Cbe-Life Sciences Education最新文献

How do undergraduates use biological principles to guide their reasoning when solving novel problems? Is it an effective strategy? To address these questions, we analyzed real-time discussions from small groups of students in an Introductory Organismal Biology course. We created a reasoning framework to characterize how students activated and linked their knowledge when constructing mechanistic explanations. We found that the principle of flux (flow rate ∝ gradient/resistance) served as a schema, a set of interconnected knowledge elements, that guided students' reasoning by focusing their attention on key components and their interactions. Students who used flux to guide their reasoning were more successful in constructing domain-plausible mechanistic explanations than students who did not use flux to guide their reasoning. However, students who used flux incorrectly, such as applying the wrong gradient for a given scenario, were less likely to generate domain-plausible answers. Our findings emphasize the importance of teaching disciplinary core principles, or core concepts, as schemas. Prioritizing core principles that function as predictive scientific models, providing explanatory power across contexts, can support students' generative reasoning. Still, students require foundational content knowledge, such as understanding gradients and resistances specific to each context, to effectively apply these principles.

Civic engagement involves an individual's proactive participation in a community to improve its socioeconomic conditions. Scientific civic engagement (SCE) is a variant where students use their scientific expertise to achieve similar effects. Various factors, including family, community, peer groups, and education, influence an individual's likelihood of SCE. In undergraduate biology, civic engagement is sometimes integrated into courses through community-engaged projects or CUREs (Course-based undergraduate research experiences). Investigations into these courses have shown positive outcomes, such as students feeling a greater Sense of belonging to the communities they civically engage with in the course and expressing intentions to pursue more SCE in the future. However, limited research explains how students' PRE-course Sense of Belonging to the communities students civically engage with during a course affects these outcomes. Our study found that students' PRE-course Sense of Belonging to the communities with which they were expected to civically engage during a course significantly predicted their outcomes in civically engaged biology courses and CUREs. This highlights questions regarding the choice of these communities by instructors and how incoming identities students hold, that do or do not align with the communities with which they are expected to engage, might influence students' science civic engagement outcomes.

National educational initiatives require significant investments of effort and time from stakeholders. Although stakeholders envision an impact, it can be difficult to measure progress toward goals on a national scale. Here, we propose a novel approach to detect change and growth in teaching practices over time in light of hypotheses outlined in the 2011, 2015, and 2018 Vision and Change (V&C) in Undergraduate Biology Education reports. Using a scoping review methodology, we analyzed trends in curricular and pedagogical practices within 650 lesson plans published over a two-decade timespan. We detected changes after V&C report publication along several variables, including a four-fold increase in publication rate, increased prominence of seven out of 11 concepts and competencies, and use of student-centered teaching and assessment practices such as the inclusion of learning goals and active learning in lesson plans. These results help the life science education community understand the current state of the field and identify growth opportunities. A similar approach can be used by other disciplines to measure educational transformations associated with national reports.

Although research on the experiences of science faculty of color foreground a range of challenges often complicated by institutional and disciplinary norms, not much is known about whether and how college faculty may integrate their social identities into their work. Through semistructured interviews, we investigated how biology faculty of color incorporate their social identities into their classroom teaching and research mentorship. Findings revealed that biology faculty use a range of inclusive and race-conscious approaches to support marginalized students. Although a majority do so in ways that support students in relating to scientists, some deliberately challenge dominant cultural science norms by bringing a more critical, race-conscious approach to their work, particularly in classrooms. Other insights highlight gendered and racialized tensions faced by these faculty. Over half of women-identified faculty shared having to navigate scrutiny, suggesting the influence of the double-bind in integrating identity into classrooms. This study supports previous research emphasizing the additional labor and risk faculty of color undertake to support marginalized students and promote cultural change in academic science-underscoring the need for institutions to redesign cultures and practices that do not further the cultural taxation of faculty of color and disrupts systems of oppression in STEM.

Undergraduate research programs (URPs) play an important role in preparing the next cohort of professionals in the health research workforce. URPs also provide continuity and structure during times of stress and uncertainty, like the COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020. This mixed-methods study describes the relationships between student stressors and educational experiences while examining program factors that might have mitigated negative consequences. Participants of an NIH-funded URP, BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity), aimed to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds in biomedical and behavioral sciences Ph.D. programs and research careers (N = 45), were surveyed in September 2020 and again in May 2021 to understand their personal, programmatic, and educational-related concerns during the twin pandemic of COVID-19 and racial injustice. Concurrent and longitudinal correlational relationships as well as qualitative data were examined to describe trainee experiences and inform best practices in supporting academic pursuits and well-being. In fall 2020, students reported high levels of mental health and academic concerns. Additionally, there was a wide spectrum of personal needs concerns, and of emotional impacts of anti-Black racism on students. High levels of these concerns and impacts of racial injustice were related to poorer personal resource management and programmatic working relationships, as well as educational and graduation impacts after students completed a virtual academic year. Students continued to feel emotionally and academically impacted by both anti-Asian and anti-Black racism, and a majority also indicated heightened awareness and engagement with racial injustice topics. Finally, results showed that negative early experiences were related to poorer end-of-the-year educational experiences, and in some cases, these relationships were significant only for students with a weaker sense of belonging, resource management skills, or working relationships. Results supported the URPs' importance of developing belongingness, strong working relationships, and personal management skills, which improved students' research and academic success, particularly for those with personal, mental health, and/or academic needs or concerns. Building a network of support and these skill sets as undergraduates may have long-reaching effects to help trainees endure and flourish when faced with future challenges.

To science instructors, it may seem obvious that understanding cell theory is essential for understanding how some diseases spread and can be treated. For students, these connections are often unclear at best. For some students, this knowledge might help propel their interest in life science and keep them motivated to engage and persist even when the content is difficult. Infusing purpose and relevance into the classroom is more than the instructor just giving an example from time to time. Our teaching guide describes the evidence for the positive impact of teaching strategies that promote purpose and relevance into introductory science classrooms. We review the various motivational theories that underlie why purpose and relevance matter and describe evidence-based strategies for engaging students in the deliberate process of drawing connections, finding and affirming value, and creating a purpose-filled science classroom culture.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is one method for implementing inclusive education that can have tangible benefits for all learners, increasing educational accessibility. Furthermore, UDL can be used as a vehicle to train majority nondisabled students in methods of inclusive education. We implemented an inclusive education pedagogical framework centered in UDL and tasked undergraduate evolutionary biology students with creating digital science media products throughout semester-long science communication projects. Our goal was to assess student perceptions of accessibility and disability, within the context of science products such as digital media. Student pre-post survey comparisons indicate an increase in ability to define accessibility, consider accessibility in science media, and advocate for access in science. Additionally, postsurvey results suggest that students experience a greater sense of classroom community, inclusion in science, and awareness of disability as diversity. We centered our study in Critical Disability Theory, and we draw on universal design literature and our lived experiences. Evolutionary biology courses inherit a long and troubling history of exclusion and othering through problematic science communication and debunked concepts of human categorization. As biology educators and education researchers, we wish to enact change in our evolutionary biology college classrooms to center our pedagogy in social justice, challenging this history. We encourage future UDL implementation in evolutionary biology and other science courses, where future practitioners of science, medicine, engineering, and other fields can feel empowered by inclusive practices and community experience.

Professional science societies stand at the intersection of science, education, and research, providing crucial professional development and career opportunities for scientists. Their structures and policies can either promote more equitable ideologies, practices and outcomes or deepen existing disparities within science. In recent years, many societies have implemented diversity statements and initiatives, but few studies have examined their actual impact on membership composition and the experiences of their minoritized members. Critical education scholars emphasize the importance of examining these experiences through frameworks that center their voices, acknowledge institutional racism, and address the power imbalances that exclude marginalized groups. This study uses the matrix of domination framework (Collins, 1990) and its four domains of power (structural, disciplinary, interpersonal, and cultural/hegemonic) to investigate the perceptions and experiences of inclusion/exclusion of the members of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER). We identified factors that contribute to and detract from the society's equity goals by analyzing members' experiences at different systemic levels. By framing members' experiences through the lens of dimensions of power, we reveal relationships and structures that may have otherwise remained invisible, offering new insights into strategies that can better aid professional societies toward their equity goals.

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) have repeatedly been shown to be biased against women instructors. Although few have been able to mitigate these biases, one team reported success in two courses by adding a short AntiBias statement to the beginning of SETs. We conducted a conceptual replication of that study to investigate the effectiveness of the AntiBias statement across a Department of Biological Sciences over three semesters. The AntiBias treatment inconsistently affected the SETs, sometimes improving women's scores but often not having any effect. Qualitative analysis showed that the types of comments students gave were mostly not affected by the conditions of treatment or instructor gender and were most frequently framed in positive connotation, implicitly about the instructor, and about course characteristics such as the logistics of the course. Our findings do not support the consistent replicability of the original work scaled to the department level yet shine an important light on SETs in the biology context. Moreover, this work suggests that a simple intervention to mitigate gender bias in teaching evaluations is not sufficient to remedy the multitude of issues with SETs. We discuss differences among studies and suggestions from the literature on ways to improve the evaluation of teaching.