Leveraging faculty expertise in CREATE pedagogy to transform teaching and maximize student outcomes through courses focused on scientific literature at 2- and 4-year institutions

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The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) predicted in 2012 that, unless measures are taken to facilitate US students' completion of degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), there will not be enough STEM graduates to fill STEM jobs in the near future. Both PCAST and Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, a recent document reflecting the views of more than 500 biology faculty representing a variety of scientific fields and academic institutions, call for engaging students in the scientific process as one means of ensuring a well prepared professional STEM workforce in the future. The CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, Think of the next Experiment) teaching/learning strategy aims to improve undergraduate science education by engaging students, at the beginning as well as at the advanced stages of their academic careers, in intensive analysis of the scientific literature. It provides one potential low cost answer to the challenges posed by PCAST and Vision and Change. Through multiday workshops (supported by NSF grants DUE 0681536, 1323005, 1021443), the PIs have introduced faculty to CREATE, followed workshop alumni as they transformed their courses into CREATE courses, and monitored workshop impact, teacher ability and student cognitive (process skills) and/or affective (attitude/beliefs) gains in CREATE courses. The project is designed to capture CREATE 'effective practices' and innovations developed by workshop-trained faculty, and to improve and test CREATE approaches for community college settings. It will enable the investigators to streamline and enhance their efforts to gather evidence on both faculty use of the technique and student learning outcomes and to help faculty develop techniques specifically appropriate for introductory biology courses and use at community colleges, as well as to assess CREATE impact on additional community college cohorts.The project builds on a pilot study in which the authors closely followed a set of workshop attendees (CBE Life Science Education, (2014) 13:224-242). The PIs will in year 1 of the two-year project hold focus groups with experienced CREATE faculty in preparation for a weekend conference bringing together a subset of these, to capture their innovations to the CREATE strategy and jointly develop ways to more effectively integrate CREATE in both four-year and community college settings. Also in year 1, community college CREATE faculty will work with the PIs and a Community College Project Consultant to develop a full CREATE curriculum applicable to first-year Biology at community colleges. In year 2, the PIs will extend testing of CREATE, including the novel curriculum, to four additional community colleges. In addition to examining student learning outcomes, this research will capture new insights into the factors that either promote or inhibit the transformation of faculty teaching practices. Taken as a whole, this two-year research project will produce significant CREATE curricular resources and publications that will facilitate changing science pedagogy via the CREATE strategy and study both student outcomes and factors that promote or inhibit faculty pedagogical change. This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.