Author(s):
The 2011 AAAS Vision and Change (V&C) report identified five core concepts in biology and called on undergraduate biology instructors to teach students to connect concepts across biological scales and sub-disciplines to prepare them to address complex interdisciplinary problems. It has been relatively straight-forward for instructors to integrate, teach, and assess core concept knowledge in sub-disciplinary contexts, but teaching students to make connections and transfer their core concept knowledge has proven challenging. Currently there are few tools that teach students to transfer and apply their knowledge across scales and sub-disciplines.This project is bringing together undergraduate educators from diverse types of institutions with expertise across biological sub-disciplines to develop, test, and publish a collection of Core Concept Teaching Tools (CCTTs) that support students to transfer their core concept knowledge across scales and sub-disciplines. Overall, the project explores whether the collaboratively generated CCTTs improve student’s abilities to translate and apply their core concept knowledge across biological scales and sub-disciplines. Specifically, the project will: 1) recruit and build a biology educator community of practice based on teaching core concepts; 2) develop and host CCTT development workshops to guide the educators to develop a collection of CCTTs that span biological scales and sub-disciplines; 3) implement and collect evidence of effectiveness of the CCTTs with diverse populations of undergraduate students at a variety of institution types; 4) develop a new CCTT article type and review rubric in the CourseSource platform; and 5) host a CourseSource writing workshop to support the biology educators to finalize and publish their CCTTs in CourseSource, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that accepts lessons grounded in research-based pedagogical techniques.This project will have broad impact through the development of an initial set of CCTTs and through promoting the practice of designing sub-disciplinary teaching materials focused on core concepts rather than on unique sub-disciplinary facts that are difficult for students to connect on their own. In addition, testing the CCTTs at different institutional types and with diverse populations of students will enact best practices with the groups of students taught by the project participants and ensure that the CCTTs are broadly useful across undergraduate biology programs. Finally, the network of biology educators and the infrastructure built in the CourseSource platform will continue to catalyze development of new CCTTs beyond the funding period. Project participants will be empowered to act as leaders in their institutional and sub-disciplinary communities by serving as mentors to colleagues who aspire to develop CCTTs and as peer reviewers for CourseSource.
Coauthors
Audrey Chen Lew, University of California, Irvine; Jennifer Knight, University of Colorado, Boulder; Amanda Butz, University of Wisconsin – Madison
