Workshops

Affiliations:

* San Francisco State University, Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory

+ Foothill College

The Scientist Spotlights Initiative aims to empower college and university science instructors to implement inclusive science curricula as a means for students of all backgrounds to envision themselves in science. The Scientist Spotlight assignment links students to resources about counter stereotypical scientists and their associated research as it is related to course topics in students’ science courses. Studies have shown that Scientist Spotlight assignments enhance students' relatability to scientists and improves science learning.

In this 3-session workshop, participants will meaningfully integrate Scientist Spotlights in their curricula, create a custom Scientist Spotlight for their chosen course topic(s), and develop strategies for assessing the impacts of Scientist Spotlights on student outcomes. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will publish their Scientist Spotlights on the website (https://scientistspotlights.org) so that educators worldwide can use these curricula resources. After Day 1, participants will be able to revise their course calendar and syllabi with Scientist Spotlights Assignments and develop an evidence-based plan of how Spotlights will be used to support inclusion efforts. Day 2 will provide the skills to support participants in creating a research-guided custom spotlight for teaching and science learning. At the conclusion of Day 3, participants will gain implementation strategies that engender student buy-in, along with assessment tools for teaching and/or conducting research on Scientist Spotlights in their unique contexts.

This interactive workshop is adapted for active participation using breakout rooms, polls, surveys, individual activities, and exploration of resources that will be provided.

By the end of this workshop, participants will gain:

• Revised course calendar and/or syllabus to support inclusive science curriculum using Scientist Spotlights as a tool for teaching course content, challenging scientist stereotypes, and supporting students’ relatability to scientists.

• Custom Scientist Spotlight directly related to a course topic of choice.

• Resources to discover additional examples of counterstereotypical scientists.

• Rubric and insights for peer-review of newly created Scientist Spotlights.

Affiliations: * Cornell University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ithaca NY

⁺ BSCS Science Learning, Colorado Springs CO

It has been well documented that college faculty are quite equipped to teach Mendelian genetics; however we know that the field of genetics is much more complex and includes interactions between genes and the environment. Moreover, evidence suggests that a genetics curriculum that focuses on Mendelian genetics and does not include the role of the environment contributes to students’ development of beliefs in genetics determinism. As a way to counteract these deterministic beliefs, we suggest developing genetics curriculum that employs a multifactorial approach by emphasizing that genes can have different effects on an organism depending on their interactions with other genes and the environment. By utilizing different interventions and assessments within genetics courses, we can develop students’ understanding of multifactorial genetics and investigate the effect that this understanding has on students’ belief in genetic determinism.

The goals of this workshop are as follows: (1) Discuss the current genetics curriculum as it pertains to a course centered on Mendelian genetics and/or multifactorial genetics. (2) Discuss the current tools that genetics instructors are using in their courses and what they concepts they are assessing. (3) Edit current assessment questions and develop new ones that are more multifactorial, rather than more Mendelian.

This workshop will employ a variety of online tools to promote meaningful discussion and collaboration. During the workshop we will utilize breakout rooms to allow for small group discussion, while also providing time for larger, whole group discussions. We will use Google Docs as a way to record, in real-time, group thoughts, notes, questions and responses. The workshop Google Docs will also serve as a repository of assessment questions that participants can access even once the workshop has ended.

After completion of this workshop, participants will have developed an understanding of the importance of a genetics curriculum that takes a multifactorial approach, rather than a Mendelian approach. This will include access to a bank of practical assessment questions surrounding multifactorial concepts like gene x environment interactions (GxE), as well as the development of a collaborative network of fellow biology and genetics faculty who can share teaching resources that focus on interactions between genes and the environment.

Affiliations: * Minerva Schools, Keck Graduate Institute

Overview: There is a critical need to develop effective teaching strategies for an online teaching environment. While the virtual environment poses some unique challenges for inclusion, it also affords unique comparative advantages to the physical classroom. This includes opportunities to substantially increase equity and overall teaching effectiveness. In this workshop, participants will develop pedagogical structures and strategies to design effective, engaging, and inclusive activities. Coupled with these strategies, there will be a focus on how to assess and evaluate student performance in an online environment. The importance of this workshop is highlighted given the intersection of the role of higher education to promote equity and inclusion, educators’ responses to COVID-19, and conversations about diversity in the classroom.

Audience: This workshop is designed for instructors and course designers with minimal experience in teaching online. The frameworks and strategies we develop can be adapted for various class sizes, from large enrollment to smaller seminar-style courses and different course modalities, including synchronous courses taught via videoconferencing.

Engagement: The workshop itself will serve as a model and template for participants. As such, it will be highly interactive and participant-centric. We will employ Active Learning strategies to build an inclusive and engaging online session. It will be conducted as a ‘flipped classroom’ in which participants complete short readings and tasks prior to the session. During the session, there will be minimal lecturing and information transfer. Instead, as outlined in the table below, the session will involve engagement activities (i.e. polls, socratic discussions, and small group breakouts). Participants will ‘learn through doing’ with live work product examples. This workshop is designed for participants to experience the techniques with live and interactive exchanges that can be implemented in the classroom.

Outcomes: The overarching outcome is for participants to have frameworks for designing inclusive and engaging online classes. Additionally, participants will bring back a concrete classroom activity and associated assessment to incorporate into new or existing courses. These are the main outcomes:

● Describe challenges and opportunities associated with inclusion and online teaching

● Develop and evaluate a list of Active Learning techniques and underlying principles that promote classroom inclusion

● Develop structures and strategies to apply Active Learning techniques in two different online environments

● Design digital classroom activities using Active Learning techniques and inclusive practices

● Anticipate and plan for challenges associated with online classroom activities and inclusive teaching.

Affiliations: *Managing editor of CourseSource, ⁺Editor-in-Chief of CourseSource

CourseSource is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes tested, evidence-based undergraduate biology activities. The articles include details in a format, style, and voice that supports replicability. Publishing activities in CourseSource provides authors with recognition of the creativity, experience, and time needed to develop effective classroom materials, while also supporting the dissemination of evidence-based teaching practices. Authors can list CourseSource articles in the peer-reviewed publication section of their curriculum vitae and use them as evidence for excellence in teaching.

In this workshop series, we will help prospective CourseSource authors learn about the journal and submission guidelines. The majority of the workshop will focus on participants writing their CourseSource Lesson manuscript for publication. Given the pandemic and the need for lessons that can be used in multiple teaching environments, particular emphasis throughout the workshop series will be placed on publishing lessons designed for online, remote, and hybrid instructional formats. Participants will learn about each section of the manuscript, have time to work in breakout rooms with partners to discuss and write manuscript ideas, receive feedback from peers, and ask questions of the editorial staff.

We will also explore how current and future CourseSource authors can highlight their publications in job applications, teaching philosophy statements, and tenure and promotion documents. We will share how journal metrics such as number of views and downloads can be highlighted and collaborations with co-authors can provide evidence for institutional change. Finally, we will highlight examples of how authors can publish articles in education research journals such as Life Sciences Education and the corresponding instructional materials (e.g., clicker questions, lesson plans, web tools) in CourseSource.

Participants should be ready to begin writing their Lesson Article manuscript for a lesson that has been field-tested at least once, by the time of the first workshop session.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Describe common author pitfalls and avoid using them during the preparation of their manuscript.

• Draft sections of a CourseSource manuscript and receive feedback from peers. [the majority of the workshop time will be spent on this learning objective]

• Finish writing their lesson manuscript and submit that manuscript to CourseSource.

• Have an action plan for highlighting their publication in job applications and/or promotion materials.

Affiliations: *UCLA Center for Education, Innovation and Learning in the Sciences (CEILS)

Abstract:
This series mirrors and discusses reflections on the anti-racism work that was generated by the Center of Education, Innovation and Learning in the Sciences (CEILS) at UCLA as a response to the murder of George Floyd and the nation-wide protests of the sweeping injustices against black Americans. When we first began this work, we recognized that as white, cis-gender women, with no expertise in facilitating conversations about race, we wanted to be intentional about how we might address the systemic inequities in STEM at UCLA. We thus engaged in our own self-education and participated in an intensive 7-day National training: Academics for Black Survival and Wellness organized by Black counseling psychologists and scholars across the country. This training became our guide in developing an anti-racism workshop series: Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator. In our remote campus workshops, faculty, grad students, postdocs and young professionals reflected on and learned about privilege, identity and anti-racism, moving toward how to be an authentic ally and take action. Many questions arose from this experience, including (but not limited to) how conversations on race are facilitated, how to include people of all backgrounds, racial identity development and experiences and the level of depth to go into in regards to pedagogy.

In this series, in addition to experiencing our “Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator” workshops, participants will discuss and crowd-source possible solutions to the challenges of bringing anti-racist teaching into a STEM community and classroom. These discussions are spread across a series consisting of three workshops. The first workshop in the series will emphasize the importance of self-reflection and participants will practice discussing their identities and privileges as a basis to begin anti-racist work. They will also discuss their experiences with racial inequities and bias occurring both inside and outside academia. In the second workshop of the series, participants will discuss and practice ways to address bias and interrupt microaggressions that may occur during conversations around race. The discussion will then move to ways to implement anti-racist teaching into course curriculum and participants will consider and explore ways to use evidence-based strategies to create an equity-based, race-conscious classroom. The final workshop in the series will be centered on discussing the challenges of facilitating online workshops on anti-racism. At the end of this series, participants will take away an action plan of how they can engage in anti-racist work on their campuses.

Participant Outcomes:

• Engage in reflective practice on identity and privilege as a foundation for anti-racist work.

• Consider and practice ways to interrupt bias and address microaggressions that may occur either in professional development sessions or in the classroom

• Create a toolkit of evidence-based strategies to enhance racial equity in a STEM classroom.

• Discuss and generate strategies to address challenges that may arise when bringing discussions on race to your campus.

• Create an action plan for how to implement anti-racist teaching and training on your campus

Affiliations: ¹ Life Sciences Core Education Department, University of California, Los Angeles, ² Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology Department, University of California, Los Angeles

Student self-beliefs regarding intelligence and ability have been shown to correspond to achievement and persistence in an academic domain. Specifically, previous research has suggested that a growth mindset - or the belief that intelligence is malleable and can increase with effort - is associated with student success. Locus of control is a related but distinct self-belief regarding personal agency over various academic and nonacademic outcomes and has also been associated with study skills and academic persistence. Mindset and Locus of Control for Undergraduates in the Sciences (M-LoCUS) is a scalable co-curricular intervention delivered entirely online outside of the classroom that was developed to impact students’ self-beliefs regarding mindset and locus of control. Previous work has demonstrated that M-LoCUS is effective in promoting a growth mindset and internal locus of control for first year students in the life sciences (Nallapothula et al., 2020).

In this workshop, participants will become familiar with M-LoCUS, adapt the intervention to the specific needs of their institution, and develop a plan for implementation and assessment. The overarching goal is to collaboratively develop and implement a multi-institutional study that will examine the immediate and long-term impacts of M-LoCUS on motivation, performance, and persistence of undergraduate students in STEM classrooms across varying academic settings. Participants will have the opportunity to collaborate on a manuscript detailing the findings of our large-scale study in the Summer. This workshop is ideal for students, postdocs, faculty, or administrators who may or may not have previous experience with education research projects and are interested in gaining skills or experience implementing and assessing a co-curricular intervention and collaborating on a multi-institutional education research project.

This workshop will be conducted over three meetings. In the first meeting, participants will become familiarized with the theoretical underpinning and the process of M-LoCUS. We will use small-group discussions to identify ways in which the intervention might be modified to address needs of different institution types and student populations. The second meeting will focus on logistics of M-LoCUS implementation. Participants will work collaboratively to integrate intervention modules into course websites and develop surveys to collect assessment data at their institutions. In the final meeting, the group will develop a concrete implementation plan, including a timeline for intervention administration, survey data collection, data analysis, and manuscript writing.

The format of this workshop will be highly interactive; participants will use breakout rooms for small group discussions, brainstorm and collaborate in real-time using online tools such as Google Docs and Qualtrics (or similar survey software), and develop individual study implementation tools and plans.

Affiliations: ¹Michigan State University, ²University of Washington, ³University of South Florida

Assessment of student learning is critically important for teaching biology. If we don’t assess what is important, what is assessed becomes important! Designing assessments that demonstrate what students know and are able to do in biology are key to transforming undergraduate biology advocated by Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education and other reports such as the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) Four-dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) Framework. These two reports provide conceptual frameworks for thinking about and designing undergraduate biology courses and curricula. Importantly, both work with the idea of multidimensional learning that helps instructors define what they want students to learn (core ideas), what they want students to do with their knowledge (scientific practices), and how they want students to focus their knowledge through multiple lenses (crosscutting concepts). The 2012 National Research Council report, A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas advocates the same framework for pre-college students, and initially introduced the idea of three-dimensional learning as a guide to help students develop a robust understanding of science.

During this workshop, participants will engage in groups based on the courses they teach in biology (e.g., cell/molecular, physiology, microbiology, ecology) to redesign and develop openended and multiple-choice assessment items, use case studies, and apply the criteria we have developed as part of the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP; Laverty et al 2016). Within this workshop facilitators will assist participants by answering questions about the protocol and providing guidance for item development with respect to scientific practices. Please bring a sample exam that you wish to work with as well as the core ideas students should learn in the course. Upon completion of the workshop, you will be able to design and/or characterize any assessment item using the 3D-LAP. The tool also is useful for research on assessment because it can reliably document how assessments change in a course(s) over time. Participants will leave with a working knowledge of how to apply multidimensional learning to modify existing assessment items and build new ones.

Affiliations: ¹Johnson County Community College, ²Collin College ³Nyack College, ⁴Boston University

Abstract: The ASK BIO network is focused on helping faculty 1) improve assessment questions and 2) develop skills to consider how both formative and summative assessment results can guide improvements in course design and student experience. The workshop will ask faculty to consider assessment items that they currently use in their course and how these items align with their course objectives and activities. Through facilitated improvement of their questions, faculty will also be guided in developing modifications or adaptations to these questions that can be used for formative assessment of students. Most evidence-based teaching practices ask faculty to develop meaningful and higher-level activities and questions in their classrooms. Often faculty introduce challenging and interactive discussions into their courses but in many cases, assessment practices that measure these higher-level skills in students are difficult to develop. The time required to assess open-ended response questions (that are easier to generate) limit the objectives that can be assessed in this format. This workshop will help faculty develop and improve both lower- and higher-level questions that are close-ended (multiple T/F, multiple choice, etc.). In addition, participants in the workshop will develop modifications and alternative assessment items that can be used for formative assessment.

The workshop will be broken into three sessions, each focused on a unique aspect of developing effective assessments. Session 1 will focus on evaluating existing questions and alignment with learning objectives. Session 2 will include work on question development, peer review, and question improvement. Session 3 will develop formative assessment options and alignment with course activities. Participants who complete the workshop will have developed both formative and summative assessment items, have an opportunity for feedback from their peers, and have an opportunity to map the assessment items to their course activities and outcomes. Facilitators will work with faculty to introduce each concept and then faculty will work in small collaborative breakout spaces to improve their assessment items and get feedback from peers. Sharing of work products will also foster community and provide inspiration for faculty developing similar assessment items. Participants in the workshop will then be invited to continue participation in the ASK BIO network moving forward.

Outcomes: Workshop participants completing this workshop will be able to:

• Develop a map that includes learning objectives, course activities, formative assessments, and summative assessment items for a portion of their course.

• Provide constructive feedback to peers that improves an assessment item.

• Write adaptations to questions that can be used by students for formative assessment.

• Discuss various styles of online assessments that are high quality and close-ended in format.