In college biology courses, exams and quizzes are often used to assess students’ knowledge and performance. Since assessments are a crucial part of biology classes, there has been a wide range of work...

Academic advising plays a major role in shaping undergraduate life sciences students’ experiences through college. However, despite the critical nature of advising, there have been relatively few stud...

Biology is the study of life, but students often hold misconceptions about what it means to be alive, with children often associating life with movement. These misconceptions can lead to biases in wha...

Associate professor reflects on an early teaching misstep and explains how backward design, clear learning objectives and reflective tools reshaped assessment, clarified expectations and helped studen...

Ten undergraduate students from Chapman University, including six dedicated majors and minors from Schmid College of Science and Technology, recently had the remarkable opportunity to present their re...

Integrative and Organismal Biology, the open access online journal of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), is excited to announce a speci

We are excited to announce that we are recruiting for a collaborative NSF-funded postdoc position in STEM education research at Chapman University. The postdoc would join a vibrant community of DBER s...

Background Office hours are one of the most ubiquitous resources for students in STEM courses. However, there has been only limited work examining what students think of STEM course office hours, and ...

In test of NIH director’s support of dissent, NIH staff sign Bethesda Declaration urging reversal of grant cuts and freezes

Office hours are a part of nearly all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, with many academic and affective benefits for students who attend. However, despite their ubiqui...

Rethinking office hours and how we talk about them can unlock new opportunities for improving student learning, Jeremy Hsu writes.

Quantitative skills are essential to student success in undergraduate biology. The importance of this critical skill is stressed in influential reports, including the American Association for the Adva...

Quantitative reasoning (QR) is a key skill for undergraduate biology education. Despite this, many students struggle with QR. Here, we use the theoretical framework of student noticing to investigate ...

The release of the 2011 Vision & Change report was a watershed moment for the undergraduate life science education community. The report, a product of some of this community’s intellectual leaders, called for the transformation of undergraduate biology education by incorporating a student-centered model of education based on active learning techniques and getting students to think and act as “real scientists” (Box 1). The past 13 years have seen significant progress towards the widespread adoption of this goal, with many individual instructors and entire departments working to bring their pedagogical practices in line with the goals set out by the 2011 report, while maintaining the unique character of their individual classrooms. Vision & Change has also sparked the development of several organizations and networks devoted to facilitating the spread of pedagogical reform as well as initiatives sponsored by life science professional societies to make Vision & Change recommendations accessible to their members.

Institutions of higher education play a major role in teaching undergraduate students. Historically, most courses have been taught by tenure-track (TT) faculty who may also be responsible for research...

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) can be a powerful tool in broadening participation in undergraduate research. In this paper, we review the benefits of and barriers to undergra....

In higher education and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), interlocking oppressions can lead to inequitable environments for those who hold marginalized identities. Instructors ...

Office hours are an integral component of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses at nearly all colleges and universities. Despite their ubiquity as a support mechanism, there has on...

Background Understanding evolution is an important part of undergraduate biology education. Despite its importance, however, students often struggle to understand evolution, often holding preconceived...

There is widespread recognition that undergraduate students in the life sciences must learn how to work in teams. However, instructors who wish to incorporate teamwork into their classrooms rarely hav...

This past weekend, Assistant Professor of Biology Jeremy Hsu and his lab participated in the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) eighth-annual west-coast conference at th...