Meeting Abstract
Biology university instructors received their call to action in 2011 in the form of AAAS’ Vision and Change report, which identifies core concepts and competencies. In the Biology Department at California State University Fresno we have begun to implement Vision and Change as part of a college-wide faculty-development initiative aimed at improving student success in introductory STEM courses. We used validated concept inventories and attitude surveys as pre-post tests to quantify changes in conceptual understanding and attitudes during our two introductory biology courses. We found significant decreases in certain categories of the CLASS attitude results (Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey), such as real-world relevance, despite significant increases in conceptual understanding (Energy and Matter in Dynamic Systems survey; Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection; Measure of Understanding of Macroevolution). We saw significant increases on certain knowledge items, but overall pre-post scores were not significantly different. We also found that our course currently serves Biology majors, but not non-Biology major students taking our introductory courses to fulfill general-education requirements. We plan to intensify of effort to observe instructors in their classroom (using COPUS – Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM) and conduct interviews with students to better understand the causes of the observed trends and to develop pedagogical strategies that reach non-Biology majors and improve also attitudes, not just conceptual understanding.
