Despite substantial evidence that writing can be an effective tool to promote student learning and engagement, writing-to-learn (WTL) practices are still not widely implemented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, particularly at research universities. Two major deterrents to progress are the lack of a community of science faculty committed to undertaking and applying the necessary pedagogical research, and the absence of a conceptual framework to systematically guide study designs and integrate findings. To address these issues, we undertook an initiative, supported by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the Reinvention Center, to build a community of WTL/STEM educators who would undertake a heuristic review of the literature and formulate a conceptual framework. In addition to generating a searchable database of empirically validated and promising WTL practices, our work lays the foundation for multi-university empirical studies of the effectiveness of WTL practices in advancing student learning and engagement.

Music is recognized as an effective mode of teaching young children but is rarely used in university-level science courses. This article reviews the somewhat limited evidence on whether and how content-rich music might affect college students' understanding of science and offers practical suggestions for incorporating music into courses. Aside from aiding memorization, songs may potentially improve learning by helping students feel relaxed and welcome in stressful settings, engaging students through multiple modes (verbal vs. nonverbal) and modalities (auditory vs. visual vs. kinesthetic) simultaneously, challenging students to integrate and “own” the material through the medium of song lyrics, and increasing students' time on task outside of class through enjoyable listening or songwriting assignments. Students may produce content-rich songs of good quality if given sufficient assistance and encouragement by instructors and peers. The challenges ahead include 1) defining the circumstances in which music is most likely to promote learning and 2) developing rubrics for evaluating the quality of songs.

Thermodynamic principles are basic to an understanding of the complex fluxes of energy and information required to keep cells alive. These microscopic machines are nonequilibrium systems at the micron scale that are maintained in pseudo-steady-state conditions by very sophisticated processes. Therefore, several nonstandard concepts need to be taught to rationalize why these very ordered systems proliferate actively all over our planet in seeming contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. We propose a model consisting of boxes with different shapes that contain small balls that are in constant motion due to a stream of air blowing from below. This is a simple macroscopic system that can be easily visualized by students and that can be understood as mimicking the behavior of a set of molecules exchanging energy. With such boxes, the basic concepts of entropy, enthalpy, and free energy can be taught while reinforcing a molecular understanding of the concepts and stressing the stochastic nature of the thermodynamic laws. In addition, time-related concepts, such as reaction rates and activation energy, can be readily visualized. Moreover, the boxes provide an intuitive way to introduce the role in cellular organization of “information” and Maxwell's demons operating under nonequilibrium conditions.

We tested the hypothesis that engagement in a few, brief writing assignments in a nonmajors science course can improve student ability to convey critical thought about science. A sample of three papers written by students (n = 30) was coded for presence and accuracy of elements related to scientific writing. Scores for different aspects of scientific writing were significantly correlated, suggesting that students recognized relationships between components of scientific thought. We found that students' ability to write about science topics and state conclusions based on data improved over the course of three writing assignments, while the abilities to state a hypothesis and draw clear connections between human activities and environmental impacts did not improve. Three writing assignments generated significant change in student ability to write scientifically, although our results suggest that three is an insufficient number to generate complete development of scientific writing skills.

We present a diagnostic question cluster (DQC) that assesses undergraduates' thinking about photosynthesis. This assessment tool is not designed to identify individual misconceptions. Rather, it is focused on students' abilities to apply basic concepts about photosynthesis by reasoning with a coordinated set of practices based on a few scientific principles: conservation of matter, conservation of energy, and the hierarchical nature of biological systems. Data on students' responses to the cluster items and uses of some of the questions in multiple-choice, multiple-true/false, and essay formats are compared. A cross-over study indicates that the multiple-true/false format shows promise as a machine-gradable format that identifies students who have a mixture of accurate and inaccurate ideas. In addition, interviews with students about their choices on three multiple-choice questions reveal the fragility of students' understanding. Collectively, the data show that many undergraduates lack both a basic understanding of the role of photosynthesis in plant metabolism and the ability to reason with scientific principles when learning new content. Implications for instruction are discussed.

In this study, we used targeted active-learning activities to help students improve their ways of reasoning about carbon flow in ecosystems. The results of a validated ecology conceptual inventory (diagnostic question clusters [DQCs]) provided us with information about students' understanding of and reasoning about transformation of inorganic and organic carbon-containing compounds in biological systems. These results helped us identify specific active-learning exercises that would be responsive to students' existing knowledge. The effects of the active-learning interventions were then examined through analysis of students' pre- and postinstruction responses on the DQCs. The biology and non–biology majors participating in this study attended a range of institutions and the instructors varied in their use of active learning; one lecture-only comparison class was included. Changes in pre- to postinstruction scores on the DQCs showed that an instructor's teaching method had a highly significant effect on student reasoning following course instruction, especially for questions pertaining to cellular-level, carbon-transforming processes. We conclude that using targeted in-class activities had a beneficial effect on student learning regardless of major or class size, and argue that using diagnostic questions to identify effective learning activities is a valuable strategy for promoting learning, as gains from lecture-only classes were minimal.

Students in an interdisciplinary undergraduate introductory course were required to complete a group video project focused on nutrition and healthy eating. A mixed-methods approach to data collection involved observing and rating video footage of group work sessions and individual and focus group interviews. These data were analyzed and used to evaluate the effectiveness of the assignment in light of two student learning outcomes and two student development outcomes at the University of Minnesota. Positive results support the continued inclusion of the project within the course, and recommend the assignment to other programs as a viable means of promoting both content learning and affective behavioral objectives.

Genomics and bioinformatics are topics of increasing interest in undergraduate biological science curricula. Many existing exercises focus on gene annotation and analysis of a single genome. In this paper, we present two educational modules designed to enable students to learn and apply fundamental concepts in comparative genomics using examples related to bacterial pathogenesis. Students first examine alignments of genomes of Escherichia coli O157:H7 strains isolated from three food-poisoning outbreaks using the multiple-genome alignment tool Mauve. Students investigate conservation of virulence factors using the Mauve viewer and by browsing annotations available at the A Systematic Annotation Package for Community Analysis of Genomes database. In the second module, students use an alignment of five Yersinia pestis genomes to analyze single-nucleotide polymorphisms of three genes to classify strains into biovar groups. Students are then given sequences of bacterial DNA amplified from the teeth of corpses from the first and second pandemics of the bubonic plague and asked to classify these new samples. Learning-assessment results reveal student improvement in self-efficacy and content knowledge, as well as students' ability to use BLAST to identify genomic islands and conduct analyses of virulence factors from E. coli O157:H7 or Y. pestis. Each of these educational modules offers educators new ready-to-implement resources for integrating comparative genomic topics into their curricula.

A multimedia game was designed to serve as a dual-purpose intervention that aligned with National Science Content Standards, while also conveying knowledge about the consequences of alcohol consumption for a secondary school audience. A tertiary goal was to positively impact adolescents' attitudes toward science through career role-play experiences within the game. In a pretest/delayed posttest design, middle and high school students, both male and female, demonstrated significant gains on measures of content knowledge and attitudes toward science. The best predictors of these outcomes were the players' ratings of the game's usability and satisfaction with the game. The outcomes suggest that game interventions can successfully teach standards-based science content, target age-appropriate health messages, and impact students' attitudes toward science.

Undergraduate biology education provides students with a number of learning challenges. Subject areas that are particularly difficult to understand include protein conformational change and stability, diffusion and random molecular motion, and molecular crowding. In this study, we examined the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional visualization techniques for learning about protein conformation and molecular motion in association with a ligand–receptor binding event. Increasingly complex versions of the same binding event were depicted in each of four animated treatments. Students (n = 131) were recruited from the undergraduate biology program at University of Toronto, Mississauga. Visualization media were developed in the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School. Stem cell factor ligand and cKit receptor tyrosine kinase were used as a classical example of a ligand-induced receptor dimerization and activation event. Each group completed a pretest, viewed one of four variants of the animation, and completed a posttest and, at 2 wk following the assessment, a delayed posttest. Overall, the most complex animation was the most effective at fostering students' understanding of the events depicted. These results suggest that, in select learning contexts, increasingly complex representations may be more desirable for conveying the dynamic nature of cell binding events.