Climate change is impacting the Pacific Islands first and most drastically, yet few native islanders are trained to recognize, analyze, or mitigate the impacts in these islands. To understand the reasons why low numbers of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders enter colleges, enroll in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, or undertake life sciences/STEM careers, 25 representatives from colleges and schools in seven U.S.-affiliated states and countries across the Pacific participated in a 2-day workshop. Fourteen were indigenous peoples of their islands. Participants revealed that: 1) cultural barriers, including strong family obligations and traditional and/or religious restrictions, work against students leaving home or entering STEM careers; 2) geographic barriers confront isolated small island communities without secondary schools, requiring students to relocate to a distant island for high school; 3) in many areas, teachers are undertrained in STEM, school science facilities are lacking, and most island colleges lack STEM majors and modern labs; and 4) financial barriers arise, because many islanders must relocate from their home islands to attend high school and college, especially, the costs for moving to Guam, Hawai’i, or the U.S. mainland. Most solutions depend on financial input, but mechanisms to increase awareness of the value of STEM training are also important.

For decades, formative assessment has been identified as a high-impact instructional practice that positively affects student learning. Education reform documents such as Vision and Change: A Call to Action expressly identify frequent, ongoing formative assessment and feedback as a key instructional practice in student-centered learning environments. Historically, effect sizes between 0.4 and 0.7 have been reported for formative assessment experiments. However, more recent meta-analyses have reported much lower effect sizes. It is unclear whether the variability in reported effects is due to formative assessment as an instructional practice in and of itself, differences in how formative assessment was enacted across studies, or other mitigating factors. We propose that application of a fidelity of implementation (FOI) framework to define the critical components of formative assessment will increase the validity of future impact studies. In this Essay, we apply core principles from the FOI literature to hypothesize about the critical components of formative assessment as a high-impact instructional practice. In doing so, we begin the iterative process through which further research can develop valid and reliable measures of the FOI of formative assessment. Such measures are necessary to empirically determine when, how, and under what conditions formative assessment supports student learning.

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.

As undergraduate biology curricula increasingly aim to provide students with access to courses and experiences that engage them in the practices of science, tools are needed for instruction, evaluation, and research around student learning. One of the important skills for undergraduate biology students to master is the selection and creation of appropriate graphs to summarize data they acquire through investigations in their course work and research experiences. Graphing is a complex skill, and there are few, discipline-informed tools available for instructors, students, and researchers to use. Here, we describe the development of a graph rubric informed by literature from the learning sciences, statistics, representations literature, and feedback and use of the rubric by a variety of users. The result is an evidence-based, analytic rubric that consists of categories essential for graph choice and construction: graph mechanics, graph communication, and graph choice. Each category of the rubric can be evaluated at three levels of achievement. Our analysis demonstrates the potential for the rubric to provide formative feedback to students and allow instructors to gauge and guide learning and instruction. We further discuss and identify potentially interesting research targets for science education researchers.

The majority of students who enroll in undergraduate biology courses will eventually be employed in non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) business occupations. This work explores how representations of industry in undergraduate biology textbooks could impact STEM learning for these students and their ability to apply this learning in their chosen work. We used text analysis to identify passages with references to industry in 29 textbooks. Each passage was categorized for relevance to health or environment, for implied positive or negative connotations, and for descriptions of synergy or conflict between science and industry. We found few passages describing applications of STEM learning in non-STEM business occupations and a paucity of content to support context-based learning for students aiming at business careers. A significant number of passages embodied negative connotations regarding industry. Notable passages highlighted irregular or fraudulent business practices or included simplistic caricatures of business practice. We discuss how the representation of industry in these textbooks may impact student engagement, context-based learning, the ability of students to critically apply STEM learning in industry or business occupations, and heuristics that guide intuitive perceptions about the intersection between science and industry.

The solving of problems in biochemistry often uses concepts from multiple disciplines such as chemistry and biology. Chemical identity (CI) is a foundational concept in the field of chemistry, and the knowledge, thinking, and practices associated with CI are used to answer the following questions: “What is this substance?” and “How is it different from other substances?” In this study, we examined the relevance of CI in biochemical contexts and first explored the ways in which practicing biochemists consider CI relevant in their work. These responses informed the development of creative exercises (CEs) given to second-­semester biochemistry students. Analysis of the student responses to these CEs revealed that students incorporated precursors to CI thinking in more than half of their responses, which were categorized by seven previously identified themes of CI relevant to the presented biochemical contexts. The prevalence of these precursors in student responses to the CEs, coupled with the examples provided by practicing biochemists of contexts in which CI is relevant, indicate that CI thinking is relevant for both students training to be biochemists and practicing biochemists.

Modern genetics is a relatively new domain, but it is increasingly important for students to have a firm grasp on the content, because genetic technologies are becoming more commonplace. In a previous study, we used the Learning Progression-based Assessment of Modern Genetics to assess high school students’ knowledge of genetics concepts after an intensive inquiry-based genetics instructional period. Given that this type of intensive inquiry-based instruction is unique, we are now investigating how students’ knowledge of genetics changes after instruction (i.e., learning loss effect). Using a six-measure longitudinal design, we found that students retained significant gains in five of the 12 constructs 18 months after instruction; scores were not significantly different than the pretest in seven of the constructs. Through a nonparametric analysis, we found that students are better able to retain mechanistic explanations in genetics than memorized details. This study uses an learning progression framework that examines what happens to genetics knowledge over an extended period of time after instruction and indicates that classroom time is better spent helping students construct mechanistic explanations of genetic phenomena as opposed to memorizing terminology.

Based on positive student outcomes, providing research experiences from early undergraduate years is recommended for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. To this end, we designed a novel research experience called the “STEMCats Research Experience” (SRE) for a cohort of 119 second-semester freshmen with diverse college preparatory levels, demographics, and academic majors. The SRE targeted student outcomes of enhancing retention in STEM majors, STEM competency development, and STEM academic performance. It was designed as a hybrid of features from apprenticeship-based traditional undergraduate research experience and course-based undergraduate research experience designs, considering five factors: 1) an authentic research experience, 2) a supportive environment, 3) current and future needs for scale, 4) student characteristics and circumstances, and 5) availability and sustainability of institutional resources. Emerging concepts for facilitating and assessing student success and STEM curriculum effectiveness were integrated into the SRE design and outcomes evaluation. Here, we report the efficient and broadly applicable SRE design and, based on the analysis of institutional data and student perceptions, promising student outcomes from its first iteration. Potential improvements for the SRE design and future research directions are discussed.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide students opportunities to engage in research in a course. Aspects of CURE design, such as providing students opportunities to make discoveries, collaborate, engage in relevant work, and iterate to solve problems are thought to contribute to outcome achievement in CUREs. Yet how each of these elements contributes to specific outcomes is largely unexplored. This lack of understanding is problematic, because we may unintentionally underemphasize important aspects of CURE design that allow for achievement of highly valued outcomes when designing or teaching our courses. In this work, we take a qualitative approach and leverage unique circumstances in two offerings of a CURE to investigate how these design elements influence outcome achievement. One offering experienced many research challenges that increased engagement in iteration. This level of research challenge ultimately prevented achievement of predefined research goals. In the other offering, students experienced fewer research challenges and ultimately achieved predefined research goals. Our results suggest that, when students encounter research challenges and engage in iteration, they have the potential to increase their ability to navigate scientific obstacles. In addition, our results suggest roles for collaboration and autonomy, or directing one’s own work, in outcome achievement.

The San Diego Biodiversity Project introduces undergraduate students at four different 2- and 4-year schools to a short-term research experience (SRE) that was implemented as a module in the last third of a traditional laboratory course. The study assesses the qualities of this SRE for students using three different methods. Twenty-one participants were interviewed about their experiences in the traditional and research components of their course. In a repeated-measures design, 124 participants took the Persistence in the Sciences (PITS) survey immediately before and after their participation in the SRE. Finally, using a propensity score matching technique, PITS survey results for SRE students were compared with those for students in a course-based research experience (CRE). Student perceptions of the traditional lab and the SRE are different—students appreciate learning basic processes and procedures in the traditional lab, but they express having personal investment in and a sense of participating in science in the SRE. Significant increases were found for the variable of Project Ownership in the SRE condition over the traditional lab, but SRE outcomes were lower than CRE outcomes. Although the SRE may not provide the benefits of a CRE, it is a serious option for expanding access to authentic research.

Providing opportunities for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics undergraduates to engage in authentic scientific practices is likely to influence their view of science and may impact their decision to persist through graduation. Laboratory courses provide a natural place to introduce students to scientific practices, but existing curricula often miss this opportunity by focusing on confirming science content rather than exploring authentic questions. Integrating authentic science within laboratory courses is particularly challenging at high-enrollment institutions and community colleges, where access to research-active faculty may be limiting. The Authentic Inquiry through Modeling in Biology (AIM-Bio) curriculum presented here engages students in authentic scientific practices through iterative cycles of model generation, testing, and revision. AIM-Bio university and community college students demonstrated their ability to propose diverse models for biological phenomena, formulate and address hypotheses by designing and conducting experiments, and collaborate with classmates to revise models based on experimental data. Assessments demonstrated that AIM-Bio students had an enhanced sense of project ownership and greater identification as scientists compared with students in existing laboratory courses. AIM-Bio students also experienced measurable gains in their nature of science understanding and skills for doing science. Our results suggest AIM-Bio as a potential alternative to more resource-intensive curricula with similar outcomes.

We argue that cultural capital plays an underexamined role in students’ recognition as budding scientists by faculty. By triangulating interview data from undergraduates and faculty mentors in a multi-institutional biology research network, we identified a set of intersecting domains of capital that help render students recognizable to faculty. We argue that faculty recognition often reflects a (mis)alignment between the cultural capital that students possess and display and what faculty expect to see. To understand why mis- or underrecognition occurs, and how this influenced students’ opportunities to further develop cultural capital, we explored our data set for patterns of explanation. Several key themes cut across students’ experiences and influenced their recognition by faculty: Faculty more easily recognized students interested in research science trajectories and those involved in institutional programs to support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics success. Students with competing family responsibilities struggled to maintain faculty recognition. Finally, faculty who broadened their scopes of recognition were able to affirm the science identities of students with fewer incoming cultural resources in science and support their development of capital. Students can and do develop scientific cultural capital through practice, but this requires access to research and mentorship that explicitly teaches students the implicit “rules of the game.”

The development of critical thinking skills in recent college graduates is keenly requested by employers year after year. Moreover, improving these skills can help students to better question and analyze data. Consequently, we aimed to implement a training program that would add to the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students: Nebraska Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math 4U (NE STEM 4U). In this program, undergraduates provide outreach, mentoring, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education to K–8 students. To determine the impacts of serving as an undergraduate mentor in this program on critical thinking, we compared undergraduate mentors (intervention group) with nonmentor STEM majors (nonintervention, matched group) using the valid and reliable California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) as a pre/post measurement. Importantly, before the intervention, both NE STEM 4U mentors and nonmentor undergraduates scored similarly overall on the CCTST. However, the posttest, carried out one academic year later, indicated significant gains in critical thinking by the NE STEM 4U mentors compared with the nonmentors. Specifically, the math-related skills of analysis, inference, and numeracy improved significantly in mentors compared with nonmentors.

Group work is often a key component of student-centered pedagogies, but there is conflicting evidence about what types of groups provide the most benefit for undergraduate students. We investigated student learning outcomes and attitudes toward working in groups when students were assigned to groups using different methods in a large-enrollment, student-centered class. We were particularly interested in how students entering the class with different levels of competence in biology performed in homogeneous or heterogeneous groups, and what types of group compositions were formed using different methods of group formation. We found that low-competence students had higher learning outcomes when they were in heterogeneous groups, while mid- and high-competence students performed equally well in both group types. Students of all competence types had better attitudes toward group work in heterogeneous groups. The use of student demographic variables to preemptively form groups and allowing students to self-select their group mates both yielded heterogeneous competence groups. Students in the instructor-formed, demographic groups had higher learning outcomes compared with students allowed to self-select. Thus, heterogeneous groupings provided the most benefit for students in our nonmajors, large-enrollment class.

Academic departments are thought to be highly productive units of change in higher education. This paper investigates department-level instructional change via case studies analyzed with two change frameworks. One framework embodies prescribed change, emphasizing leader actions. The other framework embodies emergent change, emphasizing participants’ responsibilities. Analysis identified successes and missed opportunities. The results provide guidance on how change agents might create vision, motivate participants, build momentum, and institutionalize change. Through familiarity with multiple change frameworks, a change agent can plan change initiatives that best fit with the local goals and context, thus increasing the likelihood of success.