Meeting Abstract
Vision and Change is an initiative by AAAS to transform undergraduate Biology education. It identifies five core concepts and six core competencies for Biology. On our campus, we have begun to implement Vision and Change. At the curriculum level, we are refocusing our two one-semester introductory biology courses around the core concepts of ‘energy’ and ‘information’, replacing the traditional ‘atom to cell’ and ‘organism to ecosystem’ with a look at biology across all scales through the lens of ‘energy’ and ‘information’. We also have mapped all five core concepts onto our current core curriculum. To implement the teaching of core competencies, we have begun to include authentic research, including the teaching of research techniques and skills. At the faculty development level, we are building faculty communities to move beyond individual faculty redesigning individual courses and instead collaborate to redesign curricula. This NSF-funded initiative coordinates across five STEM departments, involves 30 faculty, and directly affects ten introductory and general-education STEM courses. Faculty (1) are seeking out opportunities to observe each other’s classes to learn about new practices, (2) are developing cohesive cross-disciplinary course content that cut across multiple courses, (3) are uniting to build critical mass to initiate infrastructure improvements, such as SCALE-UP ready classrooms. We found that faculty overall embrace Vision and Change (core concepts and competencies), but struggle to find effective ways of implementing them effectively through evidence-based, active-learning practices. To address this issue, we are using the PULSE rubrics to identify focal areas for faculty development.
