Published in CBE life sciences education
This article describes an equity-focused professional learning community that used the EQUIP observation protocol to provide data analytics to instructors. The learning community met during Spring 2020, and due to the global coronavirus pandemic, it moved online midsemester. This article describes patterns of student participation and how they were...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Past research on group work has primarily focused on promoting change through implementation of interventions designed to increase performance. Recently, however, education researchers have called for more descriptive analyses of group interactions. Through detailed qualitative analysis of recorded discussions, we studied the natural interactions o...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Summer undergraduate research experience (SURE) programs are proven interventions that provide undergraduate students with opportunities to develop research skills under the mentorship of a faculty member. These are essential programs, particularly for members of underrepresented minorities, because SUREs are known to broaden their participation an...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Reasoning about visual representations in science requires the ability to control one's attention, inhibit attention to irrelevant or incorrect information, and hold information in mind while manipulating it actively-all aspects of the limited-capacity cognitive system described as humans' executive functions. This article describes pedagogical int...
Published in CBE life sciences education
The prevalent stereotype that scientific fields do not afford opportunities to fulfill goals of helping others deters student interest and participation in science. We investigated whether introductory college science textbooks that highlight the prosocial utility value of science can be used to change beliefs about the affordances of scientific wo...
Published in CBE life sciences education
Science instructors are increasingly incorporating teaching techniques that help students develop core competencies such as critical-thinking and communication skills. These core competencies are pillars of career readiness that prepare undergraduate students to successfully transition to continuing education or the workplace, whatever the field. C...
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...
