Building Tools for Institutional Transformation of Biology Core Competencies Teaching

构建生物学核心能力教学机构转型的工具

• 批准号: 1710772
• 负责人: Alison Crowe
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-05-15 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1710772&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Building; Tools; Institutional; Transformation; Biology

The message from biology educators, policy makers, and practitioners nationwide is resounding: undergraduate biology education needs reform to ensure that future graduates are diverse, skilled, and STEM-literate. An integral part of preparing biology students for modern STEM jobs is ensuring that students receive instruction not only in biology concepts, but also in the skills used by practicing biologists. Such skills include scientific communication, collaboration, quantitative reasoning, and problem solving. The fundamental objective of this work is to produce tools that will facilitate the improvement of undergraduate biology skills training. This project will produce two tools - the BioSkills Guide and the Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage - designed to be used separately by instructors as they review and enhance their teaching or together to help departments through the process of curricular reform. The BioSkills Guide will translate general recommendations about skills training into concrete descriptions of tasks that can be taught in the classroom, clarifying what it means for a student to be competent in each skill. The programmatic survey will reveal which skills are already well covered in a department's curriculum, which are lacking, and in which particular courses each skill is taught. Administrators can use data from this survey to make decisions about where to target reform efforts and resources, and the BioSkills Guide can support individual course or curriculum-wide redesign. The tools produced by this project are intended to support educators nationwide as they train biology students in the skills they need to be successful in the modern U.S. STEM workforce.The AAAS report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, published in 2011, identified six essential skills, termed core competencies, around which college biology curricula should be built. This project will elaborate the Vision and Change core competencies by developing tools that will support individual and department-wide efforts to improve core competencies teaching. Specifically, the proposed project will develop two tools: the BioSkills Guide and the Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage. The BioSkills Guide will be a set of learning goals with examples of supporting activities, elucidating each of the six core competencies. The guide will be collaboratively drafted and iteratively revised, incorporating the combined expertise of educators at a variety of 2- and 4- year institutions. The final product will then be validated using a survey sent to hundreds of biology educators and practitioners nationwide. To extend the value of the guide, each learning goal in the final guide will be mapped to evidence-based instructional practices and validated assessments from the literature. By translating core competencies into specific learning goals that can be observed and assessed, the BioSkills Guide will define what it means for an undergraduate biology student to master those skills. By reaching a consensus among biology educators who teach at diverse institution types, across a range of subdisciplines and course levels, the guide will delineate which learning goals are most important for biology majors. Alignment of BioSkills learning goals with existing assessments will enable biology education researchers to prioritize development of novel assessments addressing competency learning goals that lack appropriate testing instruments. The validated BioSkills Guide will be adapted into a Programmatic Survey of BioSkills Coverage, offering departments a means to obtain a more fine-grained assessment of competencies coverage than existing tools. This survey will enable biology departments to internally review curriculum-wide coverage of competency learning goals. To ensure the survey has widespread applicability, it will be iteratively revised following instructor interviews and pilot implementations at multiple institutions. Together these tools can be used to bring department practices into alignment with national standards outlined in Vision and Change.

来自全国生物学教育者、政策制定者和从业者的信息是响亮的：本科生物学教育需要改革，以确保未来的毕业生是多样化的、熟练的、有STEM素养的。为生物学学生准备现代STEM工作的一个组成部分是确保学生不仅接受生物学概念的指导，而且还接受实践生物学家使用的技能的指导。这些技能包括科学沟通，协作，定量推理和解决问题。这项工作的基本目标是生产的工具，这将有助于提高本科生生物技能培训。该项目将产生两种工具-《生物技能指南》和《生物技能覆盖面方案调查》-供教员在审查和改进其教学时单独使用，或共同帮助各部门完成课程改革。《生物技能指南》将把关于技能培训的一般性建议转化为可以在课堂上教授的任务的具体描述，阐明学生能够胜任每项技能意味着什么。方案调查将揭示哪些技能已经很好地涵盖在一个部门的课程，哪些是缺乏的，以及在哪些特定的课程，每一种技能是教。管理员可以使用这项调查的数据来决定将改革的努力和资源放在哪里，生物技能指南可以支持个别课程或整个学校的重新设计。该项目制作的工具旨在支持全国范围内的教育工作者，因为他们培养生物学学生在现代美国STEM劳动力中取得成功所需的技能。美国科学促进会2011年发表的报告《本科生物学教育的愿景与变革》确定了六项基本技能，称为核心能力，大学生物学课程应围绕这些技能建立。这个项目将通过开发工具来阐述愿景和变革的核心能力，这些工具将支持个人和整个部门努力改善核心能力的教学。具体而言，拟议项目将开发两种工具：生物技能指南和生物技能覆盖率方案调查。《生物技能指南》将是一套学习目标，附有支持活动的实例，阐明六项核心能力中的每一项。该指南将协同起草和反复修订，结合各种2年和4年制机构的教育工作者的综合专业知识。最终产品将通过向全国数百名生物学教育工作者和从业者进行调查进行验证。为了扩展指南的价值，最终指南中的每个学习目标都将映射到基于证据的教学实践和文献中经过验证的评估。通过将核心能力转化为可以观察和评估的具体学习目标，生物技能指南将定义本科生物学学生掌握这些技能意味着什么。通过在不同机构类型的生物学教育工作者之间达成共识，跨越一系列子学科和课程水平，该指南将描述哪些学习目标对生物学专业最重要。生物技能学习目标与现有评估的一致性将使生物教育研究人员能够优先开发新的评估，以解决缺乏适当测试工具的能力学习目标。经验证的《生物技能指南》将被改编成《生物技能覆盖率方案调查》，为各部门提供一种手段，以获得比现有工具更精细的能力覆盖率评估。这项调查将使生物系内部审查能力学习目标的覆盖范围。为了确保调查具有广泛的适用性，它将在多个机构的教师访谈和试点实施后反复修订。 这些工具可以一起用于使部门的做法与《愿景和变革》中概述的国家标准保持一致。