Building Tools for Institutional Transformation of Biology Core Competencies Teaching

来自全国生物教育工作者、政策制定者和实践者的信息是响亮的：本科生物教育需要改革，以确保未来的毕业生是多样化的、有技能的、懂STEM的。为生物学学生准备现代STEM工作的一个不可或缺的部分是确保学生不仅接受生物学概念的指导，而且还接受实习生物学家使用的技能的指导。这些技能包括科学交流、协作、定量推理和解决问题。这项工作的基本目标是制作工具，以促进本科生生物技能培训的提高。该项目将编制两个工具--《生物技能指南》和《生物技能覆盖范围方案调查》，供教师在审查和改进教学时单独使用，或共同帮助各部门完成课程改革进程。BioSkills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，阐明学生在每一项技能上都能胜任意味着什么。计划调查将揭示哪些技能在部门的课程中已经涵盖得很好，哪些是欠缺的，以及在哪些特定的课程中教授了每项技能。管理人员可以使用这项调查的数据来决定将改革努力和资源放在哪里，而BioSkills指南可以支持个别课程或整个课程的重新设计。该项目制作的工具旨在支持全国的教育工作者培训生物学学生在现代美国STEM工作队伍中取得成功所需的技能。2011年发表的AAAS报告《本科生物学教育的愿景与变化》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来构建。这个项目将通过开发工具来详细阐述愿景和改变核心能力，以支持个人和整个部门改善核心能力教学的努力。具体地说，拟议的项目将开发两个工具：《生物技能指南》和《生物技能覆盖范围方案调查》。生物技能指南将是一套学习目标和支持活动的例子，阐明六项核心能力中的每一项。该指南将以合作方式起草并反复修订，纳入了各种2年制和4年制院校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教育工作者和实践者发送的调查问卷进行验证。为了扩大指南的价值，最终指南中的每个学习目标都将与循证教学实践和文献中经过验证的评估相对应。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掌握这些技能意味着什么。通过在不同机构类型、一系列子学科和课程水平上任教的生物教育工作者达成共识，该指南将勾勒出哪些学习目标对生物专业最重要。将BioSkills的学习目标与现有的评估相结合，将使生物教育研究人员能够优先开发新的评估，解决缺乏适当测试工具的能力学习目标。经验证的BioSkills指南将被改编成BioSkills覆盖面的方案调查，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面评估。这项调查将使生物系内部审查课程范围内对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，将在教师面谈和在多个机构进行试点实施后对调查进行反复修订。这些工具结合在一起，可用于使部门的做法与《愿景与变革》中概述的国家标准保持一致。

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.