Helping Practitioners and Researchers Identify and Use Education Research Literature

Evidence-based teaching practices are being encouraged to increase student skills and understanding in the sciences. Finding, interpreting, and applying education literature to a specific context are barriers to adopting these evidence-based practices. Here, we introduce a new feature, Evidence-Based Teaching Guides. This feature identifies literature associated with specific pedagogies, which we distill to practical recommendations for teaching. The goals of the feature are: to provide instructors with tools to make research-supported choices to implement the pedagogy in question, to articulate the reasons for their choices, and to develop increased awareness of biology education research. We think these guides may also be useful for biology education researchers in identifying critical components, adaptations, and contextual features that could be investigated for a given pedagogy. Each guide consists of a website with a visual map of instructional choices associated with the topic and linked pages that summarize findings from the literature and provide additional links to and summaries of key articles. Each guide will include an instructor checklist of recommendations consolidated from the entire guide in order to provide instructors with a snapshot of instructional choices and actionable advice.