education最新文献

This study examines the self-reflections of first-year life science students enrolled in introductory biology courses across three institution types. Using an abductive analysis approach, we analyzed written reflections from 390 students to identify recurring non-academic themes and explore how these align with Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) theory. Our findings reveal that many challenges students experienced, such as unexpected academic and social difficulties, the influence of living arrangements, mental burnout, and uncertainty about personal abilities are not explicitly captured within SRL's current categories but nonetheless shape students' engagement with SRL processes. These results highlight the need for earlier, proactive interventions, as many students reported recognizing these issues only late in the semester. We offer practical recommendations for educators and student affairs professionals to better support students by addressing non-academic factors early in their college experience. We frame these non-academic influences as contextual factors that interact with students' self-reflection (including self-judgment and self-reaction), and we identify them as important areas for future exploration.

Ungrading is a pedagogical approach that, in some iterations, emphasizes formative feedback and student self-assessment over traditional point-based grading. While increasingly popular in the humanities and social sciences, ungrading remains uncommon in STEM courses, particularly those that are content-intensive. This article presents a structured example of ungrading implemented in an upper-division ecosystem ecology course through a 7-week independent research project. Students used public or previously collected ecological data to investigate a scientific question, culminating in a short-format, manuscript-style research paper and a 10 min oral presentation. The project was scaffolded with multiple checkpoints, including structured reflections, peer review, and instructor feedback. Students were invited to define personal growth goals, determine how they wished to be evaluated, and reflect on their progress throughout the project. While the rest of the course retained traditionally graded assessments, this ungraded project accounted for 40% of the final grade. Students reported high levels of engagement and ownership, with ~86% of students opting to receive both an instructor grade and self-grade, and a further ~9% of students opting to entirely self-grade, with only ~5% of students preferring a traditional grading schema. The model was particularly effective in a small, seminar-style course with students specializing in environmental science and may require adaptation for larger courses, lower-division settings, or to accommodate generative artificial intelligence usage guidelines. This case study offers a replicable framework for integrating ungrading into STEM curricula and highlights the importance of in-class support and iterative feedback when using an ungrading approach. By emphasizing student agency and identity "as a scientist," this approach aligns with the goals of authentic research experiences and provides a flexible alternative to traditional grading in content-heavy STEM courses that could include independent projects.

Microbiology, the study of microorganisms, is of critical importance to a variety of fields, including medicine, nursing, genetics, and immunology, as well as to students training to enter those fields. By definition, the objects of microbiology are too small to be seen with the naked eye, so its practitioners are well accustomed to using technology to make the invisible visible. From this perspective, virtual reality (VR) is a natural evolution from the microscope and the petri dish. We have conceptualized, designed, and tested a new virtual reality environment to teach undergraduate students how to diagnose a range of human parasitic diseases. Here we present our VR module as well as the qualitative and quantitative student feedback received from our second-year microbiology student cohort (n = 30). Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating VR into an internationally recognized university microbiology curriculum. This includes considerations at the curriculum design level, where we identify specific VR learning activities that could be added throughout the course, and at the application development level, where we present lessons learned from the development of a VR learning resource for parasitology education.

Authentic learning, defined as direct engagement with real-world problems, data, and professional practices, is widely cited for improving STEMM students' knowledge, skills, and retention. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) and research experiences for undergraduates (REUs) increase students' understanding of scientific content and processes, and STEMM career interest. However, these experiences are often resource and time intensive. As a result, many students are unable to access these formative experiences due to differences in ability, financial constraints, or family and caregiving responsibilities. Open educational resources can broaden access to authentic learning, especially for place-based learning in tropical field settings. We introduce a new concept of free interactive research-based experiences (FIREs) as a category of instructional design that has many of the benefits of CUREs and REUs while removing many barriers. As a case study, we present the Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems (OCELOTS) network and their open-access modules that are grounded in peer-reviewed tropical biology research. Hosted on the Gala platform, these modules are adaptable, multilingual, and integrative; they feature real data sets, visualizations, and simulations for instructors to implement authentic learning without specialized infrastructure. Instructor feedback from OCELOTS module implementations highlights gains in student engagement, conceptual understanding, and appreciation for real-world science. We argue that FIREs complement existing authentic learning frameworks and should be part of a diverse set of authentic learning opportunities used by educators. As a community, we should prioritize the assessment of short- and long-term impacts of FIREs on student outcomes to guide further adoption and funding support.

Training in specialized techniques and instrumentation is an important component of undergraduate and graduate education. While such training can occur in formal lab courses, it also occurs as students engage in research. Although training in a research lab setting is typically informal, implementing evidence-based practices from the classroom would be beneficial, particularly for learning complex techniques and instruments, for example, light microscopy. Using advanced microscopes for research is more complicated than using teaching microscopes in a course. In addition, microscopes are easy to misuse because they will generally always produce an image even if that image is suboptimal, misleading, or inaccurate. Here, we describe a backward-designed approach to individual or small-group microscope training for undergraduate life sciences research, including a training module and assessments. The approach was designed to be generalizable to a variety of microscopes and applications with performance tasks and survey measures to assess shifts in students' practical skills, knowledge, and attitude toward microscopy. Results are presented supporting the utility and efficacy of the unit and its components.

With the ever-expanding amount of data, students increasingly find themselves needing to engage in self-directed learning to be successful. Students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics often struggle with self-directed learning and are often discouraged, leading to higher attrition within these disciplines. There is a lack of opportunities for students to develop and practice self-directed learning skills within traditional curricula. This research explored the ways in which a generative artificial intelligence model could be used to cultivate metacognition and promote readiness for self-directed learning among graduate students. By leveraging the relationship between metacognition and self-directed learning, with the customizability of the artificial intelligence model, we sought to facilitate conversations between students and the model to enhance metacognitive awareness and self-directed learning readiness. Using the Metacognition Awareness Inventory and Self-Directed Learning Instrument, we found that students improved significantly on both pre- and post-assessment comparisons. Students needed to interact with the model twice a week, for 10 minutes per session. Our findings demonstrate a novel application of generative artificial intelligence in supporting students' personal development and expand our understanding of how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to generate a supportive process, rather than solely as a mechanism for generating answers or some other product.

Improving the rate at which individuals enter STEM careers remains a national concern. STEM fields are currently facing a crisis with respect to filling jobs with qualified workers, suggesting that STEM jobs are available yet remain open and waiting for qualified graduates. While researchers have previously investigated variables, such as demographics and attrition rates for the lack of STEM graduates available to fill job vacancies in the STEM workforce, there is a critical need for additional research examining the impact of structured career development. In this article, we describe the development and evaluation of an assessment designed to measure career self-efficacy and career outcome expectations, two central factors of Social Cognitive Career Theory, and present evidence of validity in our population of students. The assessment was administered to students attending an R1 Hispanic Serving Institution in the southeastern United States during Spring 2022 (n = 600). Factor analysis indicated a one-factor self-efficacy and three-factor outcome expectation assessments. For self-efficacy, item-level analysis is presented and leveraged to further understand student career self-efficacy behaviors. Results support the potential use of the assessment for measuring undergraduate biology students' progress related to career development.

Microorganisms are expected to play vital roles in the development of sustainable societies, but this idea is still poorly understood by the general public. In addition, it would also be important for the future development of microbiology that young students understand this idea and become interested in microorganisms. To this end, we have initiated a citizen-science project known as "the mud-battery project," in which junior high and high school students examine the ability of bacteria in mud to generate electric power using standardized mud-battery experimental kits supplied by the project. In schools and/or houses, students operate mud batteries using local mud taken around their residences and address their ideas on how high-power mud batteries can be constructed. Besides, according to results reported by the students, project researchers collect high-power mud batteries from students and use them for the isolation of novel and/or active electricity-generating bacteria with the expectation that these will contribute to the development of sustainable biotechnology processes, such as microbial fuel cells for generating electric power from food waste. In this way, students collaborate with microbiologists and take roles in advanced research projects toward the development of sustainable energy.

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are key elements under the self-determination theory (SDT) for student motivation in learning. Stump the Professor (STP) is a low-prep activity designed to model metacognition, normalize the experience of being incorrect, and encourage student participation in undergraduate biology classrooms. By empowering students to generate their own questions, STP promotes autonomy and gives students agency to shape classroom dialog. Observing the instructor verbally reason through uncertainty highlights strategies of problem-solving which model metacognition and competence. Normalizing mistakes within a supportive, low-stakes environment fosters relatedness as students perceive the classroom as a collaborative and psychologically safe place. In this article, we outline how to run this activity to establish an environment conducive to promote student learning and engagement. Our STP-focused post-activity survey results suggest that this activity reduces anxiety, increases comfort with being wrong, and enhances student engagement, supporting all three components of SDT.

Careers in the professoriate at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) may represent a good fit for trainees who want to remain in academia. Retaining talent in the biomedical and life sciences professoriate at PUIs will be critical to the training of undergraduates for careers in the STEM workforce. Early-career scientists seeking insights into career paths available at PUIs and small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) rarely have opportunities for on-site immersive career exploration and capacitation. While some programs exist, these are often short-term and rarely immersive, likely failing to expose trainees to some of the unique features and benefits of careers at PUIs and SLACs. Such programs are not described in the literature in a way that can enable interested institutions to adopt or replicate their successful elements. Our program aims to fill this gap by leveraging well-established resources (Collaborative Teaching Fellows Program at Goucher College and Stevenson University and Center for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching at Goucher College) to create a cohort-based model for PUI career exploration that can be adopted by other institutions, especially those near biomedical and life sciences research-intensive institutions. We call this program ACCESS (Accomplishing Career Exploration for Scientist Scholars) to PUIs. In this Curriculum article, we share the structure of the program and the outcomes of our program. The outcomes include those connected to trainees' preparedness to adapt their research for PUIs.