We Can't Fail Again: Arguments for Professional Development in the Wake of COVID-19.

The majority of academic institutions were underprepared for a global pandemic, leading to spikes in instructor anxiety and drops in student engagement with STEM courses. With many STEM professors teaching online for the first time, they independently sought out training in distance education and inclusive teaching practices. Had institutions been proactive in providing such professional development prior to the pandemic, the negative impacts of transitioning to online education would have been reduced. While recent events are still fresh in people's minds, we advocate for increased or maintained professional development opportunities for STEM instructors in order to protect this critical pedagogical support from budget cuts.

Why and how science students in the United States think their peers cheat more frequently online: perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic

Academic integrity establishes a code of ethics that transfers over into the job force and is a critical characteristic in scientists in the twenty-first century. A student’s perception of cheating is influenced by both internal and external factors that develop and change through time. For students, the COVID-19 pandemic shrank their academic and social environments onto a computer screen. We surveyed science students in the United States at the end of their first COVID-interrupted semester to understand how and why they believed their peers were cheating more online during a pandemic. Almost 81% of students indicated that they believed cheating occurred more frequently online than in-person. When explaining why they believed this, students touched on proctoring, cheating influences, and extenuating circumstances due to COVID-19. When describing how they believed cheating occurred more frequently online, students touched on methods for cheating and surreptitious behavior. The student reasonings were associated with four theories (game theory, Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, neutralization theory, and planned behavior theory) that have been used to examine academic dishonesty. Our results can aid institutions in efforts to quell student concerns about their peers cheating during emergencies. Interestingly, most student beliefs were mapped to planned behavior theory while only a few students were mapped to neutralization theory, suggesting it was a novel modality of assessment rather than a pandemic that shaped student perceptions.

Training Faculty as an Institutional Response to COVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching Supported by Data.

In March 2020, colleges in the United States rapidly switched in-person courses online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. To chronicle how biology faculty responded to this emergency remote teaching, we surveyed faculty across the United States in August of 2020. Our survey included open-ended questions to identify a memorable moment, difficulties encountered, and unexpected benefits during the first COVID-19 semester. Faculty responses were coded by two researchers, and 21 themes emerged. Seventeen coding themes corresponded to one of four facets of adult personal resilience theory, and we used nonparametric statistical tests to compare resilience between inexperienced and experienced online instructors, as well as trained and untrained instructors. Experienced online instructors were more likely to describe an act of kindness in their memory but were also more likely to include negative student behavior as a difficulty. Untrained faculty were the only instructors who included student engagement as a difficulty and were more likely to describe a negative, discouraging memory. We used conditional forest analysis to identify polarizing themes between faculty with and without previous experience teaching online and between faculty who did and did not receive formal training. Our results underline the importance of training faculty, including experienced instructors, to improve emergency preparedness.

Student Engagement Declines in STEM Undergraduates during COVID-19-Driven Remote Learning.

We examined how the shift in learning environment from in-person to online classes, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, impacted three constructs of student engagement: behavioral engagement, including students' frequency of participating in class discussions, meeting with instructors, and studying with peers outside of class; cognitive engagement, including students' sense of belonging and self-efficacy; and emotional engagement, including students' attitudes toward science, their perceived value of the course, and their stress. Seventy-three undergraduate STEM students from across the country completed five-point Likert-style surveys in these areas of student engagement, both prior to their science course transitioning online and at the end of the spring 2020 semester. We found that while overall behavioral engagement did not change, students participated less frequently in class discussions but met with professors more often outside of class. We saw no significant change in cognitive engagement, indicating that while students' sense of belonging and self-efficacy ideally increases over the course of the semester, in this case, it did not. Most alarmingly, we found a significant decrease in emotional engagement, with students reporting a drastic decline in positive attitudes toward science. Students' reported stress levels remained unchanged, and students reported a slight increase in their perceived value of the science course they were taking. These data shed light on how the transition to online learning had an overall negative impact on undergraduate student engagement in science courses.