Transforming undergraduate biology education: What resources are available to faculty and departments?

Today's Guest Blogger is Christian Wright a postdoctoral research scholar in Dr. Sara Brownell’s Biology Education Research Lab in the School of Life Sciences as ASU. He has a Master’s in Education and a Ph.D. in Biology where he studied the interaction between physiological condition, environment, and foraging behavior of Gila monsters. His current research focuses on 1) generating a validated general biology programmatic assessment, 2) exploring potential biases in undergraduate biology classrooms as well as examining mechanisms and interventions that may explain and alleviate said biases, 3) evaluating assessments used by undergraduate biology instructors and by biology education researchers to determine if these measurement tools are indeed measuring what they intend to measure, and 4) exploring how and why instructional strategies differentially impact cohorts of students in undergraduate biology classrooms. He will be starting a position as an Academic Professional in the School of Life Sciences in June, 2015.

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Vision and Change: A general framework for undergraduate teaching

There have been numerous calls to action by national agencies (e.g., National Science Foundation [NSF], American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS]) for curricular reform in undergraduate biology education, with the goal of moving students away from thinking about biology as “silos” of content and towards encouraging students to think about biology in a much more integrative way. The product of many of these discussions is the consensus Vision and Change Report (AAAS, 2011). In this report, a group of 500+ biology faculty, administrators, students, and postdoctoral scholars identified five core biology concepts: 1) evolution, 2) structure and function, 3) information flow, exchange, and storage, 4) pathways and transformations of energy and matter, and 5) systems. The report suggests that these concepts be integrated throughout an undergraduate biology curriculum in order to ensure that all students master these concepts by graduation.

This report has been critical in encouraging dialogue and promoting meaningful change in the way undergraduate biology is taught nationally; however, the concepts laid out in Vision and Change were intentionally broad and thus sometimes difficult for departments and faculty members to use to directly transform biology curricula.

BioCore Guide: Clarifying the Vision and Change Report

Most of the work to clarify the Vision and Change core concepts has been discipline specific, therefore likely too specific for general biology majors. As such, a team of researchers took the recommendations from Vision and Change and generated the BioCore Guide as a framework for what general biology majors should know upon graduating (Brownell et al., 2014).

Figure 1

The BioCore Guide further articulates the core concepts in Vision and Change into a set of general principles and explicit statements situated into three biological sub-disciplines:

1. molecular/cellular/developmental biology
2. physiology,
3. ecology/evolutionary biology.

 The BioCore Guide is currently available for use and a printable document can be found here.. Figure 1 in this blog illustrates the conceptual framework of the BioCore Guide while figure 2 illustrates the organization of the BioCore Guide.

The strength of the BioCore Guide is the manner in which it was designed: it is a nationally-validated, grassroots-generated document that incorporates feedback from over 240 biologists and biology educators at a diverse range of institutions in the United States, with ultimately over 90% of responding biology faculty agreeing with the importance and scientific accuracy of the statements in the BioCore Guide (Brownell et al., 2014). As with the Vision and Change Report, the BioCore Guide is meant to be a tool for faculty and departments to use as they continue to transform their undergraduate biology curriculum. Collectively, Vision and Change and the BioCore Guide provide faculty and departments with a nationally-agreed upon framework which they can use to redesign their curriculum. Yet the question remains, how do faculty and departments ensure that their students are mastering these concepts?

Figure 2

Bio-MAPS: Measuring students conceptual understanding of biology

Although establishing the aforementioned core concepts, principles, and statements was a critical first step in improving undergraduate biology education, it is equally important that departments assess students’ mastery of these concepts. To address this need, an NSF-funded, multi-institution collaboration is currently working to develop an assessment that can be used to measure students’ general biology conceptual understanding at multiple time points during their undergraduate career. This tool, called the GenBio-MAPS (Measuring Achievement and Progress in Science) is aligned with the statements and principles in the BioCore Guide and is designed to be implemented at multiple time points as students progress through a biology curriculum.

The GenBio-MAPS test has gone through an iterative process of developing the questions, including (1) revising based on student feedback from over 150 think aloud interviews, (2) piloting to over 2500 students nationally, and (3) incorporating expert biologist feedback. The assessment is currently being revised and will be undergoing a final set of interviews and expert validation in summer 2015 followed by administration of the final version of GenBio-MAPS in the fall of 2015.

The Bio-MAPS assessment team is looking for 1) courses/institutions to help pilot the test and 2) individuals to provide expert feedback on questions. Please contact Christian Wright at cdwrigh2@asu.edu if interested. 

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References:
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. Washington, DC; 2011.

Brownell SE, Freeman S, Wenderoth MP, Crowe AC. BioCore Guide: A tool for interpreting the core concepts of Vision and Change for biology majors. CBE - Life Sciences Education 2014; 13: 200 - 211.