Motivating Tomorrow's Biologists
"How do you make the biology we teach as exciting as the biology that we do?" was the challenging question posed by V. Celeste Carter to participants at the National Academy of Sciences convocation, "Thinking Evolutionarily: Evolution Education across the Life Sciences," held in October. Carter, program director at the National Science Foundation, and others at the convocation discussed the converging efforts to improve biology education, to better motivate students, and to integrate evolution across learning experiences.
Simply regurgitating the biological knowledge generated by the scientific community or conducting "co...
Source: Eye on Education - February 12, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: BioScience Source Type: news
Making Biology Relevant to Undergraduates
Terry R. McGuire always assumed that his students understood the relevance of their biology coursework to their lives outside the classroom, and he expected their grades to fall along a normal bell curve. But when he returned from a professional development experience in 2002, his life as a professor was forever changed.
McGuire, who teaches genetics at Rutgers University, had attended a Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER; www.sencer.net) Summer Institute. On his return, he began to make small shifts in his teaching approach, sharing course-relevant current events and assigning "one-m...
Source: Eye on Education - February 12, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: BioScience Source Type: news
Community Colleges Giving Students a Framework for STEM Careers
Over the coming decade, our country will need one million more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals than was originally projected. That is the conclusion of a February 2012 report, Engage to Excel: Producing One Million Additional College Graduates with Degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-engage-to-excel-final_2-25-12.pdf), presented to President Obama by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
The report stresses the importance of exciting early on students who are potent...
Source: Eye on Education - February 12, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: BioScience Source Type: news
Collaborations Grow through the Introductory Biology Project
When Elena Bray-Speth, assistant professor of biology at Saint Louis University, presented her case study on the evolution of fur color in mice, little did she know that someone in the audience had developed a case on the very same topic. That person was Jim Smith, principal investigator (PI) of Evo-Ed (http://lbc.msu.edu/evo-ed), a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project that currently houses four evolutionbased case studies. "Elena and I met just after her session and I showed her our cases," said Smith, who is a professor in the Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University....
Source: Eye on Education - February 12, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: BioScience Source Type: news
Discovering the Biology Education Research Community
When Sarah Eddy began work on her doctoral thesis, she assumed that her main contribution would relate to her field of study—behavioral ecology and the sexual selection of salamanders—but one of her more significant discoveries had nothing to do with amphibians and everything to do with what was going on in the classroom. As a graduate teaching assistant at Oregon State University, she realized how important it was to her to see students truly improve their learning. "It was in trying to figure out how to help students achieve more that I discovered education research literature," she explained. Many biologists...
Source: Eye on Education - February 12, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: BioScience Source Type: news
A Second CHANCE
How do you change the way science is taught? You might start by giving teachers a second chance—or CHANCE, in this instance. Jacqueline McLaughlin, assistant professor of biology at Penn State University, is doing just that through an innovative professional development program called CHANCE, or Connecting Humans and Nature through Conservation Experiences. CHANCE exposes participants—in-service and preservice high school teachers—to the way scientists think and work by involving them in research projects in the field. The program’s two weeks of fieldwork, carried out in Costa Rica, coupled with the cre...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Samantha J. Katz Source Type: news
Creating a New Breed of Biology Education Researchers
Introductory undergraduate biology courses often fail to truly engage students in the subject matter, a problem that sometimes causes students to switch out of biology majors. The traditional, lecture-only curriculum has already been shunned in middle-school and high-school science classrooms, but this lesson structure persists in the postsecondary domain. Although some professors are using innovative teaching methods in college biology classrooms, they may lack the knowledge, skills, and support to research other promising learning methods, write up their findings, and create a culture on their campuses that emphasizes ...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Brian Stagg Source Type: news
Digital Games: Learning through Play
The Horizon Report, the go-to guide for emerging educational technology published by the New Media Consortium (www.nmc.org/horizon), projected in 2005 that educational gaming would become a significant learning tool within two or three years. The 2008 report identifies game play as one of the seven metatrends that continue to affect pedagogy, evolving to include virtual worlds, augmented reality, and massive multiplayer modes. Yet there are still those who consider electronic games mindless entertainment that fails to confer academic benefits.
Eric Klopfer, winner of the 2008 AIBS Education Award, directs the Scheller Teac...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Oksana Hlodan Source Type: news
A Dynamic Alternative to the Scientific Method
Open a biology textbook to the table of contents and you will undoubtedly see a chapter devoted to the scientific process. Typically, this is presented as a four- or five-step "scientific method," a recipe that all must follow if scientific experimentation is to generate irrefutable results. These steps may be adequate for a science report, but, explains Judy Scotchmoor at the University of California's Museum of Paleontology, it is not really how scientists do their work.
Scotchmoor and a team of natural scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and educators developed a Web site called Understanding Science (www.unde...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Susan Musante Source Type: news
The Professional Science Master's: The MBA for Science
When Jay Duffner decided to go to graduate school to advance his career in biotechnology, he chose Northeastern University's Professional Science Master's (PSM) program rather than a traditional master's or PhD track. He recognized the benefits of earning an advanced degree from a well-known institution, which would provide him with real-world practical experiences that he could immediately apply in the workplace. The PSM program's internship requirement opened the door to a unique opportunity at his current job. "It gave me an excuse to ask for a project that was outside of my area of expertise and that of the company's, ...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Susan Musante Source Type: news
You're Teaching, But How Do You Know They're Learning?
Although most instructors would like to believe that their students fully understand every biological concept explained in class, this is often not the case. Gary Wisehart, chair and professor of biology at San Diego City College, knows this from firsthand experience. "Students get very good at telling you what you want to hear," he says, "so it is important to assess the real impact you are having on students' understanding." To do that, Wisehart has been using concept inventories, diagnostic tools designed specifically to uncover lingering misconceptions.
Wisehart first learned of concept inventories in the late 1990s w...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Susan Musante Source Type: news
Fill in the Blank: "Without this technology, my students simply cannot _________."
My first thought about the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) was that I needed a personal trainer to schedule the sessions best suited to my needs. A record 18,500-plus educators and exhibitors attended the 30th annual NECC event in Washington, DC, in June. Conference chair Leslie Conery called it an "odds-defying" accomplishment in difficult economic times and lauded educators for their energy and commitment. She might have added kudos to anyone getting through the four-day event with energy to spare.
The NECC is held annually by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). It draws teacher...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Oksana Hlodan Source Type: news
DNA Barcoding Investigations Bring Biology to Life
When Sophia Cuprillnilson walked into her undergraduate genetics class in the fall of 2008, little did she realize that her perception of biology would be transformed forever. "I thought I was going to be learning about Mendel and peas," she said. Instead, Cuprillnilson and her classmates became DNA detectives, sent out in pairs to collect samples of fish from local restaurants. Back in the lab at Nova Southeastern University's Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences in Florida, they extracted DNA, created primers, and analyzed the sequences to determine whether consumers were really getting the species described on the menu...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Susan Musante Source Type: news
Learning How to Ask Research Questions
Collaborative research is a demanding endeavor, and for a group of undergraduate students tasked with identifying their own interdisciplinary research problem, the challenges are even greater. "It was scary—we didn't know what to ask the professors, and we couldn't decide on a research question," says Miran Park, a student at the University of California, Davis (UCDavis), about her first quarter there in the Collaborative Learning at the Interface of Mathematics and Biology (CLIMB) program. The yearlong program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Undergraduate Biology and Mathematics program, is modeled on...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Susan Musante Source Type: news
Update: Have BIO2010 Goals Been Achieved?
Leaders in biology education are celebrating the progress made since the publication of BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists. The landmark report, published in 2003 by the National Research Council (NRC), called on institutions of higher education to revamp both the curricula and teaching methods in the life sciences to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
BIO2010 urged much deeper connections between the biological sciences and mathematics, the physical sciences, and computer science. In addition, the report called on faculty to move out of the lecture hall and into the field an...
Source: Eye on Education - January 23, 2013 Category: Biology Authors: Beth Baker Source Type: news
