Published in CBE life sciences education
The 2019 Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference (UBER GRC), titled "Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education," brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working to identify, promote, and understand widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching, learning, and success strategies...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Random call is a randomized approach to select a student or group of students to share their thinking with the whole class. There are potential costs and benefits of random call in undergraduate courses, yet we lack insight about how this strategy is actually implemented and why instructors choose to use it. We interviewed 12 college biology instru...
Published in CBE life sciences education
The study of genetics centers on how encoded information in DNA underlies similarities and differences between individuals and how traits are inherited. Genetics topics covered in a wide variety of undergraduate biology classrooms can relate to various identities held by students such as gender identity, disability, and race/ethnicity, among others...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes b...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are an effective way to expose large numbers of students to authentic research, yet most laboratory courses still use traditional "cookbook" methods. While barriers to using CUREs have been captured postimplementation, little is known about the decision mindset before implementation or what fe...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Students' identities shape and are shaped by learning experiences inside and outside classrooms. Three recent papers present theoretical frameworks for understanding the complex dynamics of identity development with implications for equity in science and mathematics education.
Published in CBE life sciences education
We previously developed an online multiple-choice question authoring, learning, and self-assessment tool that we termed Quizzical. Here we report statistical analyses over two consecutive years of Quizzical use in a large sophomore-level introductory molecular biology course. Students were required to author two questions during the term and were a...
Published in CBE life sciences education
The Vision and Change report called for the biology community to mobilize around teaching the core concepts of biology. This essay describes a collection of resources developed by several different groups that can be used to respond to the report's call to transform undergraduate education at both the individual course and departmental levels. Firs...
Published in CBE life sciences education
As research has shown, collaborative peer learning is effective for improving student learning. Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is one well-known collaborative-group approach in which groups are facilitated by trained undergraduate peer leaders. This paper contributes to the literature on peer-leader training by examining how peer leaders for a large...
Published in CBE life sciences education
When a student explains a biological phenomenon, does the answer reflect only the product of retrieving knowledge or does it also reflect a dynamic process of constructing knowledge? To gain insight into students' dynamic knowledge, we leveraged three analytic frameworks-structures-behaviors-functions (SBF), mental models (MM), and conceptual dynam...
