Cbe-Life Sciences Education最新文献

Higher education has evolved in ways that may increase the challenges life science faculty face in providing accommodations for students with disabilities. Guided by Expectancy-Value Theory, we interviewed 34 life sciences faculty instructors from institutions nationwide to explore faculty motivation to create disability-inclusive educational experiences. We found that faculty in our sample perceive that providing most standard accommodations is a manageable but often challenging task. Further, faculty in our sample feel that improving accommodations necessitates additional support from their institutions. Most faculty had high attainment value for providing accommodations, in that they strongly believed that supporting students with disabilities is the fair and right thing to do. However, faculty did not perceive much utility value or intrinsic value in their task of providing accommodations, and most reported that providing accommodations can be a substantial burden on faculty. These findings imply that current approaches to providing inclusive educational experiences for students with disabilities rely primarily on the personal belief that providing accommodations is the right thing to do, which likely results in a flawed and inequitable system given that not all faculty equally share this conviction.

Positive outcomes from undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have resulted in calls to broaden and diversify participation in research. However, we have little understanding of what demographics are reported and considered in the analyses of student outcomes from UREs. Without this information, it is impossible to assess whether participation in UREs has been diversified and how outcomes may vary by participant identity. Through a comprehensive literature search, we systematically identified 147 peer-reviewed research articles on student participation in UREs in the natural sciences, published between 2014 and 2020. We coded each paper to document which student demographic variables are reported and considered in analyses. The majority (88%) of articles on UREs reported at least one demographic variable and 62% incorporate demographics into their analyses, but demographics beyond gender and race/ethnicity were infrequently considered. Articles on independent research apprenticeships included demographics in their analyses more frequently than studies on course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). Trends in reporting and analyzing demographics did not change from 2014 to 2020. Future efforts to collect these data will help assess whether goals to diversify UREs are being met and inform how to design UREs to meet the needs of diverse student groups.

First-generation (FG) college students (i.e., those for whom neither parent/guardian obtained a bachelor's degree) experience more barriers in college, compared with continuing-generation students. These barriers are compounded by subtle messages from instructors that convey the idea that natural talent is necessary for success in scientific fields. In contrast, growth mindset messages communicate that ability can improve with effort, help-seeking, and using productive study strategies. In a large enrollment introductory biology course, students were randomly assigned to receive email messages from their instructor after the first two exams containing either a growth mindset or control message. The intervention improved grades in the course for everyone, on average, compared with control messages, and were especially beneficial for FG students. This increase in performance was partially mediated by increased activity accessing course materials on the course website. This study provides preliminary evidence that instructors communicating growth mindset messages can support FG students' performance.

Quality mentoring promotes graduate student success. Despite an abundance of practical advice, empirical evidence regarding how to match mentees and mentors to form quality mentoring relationships is lacking. Here, we examine the influence of variables theorized to predict mentorship support and quality in a national sample of 565 science doctoral students from 70 universities in 38 states. Our structural equation modeling results indicate that mentor rank, mentee capital, and the relationship matching mechanism (direct admissions, rotations) were not associated with higher-quality relationships. We found no support for the widely held belief that students whose mentors shared their gender, race, or ethnicity experienced greater mentorship quality. Rather, mentees who shared attitudes, beliefs, and values with their mentor, or whose mentors displayed greater cultural awareness experienced more supportive, higher quality mentoring. Furthermore, these patterns were largely consistent across both mentee and mentor demographic groups. These results highlight the potential benefits of pairing mentees and mentors who share personal and intrinsic qualities rather than demographic or surface-level attributes. Our findings also indicate that graduate students from marginalized backgrounds can be effectively mentored by faculty who are demographically dissimilar if their mentors engage in culturally aware mentorship.

The Vision and Change report called for biology educators to transform undergraduate biology education. The report recommended educators transparently state what students should know and be able to do and create assessments to measure student learning. Using backward design, learning objectives (LOs) can serve as the basis for course transformation. In this essay, we present a roadmap for planning successful course transformations synthesized from the literature. We identified three categories of critical features for successful course transformation. First, establishing a sense of urgency and offering faculty incentives to engage in this time-consuming work creates a needed climate for change. Second, departments are empowered in this process by including key stakeholders, building faculty teams to work collaboratively to identify LOs used to drive pedagogical change, develop assessment strategies, and engage in professional development efforts to support the process. Third, there must be intentional effort to manage resistance and ensure academic freedom and creativity in the classroom. General recommendations as well as areas for further research are discussed.

Scientific practices are the skills used to develop scientific knowledge and are essential for careers in science. Despite calls from education and government agencies to cultivate scientific practices, there remains little evidence of how often students are asked to apply them in undergraduate courses. We analyzed exams from biology courses at 100 institutions across the United States and found that only 7% of exam questions addressed a scientific practice and that 32% of biology exams did not test any scientific practices. The low occurrence of scientific practices on exams signals that undergraduate courses may not be integrating foundational scientific skills throughout their curriculum in the manner envisioned by recent national frameworks. Although there were few scientific practices overall, their close association with higher-order cognitive skills suggests that scientific practices represent a primary means to help students develop critical thinking skills and highlights the importance of incorporating a greater degree of scientific practices into undergraduate lecture courses and exams.

Mentorship has been widely recognized as an effective means to promote student learning and engagement in undergraduate research experiences. However, little work exists for understanding different mentors' perceived approaches to mentorship, including mentorship of students from backgrounds and educational trajectories not well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Transfer students, in particular, face unique trajectories in their pursuit of research opportunities, yet few studies investigate how mentors describe their approaches to supporting these students. Using semistructured interviews, this study examines how mentors approach mentoring students from diverse backgrounds as research trainees, with an emphasis on transfer students. First, using phenomenography as an analytical approach, we identified four categories describing variations in how mentors reflected upon or accounted for the transfer student identity in their approaches. We find that research mentors vary in their understanding and exposure to the transfer student identity and may have preconceived notions of the transfer student experience. Second, we present vignettes to illustrate how mentors' approaches to the transfer student identity may relate or diverge from their general approaches to mentoring students from different backgrounds and identities. The emerging findings have implications for developing effective mentorship strategies and training mentors to support transfer students.

Existing research has investigated student problem-solving strategies across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; however, there is limited work in undergraduate biology education on how various aspects that influence learning combine to generate holistic approaches to problem solving. Through the lens of situated cognition, we consider problem solving as a learning phenomenon that involves the interactions between internal cognition of the learner and the external learning environment. Using phenomenography as a methodology, we investigated undergraduate student approaches to problem solving in biology through interviews. We identified five aspects of problem solving (including knowledge, strategy, intention, metacognition, and mindset) that define three qualitatively different approaches to problem solving; each approach is distinguishable by variations across the aspects. Variations in the knowledge and strategy aspects largely aligned with previous work on how the use or avoidance of biological knowledge informed both concept-based and nonconcept-based strategies. Variations in the other aspects revealed intentions spanning complete disengagement to deep interest with the course material, different degrees of metacognitive reflections, and a continuum of fixed to growth mindsets. We discuss implications for how these characterizations can improve instruction and efforts to support development of problem-solving skills.

Stronger metacognitive regulation skills and higher self-efficacy are linked to increased academic achievement. Metacognition and self-efficacy have primarily been studied using retrospective methods, but these methods limit access to students' in-the-moment metacognition and self-efficacy. We investigated first-year life science students' metacognition and self-efficacy while they solved challenging problems, and asked: 1) What metacognitive regulation skills are evident when first-year life science students solve problems on their own? and 2) What aspects of learning self-efficacy do first-year life science students reveal when they solve problems on their own? Think-aloud interviews were conducted with 52 first-year life science students across three institutions and analyzed using content analysis. Our results reveal that while first-year life science students plan, monitor, and evaluate when solving challenging problems, they monitor in a myriad of ways. One aspect of self-efficacy, which we call self-coaching, helped students move past the discomfort of monitoring a lack of understanding so they could take action. These verbalizations suggest ways we can encourage students to couple their metacognitive skills and self-efficacy to persist when faced with challenging problems. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for helping first-year life science students develop and strengthen their metacognition to achieve improved problem-solving performance.

There is widespread recognition that undergraduate students in the life sciences must learn how to work in teams. However, instructors who wish to incorporate teamwork into their classrooms rarely have formal training in how to teach teamwork. This is further complicated by the application of synonymous and often ambiguous terminology regarding teamwork that is found in literature spread among many different disciplines. There are significant barriers for instructors wishing to identify and implement best practices. We synthesize key concepts in teamwork by considering the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) necessary for success, the pedagogies and curricula for teaching those KSAs, and the instruments available for evaluating and assessing success. There are only a limited number of studies on teamwork in higher education that present an intervention with a control group and a formal evaluation or assessment. Moreover, these studies are almost exclusively outside STEM disciplines, raising questions about their extensibility. We conclude by considering how to build an evidence base for instruction that will empower students with the KSAs necessary for participating in a lifetime of equitable and inclusive teamwork.