Maintaining the PULSE: Sustaining Efforts of the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to Transform Life Sciences Education

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An award has been made to Washington University to coordinate the efforts of the PULSE Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to pilot, widely implement, and make sustainable a series of programs, collectively "The PULSE Roadmap for Change," to catalyze departmental transformation as part of the mission of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). In September 2012 the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH, and NSF) appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in undergraduate life science education as recommended in the Vision and Change report. Fellows were selected from two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities and research universities. The Fellows have organized into working groups with the overarching goal of helping departments transform their programs in a national effort to increase student learning of core concepts, increase student retention in the sciences, and prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens. The current award is to oversee, coordinate, and provide communications and information management support for the efforts of the working groups that each focuses on a part of the Roadmap. The programs and mechanisms that have emerged from the efforts of the different working groups are a complimentary set of initiatives and tools that target life sciences department educational change. They will be most effective when used synergistically and in a coordinated manner. The Vision and Change report contained a number of recommendations for improving undergraduate life sciences education but did not furnish an implementation strategy. The initiatives and tools that have been developed by the Fellows form a "Roadmap for Change" address this issue and will serve as a blueprint for departments to adopt the Vision and Change recommendations: departments will become aware of the need for change, evaluate their current state of adoption, develop strategic plans, implement changes, assess their progress, and be rewarded for progress toward the goals. The working groups are focused on creating materials to promote awareness of the need for change, regional network development to foster change, certification program to evaluate, recognize, and reward departments that adopt the recommendations, a Vision and Change Ambassador program to assist departments in developing strategies and implementing tools and methods for change. This award also encompasses development and piloting of assessment tools and strategies to evaluate the desired change and the impact of the programs on life sciences education nation-wide. The award will support efforts to find mechanisms to sustain for the long term the initiatives begun under the PULSE program. Results from the overall PULSE "Roadmap for Change" project will be posted on the pulsecommunity.org website and shared with the life sciences community at professional meetings. This project is being funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to support Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.