The Pursuit of Excellence: Transforming Undergraduate Science Education through Evidence-Based Practice

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The West Virginia Summer Institute on Undergraduate Science Education (WVUSI) is a 4-day professional development workshop on scientific teaching for science and math faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students in 4-year institutions in the state of West Virginia. Just like the successful National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Biology Education (NASI), this institute holds morning workshops that model active learning, assessment and diversity, with afternoon group work sessions where participants create teaching materials using the strategies that they practiced in the morning workshop. As a summative assessment at the end of the week, the groups present their teaching materials to the entire institute. The groups receive valuable peer evaluation on their teaching materials which they incorporate before implementing the materials into one of their classes when they return to their institutions. However unlike NASI, which only selects biology faculty teams, this project targets science and math teams and also post-doctoral fellows and graduate student. Piloting this institute in May 2008 at West Virginia University has already increased the number of faculty and graduate students across the sciences and in math that are changing the way they teach, and also volunteering to help with this institute.