Cbe-Life Sciences Education最新文献

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) are attractive solutions for scaling undergraduate research experiences at primarily undergraduate teaching institutions, where resources for faculty research activities can be limited. The Sustainable Interdisciplinary Research to Inspire Undergraduate Success (SIRIUS) project is a unique program that integrates CUREs, coordinated around a local real-world problem, throughout a biology department's curricula. The CUREs are scaffolded to provide all biology majors with multiple opportunities to engage in scientific investigations as they advance through introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses. In this mixed methods, cross-sectional study, we explore students' perceptions of the authenticity of their experiences as they progress through the SIRIUS CUREs. Triangulated data collected from two instruments indicated that students in advanced courses recognized more involvement in research activities and perceived greater authenticity in the science they were performing compared with introductory and intermediate students. Intermediate and advanced students perceived more opportunities for independence; however, experiences with failure and the influence these experiences had on the perceptions of authenticity was primarily observed with advanced students. This study contributes to the growing literature on CUREs with a focus on students from a primarily undergraduate institution with multiple minority-serving designations.

Effective communication about science is a core skill undergraduates should learn, but little research has explored how students communicate about culturally controversial science topics. In this study, we explored how Black undergraduate science students took on the role of science communicators in their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed 23 Black students about their experiences learning about COVID-19 vaccines and communicating about COVID-19 vaccines to their communities. We found that students' racial/ethnic and science backgrounds made them feel a responsibility to be effective communicators about COVID-19 vaccines as potential trusted messengers within their communities. However, students were using limited strategies when communicating and were unsure how to communicate about COVID-19 topics effectively to those who were vaccine-hesitant or doubted the severity of the pandemic. Finally, students described ways that their biology instructors could have helped them be more confident when communicating about COVID-19 vaccines with their communities. Findings suggest that biology instructors could teach science communication principles in addition to content knowledge about culturally controversial science topics in their undergraduate classes to build on students' developing science communication skills.

Graduate students often face choices about which resources to use to help them succeed in their programs. These choices likely differ among students, in part, due to different perceptions of resource value. However, little is known about why particular resources might be considered highly valuable to students, thus driving choice. Utilizing expectancy-value theory for help sources as our theoretical framework, this qualitative study explored life science (LS) graduate students' top three resource choices, their explanations about why they made those choices, and whether students' perceptions of value differed among resources and across demographic groups. We addressed two research questions: 1) What resources do LS graduate students consider to be the most important? 2) What drives LS graduate students' perceptions of resource value? Many participants indicated that 'advisor' and 'academic stipend' were most important. Student perceptions of value were driven by their perceptions of which needs resources fulfilled, such as basic needs, academic help, or support. Participants' top resource choices and underlying values of those resources did not differ among demographic groups. We propose a model for understanding graduate student resource choice that may inform future work on student outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to present an argument for why there is a need to re-envision the underlying culture of undergraduate biology education to ensure the success, retention, and matriculation of Black students. The basis of this argument is the continued noted challenges with retaining Black students in the biological sciences coupled with existing research that implicates science contexts (i.e., the cultural norms, values, and beliefs manifesting through policies and practices) as being the primary source of the challenges experienced by Black students that lead to their attrition. In presenting this argument, we introduce the Re-Envisioning Culture Network, a multigenerational, interdisciplinary network comprised of higher education administrators, faculty, staff, Black undergraduate students majoring in biology, Black cultural artists, community leaders, and STEM professionals to work together to curate and generate resources and tools that will facilitate change. In introducing the REC Network and disseminating its mission and ongoing endeavors, we generate a clarion call for educators, researchers, STEM professionals, students, and the broader community to join us in this endeavor in fostering transformative change.

Evolution is foundational to understanding biology, yet learners at all stages have incomplete and incorrect ideas that persist beyond graduation. Contextual features of prompts (e.g., taxon of organism, acquisition vs. loss of traits, etc.) have been shown to influence both the learning process and the ideas students express in explanations of evolutionary processes. In this study, we compare students' explanations of natural selection for humans versus a nonhuman animal (cheetah) at different times during biology instruction. We found "taxon" to be a significant predictor of the content of students' explanations. Responses to "cheetah" prompts contained a larger number and diversity of key concepts (e.g., variation, heritability, differential reproduction) and fewer naïve ideas (e.g., need, adapt) when compared with responses to an isomorphic prompt containing "human" as the organism. Overall, instruction increased the prevalence of key concepts, reduced naïve ideas, and caused a modest reduction in differences due to taxon. Our findings suggest that the students are reasoning differently about evolutionary processes in humans as compared with nonhuman animals, and that targeted instruction may both increase students' facility with key concepts while reducing their susceptibility to contextual influences.

Student-study behaviors and metacognition are predictors of student-academic success. However, student metacognitive evaluation of their own study habit behavior use has been largely unexplored. To address this gap, we gave students enrolled in three different Biology courses (n = 1140) a survey that asked them to identify the study behaviors used to prepare for their first and third exams and to appraise the effectiveness of each behavior. We observed that, across all courses, students used different counts of active- and passive-study behaviors. However, there were no differences in performance across courses, and the use of effective (i.e., active) study behaviors resulted in improved exam performance for all students, regardless of course, while the use of ineffective (i.e., passive) study behaviors had no significant impact on exam performance. Finally, our qualitative analysis revealed that students across all courses demonstrated similar ability in identifying effective-study behaviors, but students could not explain why those behaviors were effective. Taken together, our study demonstrates that students use various study behaviors to prepare for exams without understanding their effectiveness. We encourage instructors to structure their courses to promote the development of metacognitive evaluation and effective-study behaviors.

Active-learning pedagogies often require group work. We tested aspects of forming groups in a nonmajors Biology class. We asked whether large or small groups affected student learning outcomes and attitudes towards working in groups. We placed students in groups of three or six and students stayed in their groups for the term. We measured learning outcomes using a pre/postassessment as well as two-stage exams. Attitudes towards working in groups were measured using a previously published pre/post survey and an exit survey. We found that students in large groups did better on group exams and large groups had higher highest scores on the individual part of two-stage exams. Group size had no effect on students' postassessment scores or attitudes towards working in groups. We next assigned students to permanent or nonpermanent groups. We used the same metrics as the group size experiment. Students in permanent groups had higher group exam scores and better attitudes towards working in groups. Group permanence had no effect on students' postassessment scores. Students preferred working in permanent groups due to positive group interactions that developed over the quarter. Optimal group size and permanence are likely context-specific and dependent on the types of group work used in class.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life-science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight recent large-scale studies from the K-12 literature that can inform undergraduate teaching. The first characterizes how the sense of belonging can influence whether students offer their ideas during class. The second explores the how instructor-student relationships can be leveraged to improve teaching. The third explores whether rubrics or exemplars are better at helping students develop quality feedback on their own writing.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) offer an expanding avenue to engage students in real-world scientific practices. Increasingly, CUREs are instructed by graduate teaching assistants (TAs), yet TAs may be underprepared to facilitate and face unique barriers when teaching CUREs. Consequently, unless TAs are provided professional development (PD) and resources to teach CUREs effectively, they and their students may not reap the assumed benefits of CURE instruction. Here, we describe three perspectives - that of the CURE TA, the CURE designer/facilitator, and the CURE student - that are collectively intended to inform the development of tentative components of CURE TA PD. We compare these perspectives to previous studies in the literature in an effort to identify commonalities across all sources and offer potential insights for advancing CURE TA PD efforts across a diversity of institutional environments. We propose that the most effective CURE TA PD programs will promote the use of CURE-specific instructional strategies as benchmarks for guiding change in teaching practices and should focus on three major elements: 1) enhancement of research and teaching acumen, 2) development of effective and inclusive mentoring practices, and 3) identification and understanding of the factors that make CUREs a unique learning experience.

Although Hispanic population is growing rapidly, Latino students earn fewer STEM degrees than their peers. Therefore, it is mandatory to implement strategies that improve STEM retention and graduation rates for Hispanic students. There is little research about the ways in which multicampus collaborative CUREs combined with additional academic support, affect low-income, Hispanic students and none that focus solely on Puerto Rican students in STEM. Puerto Rico (PR) has a 99% Hispanic population; thus, it is imperative to include PR in education research literature. This study sought to examine the impacts of the Research for Improved Student Experiences (RISE) in STEM program at two campuses of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico. The program included multicampus collaborative CUREs, academic advising, and peer mentoring using quasi-experimental design. Impact assessment included psychosocial metrics such as self-efficacy, science identity and sense of belonging in a pre/posttest design. These findings were triangulated with the differences between treatment and control for retention, pass rate, and course grades. The findings revealed statistically significant improvements on all metrics. This study's findings support multicampus collaborative CUREs, academic advising, and peer mentoring as useful and effective strategies for improving outcomes for low-income Hispanic students in Puerto Rico.