Using Systems and Systems Thinking to Unify Biology Education.

As biological science rapidly generates new knowledge and novel approaches to address increasingly complex and integrative questions, biology educators face the challenge of teaching the next generation of biologists and citizens the skills and knowledge to enable them to keep pace with a dynamic field. Fundamentally, biology is the science of living systems. Not surprisingly, systems is a theme that pervades national reports on biology education reform. In this essay, we present systems as a unifying paradigm that provides a conceptual framework for all of biology and a way of thinking that connects and integrates concepts with practices. To translate the systems paradigm into concrete outcomes to support instruction and assessment in the classroom, we introduce the biology systems-thinking (BST) framework, which describes four levels of systems-thinking skills: 1) describing a system's structure and organization, 2) reasoning about relationships within the system, 3) reasoning about the system as a whole, and 4) analyzing how a system interacts with other systems. We conclude with a series of questions aimed at furthering conversations among biologists, biology education researchers, and biology instructors in the hopes of building support for the systems paradigm.

"Is This Class Hard?" Defining and Analyzing Academic Rigor from a Learner's Perspective.

Despite its value in higher education, academic rigor is a challenging construct to define for instructor and students alike. How do students perceive academic rigor in their biology course work? Using qualitative surveys, we asked students to identify "easy" or "hard" courses and define which aspects of these learning experiences contributed to their perceptions of academic rigor. The 100-level students defined hard courses primarily in affective terms, responding to stressors such as fast pacing, high workload, unclear relevance to their life or careers, and low faculty support. In contrast, 300-level students identified cognitive complexity as a contributor to course rigor, but course design elements-alignment between instruction and assessments, faculty support, active pedagogy-contributed to the ease of the learning process. Overwhelmingly, all students identified high faculty support, learner-centered course design, adequate prior knowledge, and active, well-scaffolded pedagogy as significant contributors to a course feeling easy. Active-learning courses in this study were identified as both easy and hard for the very reasons they are effective: they simultaneously challenge and support student learning. Implications for the design and instruction of rigorous active-learning college biology experiences are discussed.

A SCALE-UP Mock-Up: Comparison of Student Learning Gains in High- and Low-Tech Active-Learning Environments.

Student-centered learning environments with upside-down pedagogies (SCALE-UP) are widely implemented at institutions across the country, and learning gains from these classrooms have been well documented. This study investigates the specific design feature(s) of the SCALE-UP classroom most conducive to teaching and learning. Using pilot survey data from instructors and students to prioritize the most salient SCALE-UP classroom features, we created a low-tech "Mock-up" version of this classroom and tested the impact of these features on student learning, attitudes, and satisfaction using a quasi--experimental setup. The same instructor taught two sections of an introductory biology course in the SCALE-UP and Mock-up rooms. Although students in both sections were equivalent in terms of gender, grade point average, incoming ACT, and drop/fail/withdraw rate, the Mock-up classroom enrolled significantly more freshmen. Controlling for class standing, multiple regression modeling revealed no significant differences in exam, in-class, preclass, and Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology Concept Inventory scores between the SCALE-UP and Mock-up classrooms. Thematic analysis of student comments highlighted that collaboration and whiteboards enhanced the learning experience, but technology was not important. Student satisfaction and attitudes were comparable. These results suggest that the benefits of a SCALE-UP experience can be achieved at lower cost without technology features.

Teaching Assistant Professional Development in Biology: Designed for and Driven by Multidimensional Data.

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are increasingly responsible for instruction in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Various professional development (PD) programs have been developed and implemented to prepare TAs for this role, but data about effectiveness are lacking and are derived almost exclusively from self-reported surveys. In this study, we describe the design of a reformed PD (RPD) model and apply Kirkpatrick's Evaluation Framework to evaluate multiple outcomes of TA PD before, during, and after implementing RPD. This framework allows evaluation that includes both direct measures and self-reported data. In RPD, TAs created and aligned learning objectives and assessments and incorporated more learner-centered instructional practices in their teaching. However, these data are inconsistent with TAs' self-reported perceptions about RPD and suggest that single measures are insufficient to evaluate TA PD programs.

Just the facts? Introductory undergraduate biology courses focus on low-level cognitive skills.

Introductory biology courses are widely criticized for overemphasizing details and rote memorization of facts. Data to support such claims, however, are surprisingly scarce. We sought to determine whether this claim was evidence-based. To do so we quantified the cognitive level of learning targeted by faculty in introductory-level biology courses. We used Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to assign cognitive learning levels to course goals as articulated on syllabi and individual items on high-stakes assessments (i.e., exams and quizzes). Our investigation revealed the following: 1) assessment items overwhelmingly targeted lower cognitive levels, 2) the cognitive level of articulated course goals was not predictive of the cognitive level of assessment items, and 3) there was no influence of course size or institution type on the cognitive levels of assessments. These results support the claim that introductory biology courses emphasize facts more than higher-order thinking.

1, 2, 3, 4: infusing quantitative literacy into introductory biology.

Biology of the twenty-first century is an increasingly quantitative science. Undergraduate biology education therefore needs to provide opportunities for students to develop fluency in the tools and language of quantitative disciplines. Quantitative literacy (QL) is important for future scientists as well as for citizens, who need to interpret numeric information and data-based claims regarding nearly every aspect of daily life. To address the need for QL in biology education, we incorporated quantitative concepts throughout a semester-long introductory biology course at a large research university. Early in the course, we assessed the quantitative skills that students bring to the introductory biology classroom and found that students had difficulties in performing simple calculations, representing data graphically, and articulating data-driven arguments. In response to students' learning needs, we infused the course with quantitative concepts aligned with the existing course content and learning objectives. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by significant improvement in the quality of students' graphical representations of biological data. Infusing QL in introductory biology presents challenges. Our study, however, supports the conclusion that it is feasible in the context of an existing course, consistent with the goals of college biology education, and promotes students' development of important quantitative skills.