Cohort March 2022: Faculty of Science – Jaclyn Dee, Caitlin Donnelly, Brett Couch, Deaunte Nelson
Project background
We want to make biology learning rewarding for all learners for the sake of their own personal satisfaction. We also want to create a more biologically literate society in which people can make better-informed decisions about their personal health, our environment, and social policy. BIOL 111: “Introduction to Modern Biology,” is both a survey of core biology concepts for learners who may never take another biology course and a stepping stone for students who might want to take additional biology courses.
For this Students as Partners initiative, our goal is to enhance students’ biological literacy and their ability to appraise biology-related news items critically. We also aim to improve equitability in assessments. To promote meaningful biological literacy, we must connect core biology concepts with diverse students’ values, past experiences and prior knowledge, and mitigate student anxiety about learning biology.
Furthermore, students’ ability to assess the validity of claims made about biology depends on their beliefs, what sources they trust, their critical thinking habits, their disciplinary knowledge, and their degree of motivation to get to the bottom of a given claim. Despite the fact that so much of this learning rests on what students bring with them into the course, we have not yet systematically harnessed student experiences and voices to guide the course design.
What we plan to change
The core concepts presented in BIOL 111 are fixed. However, we choose real-world stories that exemplify those concepts. We want to tap into students’ intrinsic interest in biology, which may be just emerging, by showcasing current biology-related controversies, events, technologies, and/or natural phenomena. We also want to change students’ habits regarding how they process the biology news that they are hearing every day. In addition, we would like to improve personal accountability and collaboration skills in team settings. Anecdotally, group assessments need to be better at measuring and rewarding individual achievement and deterring students from social loafing. We predict that the data will prod us in the direction of including more Indigenous Science, cultural competencies, experiential learning opportunities, land-based learning, and programming/data science in the course. This project will be part of a larger course renewal effort in BIOL 111 that was commissioned by leaders within the biology program. We are also looking to tackle barriers to biology interest such as heavy memorization and scientific jargon.
Project outcomes
We anticipate the following outcomes from this work:
- Revised lessons, resources, and assessments that will leverage students’ self-reported interests and alter the thought processes and habits they use when consuming science news. Revised assessments will also mitigate social loafing in team settings.
- Pre- vs. post-course measures of biology interest in BIOL 111 for quality assurance purposes using the validated Biology Interest Questionnaire (Knekta et al. 2020).
- Qualitative analyses of diverse student interests in biology and how non-majors see biology connecting to their daily lives.
- Pre- vs. post-course analyses of how non-majors biology students consume and process biology-related claims in the media.