Building Tools for Institutional Transformation of Biology Core Competencies Teaching

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The message from biology educators, policy makers, and practitioners nationwide is resounding: undergraduate biology education needs reform to ensure that future graduates are diverse, skilled, and STEM-literate. An integral part of preparing biology students for modern STEM jobs is ensuring that students receive instruction not only in biology concepts, but also in the skills used by practicing biologists. Such skills include scientific communication, collaboration, quantitative reasoning, and problem solving. The fundamental objective of this work is to produce tools that will facilitate the improvement of undergraduate biology skills training. This project will produce two tools - the BioSkills Guide and the Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage - designed to be used separately by instructors as they review and enhance their teaching or together to help departments through the process of curricular reform. The BioSkills Guide will translate general recommendations about skills training into concrete descriptions of tasks that can be taught in the classroom, clarifying what it means for a student to be competent in each skill. The programmatic survey will reveal which skills are already well covered in a department's curriculum, which are lacking, and in which particular courses each skill is taught. Administrators can use data from this survey to make decisions about where to target reform efforts and resources, and the BioSkills Guide can support individual course or curriculum-wide redesign. The tools produced by this project are intended to support educators nationwide as they train biology students in the skills they need to be successful in the modern U.S. STEM workforce. The AAAS report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, published in 2011, identified six essential skills, termed core competencies, around which college biology curricula should be built. This project will elaborate the Vision and Change core competencies by developing tools that will support individual and department-wide efforts to improve core competencies teaching. Specifically, the proposed project will develop two tools: the BioSkills Guide and the Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage. The BioSkills Guide will be a set of learning goals with examples of supporting activities, elucidating each of the six core competencies. The guide will be collaboratively drafted and iteratively revised, incorporating the combined expertise of educators at a variety of 2- and 4- year institutions. The final product will then be validated using a survey sent to hundreds of biology educators and practitioners nationwide. To extend the value of the guide, each learning goal in the final guide will be mapped to evidence-based instructional practices and validated assessments from the literature. By translating core competencies into specific learning goals that can be observed and assessed, the BioSkills Guide will define what it means for an undergraduate biology student to master those skills. By reaching a consensus among biology educators who teach at diverse institution types, across a range of subdisciplines and course levels, the guide will delineate which learning goals are most important for biology majors. Alignment of BioSkills learning goals with existing assessments will enable biology education researchers to prioritize development of novel assessments addressing competency learning goals that lack appropriate testing instruments. The validated BioSkills Guide will be adapted into a Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage, offering departments a means to obtain a more fine-grained assessment of competencies coverage than existing tools. This survey will enable biology departments to internally review curriculum-wide coverage of competency learning goals. To ensure the survey has widespread applicability, it will be iteratively revised following instructor interviews and pilot implementations at multiple institutions. Together these tools can be used to bring department practices into alignment with national standards outlined in Vision and Change.