Collaborative Research: Improving General Biology Teaching with Diagnostic Question Clusters and Active Teaching

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This project builds on a one year Phase 1 project in which ecology faculty began to use Diagnostic Question Clusters (DQCs) to: 1. organize an entire introductory course around key concepts and biologically principled thinking based on an overarching framework and 2. identify and gauge student progress on specific principles especially problematic for them. The DQCs focus on energy and matter across all levels of biological organization. Faculty from universities, including Historically Black Colleges, plus four year and community colleges contributed to the original DQC research. Adopting an expanding networks approach for broader dissemination and impact, this project extends this model to more faculty and also introduces modifications to the faculty workshops based on the "lessons learned" from the previous project.Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project stems from the value of the material being produced and the lessons concerning effective dissemination techniques being learned from the outcomes of the workshops.Broader Impact: The ability of the workshops to help faculty inspect their own teaching practices is potentially transformative.