Workshops

A syllabus represents a key opportunity for an instructor to increase the equity and inclusivity of a biology course. Syllabi provide students with information about the instructor’s teaching practices and expectations, allow students to develop their own expectations for the course and the instructor, and can lay the foundation for the student-instructor relationship even before the first day of class. Using the syllabus to clearly convey course expectations and information may be especially advantageous for certain groups, such as first-generation students, who are less likely to acquire information about college from their parents. To identify the elements of a syllabus that promote equity and inclusivity, Gin et al. (2021) developed the Syllabus Inclusive Rubric, which provides a starting point for identifying the elements of an inclusive syllabus and a useful self-evaluation tool for instructors to use. We developed a revision of their rubric, which we call the Inclusive-Equity (IE) Rubric. The IE rubric expands upon the elements from the Syllabus Inclusive rubric, accounts for the degree to which each inclusivity element is represented, and can be used as a scoring tool to measure the overall inclusivity of a syllabus.

In this workshop, we will facilitate a discussion of inclusive and equity-minded practices in classrooms and on syllabi. Participants will be provided with sample syllabi and work in breakout groups to evaluate their level of equity and inclusivity using the IE Rubric. Finally, participants will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the IE rubric, propose other elements that may be missing from the current rubric, and identify ways in which they can incorporate elements of inclusivity and equity into their own syllabi and classrooms.

By engaging in this workshop, participants will

• Identify inclusive and equity-minded teaching elements that may be represented in course syllabi

• Evaluate biology course syllabi using the Inclusive-Equity Rubric for syllabi

• Reflect on their own syllabi to seek areas where inclusion and equity could be strengthened.

This workshop focuses on development and implementation of structured peer review activities in large biology courses, with the goal to foster participants' development of their own peer review activities for their course. Further, we will offer a model and tips for those interested in treating the project as a discipline based education research (DBER) project. We will offer suggestions for a protocol to follow if the participants choose to collect data from their course regarding the effects the peer review activities . Peer review offers a scalable way to incorporate formative writing assignments into large courses. Peer review activities support learning gains (Halim et al., 2018; Lundstrom & Baker, 2009; Patchan et al., 2009), and have been implemented in STEM courses (Gunersel et al., 2008; Reynolds & Moskovitz, 2008; Robinson, 2001). In the workshop we will explain our model for structured peer reviews which are assignments predicated on the idea that biology is a community that has norms, knowledge making practices, and approaches that are apparent to professors (experts), but that not apparent to students (novices; e.g. Bransford 2000; Batzli et al., 2016). The goal of the structured peer review is to provide students with keys to access biology. Structured peer reviews can deepen student understanding through development of metacognitive strategies, and foster their sense of membership and belonging in biology. During the workshop the facilitators will be switching between presentations, whole group, and small group discussions throughout the entire workshop (see detailed outline below). Participants will be in small groups based on the types of concepts they want to focus on in the creation of their peer review assignments to foster engagement among participants. Using these engagement strategies participants will leave with (1) having had a discussion of difficult course concepts with other biologists (2) with a structured peer review assignment that they can use in their course (3) a draft of a research question, and (4) a protocol to start with if their goal is a DBER project.

Participants will:

• Identify difficult concepts that students struggle with, with a focus on concepts whose application is fundamental to active participation in the community of Biologists.

• Develop a draft of structured peer review activity that will focus on practice of application of difficult concepts. An activity that can be implemented in their course. The activity will include clear instructions for the creation of the writing task as well as clear instructions for the creation of the review task.

• Develop an individualized research question that will help the assessment process of the effectiveness of the structured peer review activity in the classroom.

One essential component of student-centered teaching is to engage students actively with the course material. Instructor discourse moves can engage students in the construction, justification, and evaluation of knowledge as opposed to simply providing factual knowledge. They can provide opportunities to empower students to talk in class about science content. The Classroom Discourse Observation Protocol (CDOP) (Kranzfelder et al. 2019 & 2020, Alkhouri et al. 2021) is a tool for characterizing instructor discourse moves from observational data in undergraduate STEM learning environments. In this interactive workshop, participants will solve a scenario implementing student-centered instructor discourse moves and design an activity to integrate student-centered instructor discourse moves in their science teaching. Also, participants will learn how they can use their discourse data to provide evidence of teaching effectiveness for merit, promotion, and tenure and teaching awards.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Compare teacher- and student-centered instructor discourse moves.

• Gain familiarity with CDOP by practicing the instructor discourse moves.

• Design a class activity that encourages student-centered instructor discourse moves.

• Describe how student-centered discourse moves are evidence of teaching effectiveness for merit, promotion, and tenure and teaching awards.

Assessment of student learning is critically important for teaching biology and evaluating our teaching of 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. Both V&C and (ESA’s) Four-dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) Framework 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). A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (2012) advocates a similar framework for pre-college students.

Using this framework, researchers (Laverty et al 2016 and Bain et al 2020) are working to transform gateway science courses by moving beyond active learning to incorporate what is known as three-dimensional learning (3DL), the dimensions that are used in concert by practicing scientists and engineers when they apply their knowledge to investigate and reason about phenomena. This workshop will use two protocols developed by these researchers that characterize the extent to which assessments and instruction in introductory biology, physics, and chemistry courses provide opportunities for students to engage with three dimensions. The resulting tools are useful for both research and teaching professional development.

Participants will engage in groups based on the courses they teach or are researching in biological sciences to redesign and develop open-ended and multiple-choice assessment items, use case studies, and apply the criteria of Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP). In addition, participants will be introduced to the Three-Dimensional Learning Observation Protocol (3D-LOP) that was developed to characterize instruction in introductory STEM courses. Facilitators will assist participants as they use both protocols for item development and instruction with a focus on scientific practices. These tools can be used to evaluate courses, individual classes, and support research on course transformation efforts.

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. Concurrently, you will be able to use the 3D-LOP to evaluation instruction. Both tools are useful for research because they can reliably document how assessments change in a course(s) over time and how instruction changes over time.

Participant outcomes:

• Describe and use the 3D-LAP and 4DEE frameworks.

• Design and characterize any assessment item using the 3D-LAP.

• Apply multi-dimensional learning to modify existing assessment items and build new ones.

• Use the 3D-LAP as a research tool for evaluating assessments for research and teaching.

• Use the 3D-LOP as a research tool for providing feedback to support the development and modification of instructional practice and materials.

Public exams (B. L. Wiggins, 2019) attempt to work within the logistical constraints of STEM teaching to allow instructors to apply best practices of education to these onerous experiences as much as possible. The public exam style uses a partial, pre-released exam document to address the following:

• Language Issues: Provide opportunities for students to usefully edit the exam, so as to ensure better use of understandable language and minimizing issues for multilingual students (Abedi & Linquanti, 2012).

• Cognitive Depth: Allow for deeper and more realistic challenges to be used on exams to better match the skills used in science-based careers (Ashford-Rowe et al., 2014; G. Wiggins, 1998, 2011).

• Directing to Core Concepts: Using the principles of deliberate practice, explicitly direct students to the content that is core to the field by positioning that content in obvious and valuable places in the curriculum (Ericsson et al., 1993; Bransford et al, 2018).

• Franchisement: Bring students authentically into the process of assessment in order to engender student trust of a difficult process through increased transparency and relevance (Ambrose, 2010; Bang & Medin, 2010; Hurtado et al., 2017; Steele, 1997).

These aspects of summative exams are widely accepted as best practices but are infrequently demonstrated in postsecondary STEM courses (Handelsman, 2006). A partial, pre-released assessment allows for students to still encounter new material during an exam but to have much more agency in their own realistic preparations.

In more recent research work, public exams appear to show positive impacts on the learning environment and student experience of high-stakes exams (pre-printed here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.15.488479v1). Specifically, students experience significantly better direction towards core concepts, deepened (aka higher-order) thought, and decreased anxiety.

In this workshop, participants will begin the development of a public exam style treatment of material in one of their own courses. Using content from their teaching, they will proceed through a short set of activities to catalyze generation of pre-release-able exam material and the structure for the course to support it. By the end of the 90-minute session, participants will have a strong understanding for how to develop an entire public exam, 1-2 questions pre-written, and a nascent plan for how to communicate their new exam plan to students.

The process of hiring faculty can be riddled with unconscious biases. These biases can potentially lead to a disproportionate number of faculty being hired from majority groups. In order to diversify academia and not only increase representation, but also a sense of inclusion within faculty of color, key practices need to be utilized in the hiring process by search committees. In this workshop, we will explore literature examples for different aspects of the hiring process for faculty. More specifically, we will focus on the practices necessary for the development of an inclusive job advertisement and the formation of the search committee. Together, we will explore these practices in the context of each participant’s home campus. To accomplish this, workshop participants will apply the practices discussed in the workshop to develop sections of a sample job advertisement along with strategies on how to form an inclusive search committee. Additionally, participants will explore the experiences that other workshop participants have had in hiring committees that can potentially be utilized at their home campus.

By the end of this workshop, participants will:

• Gain familiarity with relevant literature on biases in faculty hiring

• Develop a list of potentially inclusive practices to be leveraged for future searches

• Learn about faculty hiring processes at different campuses and departments

• Create sections of an inclusive job advertisement to be shared at participant home departments

Visualizations are crucial to making meaning of your data, as well as conveying research findings to your audience. However, making the right kinds of graphs and charts to answer your specific research needs can be a challenge, not to mention the need to make them polished and publication-worthy!

This workshop is a gentle hands-on introduction to using the ggplot2 visualization library in R. The ggplot2 library empowers everyone from novices to experts in R programming to easily generate clean and aesthetically pleasing figures from tabular data. Through a series of live coding segments combined with pair and group activities, participants will work to create, modify, and iterate upon figures that support a research approach.

Individuals who can work with datasets (variables, matrices, dataframes) and functions in R, but who have never created figures beyond maybe a few base R visualizations (using the plot, hist, barplot functions) will get the most out of this experience.

Please bring your laptop and data from your projects that you want to visualize (if any) to this interactive workshop.

At the end of this workshop, students will be able to:

• Describe the syntax of the ggplot2 package functions

• Modify and customize key graph aesthetics like labels and axes

• Generate several kinds of 1D and 2D plots (e.g. histogram, dotplot, barplot)

• Save figures to their computer in several formats

• (time permitting) Customize figures using facets, colors, and themes

Metacognition, the understanding and regulation of one’s own thinking, is a critical factor in helping students think like biologists and learn most effectively (Tanner, 2012). Metacognition is particularly important for learning and performance when students are operating under time restrictions or in open-ended learning environments. Many students face challenges in using metacognition to guide their learning, either in adopting new learning strategies or knowing when and how to employ the most effective strategies for a given task (Stanton et al., 2021). Instructors can assist students in overcoming these challenges and developing metacognitive skills by intentionally building in metacognitive activities into their courses.

This workshop will equip participants with the practical knowledge to incorporate metacognitive activities into their own courses. Through a combination of small group discussions and background information from the literature, participants will develop the knowledge and vocabulary to justify the relevance and importance of incorporating metacognitive activities into their courses. The workshop will leverage examples of metacognitive activities, such as learning reflections and metacognitive quiz resubmissions, to help participants identify strategies that can be used to develop students’ metacognitive skills and articulate some of the instructional choices involved in implementing metacognitive activities. During the workshop, attendees will be guided through the process of developing a metacognitive activity to implement in one of their own current or future courses. After outlining the specifics of their activities, participants will engage in small group discussions to gain feedback on their proposed activities and examine the strengths and weaknesses of different design and implementation choices (e.g., frequency of metacognitive activities, student accountability, and feedback).

After attending the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Define metacognition and its key components

• Discuss evidence-based strategies to develop metacognition

• Defend the rationale for incorporating metacognitive activities into STEM training

• Describe examples of metacognitive activities that have been implemented with undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and graduate STEM trainees, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of various aspects of implementation

• Apply the principles discussed in the workshop to design a metacognitive activity to implement in one of their own current or future courses

In an effort to improve retention of STEM majors, provide a more equitable and inclusive STEM education, and better engage students in their learning process - we have developed a workshop that emphasizes research-based strategies, including the use of backward design to develop and teach high-structure courses.

The workshop presenters’ expertise and interests are all focused on evidence-based teaching and learning practices such as backward design, high structure course design, metacognition, and self-testing. In this workshop, instructors will build and/or update their courses through the effective practice of backward design. Instructors will first identify the learning outcomes they desire for their course, then determine how students will demonstrate mastery of the desired outcomes, and lastly, plan for the teaching and learning experiences to facilitate student understanding. An important aspect of backward design and scientific teaching is for instructors to continually reflect on, collect data about, and iterate/improve upon their teaching.

In this workshop, we will facilitate conversations around the backward-design approach and utilize an online workspace to put knowledge into practice. Participants will have ample opportunity to share their experiences with designing courses and build a high-structure course using backward design that aligns their learning objectives with specific class assessments as well as participate in peer-to-peer review discussions of their courses.

Participants will:

• Be able to approach course design from a backward design perspective.

• Be able to align class days with learning objectives.

• Be able to align assessments with learning objectives.

• Design at least one unit of their course with learning objectives and assessments.

• Access in-class activities and out-of-class resources for students, all aligned with their course learning objectives.

The workshop will provide a comprehensive introduction to STEM education research. The workshop will cover key topics and research questions being addressed in the field and discuss potential ways to address these questions using research designs that support both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The workshop will also review different ways to measure student success outcomes using course-level data, student survey data, and focus group/interview data. These discussions will revolve around both academic outcome measures and non-academic outcome measures (e.g., social-psychological measures that capture student experiences and engagement). Participants will be given the opportunity via small group discussions to outline a research design.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Generate research questions relevant to their interests and goals

• Identify relevant outcome measures

• Establish next steps in terms of design and implementation of their research study