Building Tools for Institutional Transformation of Biology Core Competencies Teaching

来自全国范围内的生物教育者、政策制定者和从业者的信息是响亮的：本科生物教育需要改革，以确保未来的毕业生多样化、熟练和stem素养。让生物学学生为现代STEM工作做好准备的一个组成部分是确保学生不仅在生物学概念方面得到指导，而且在实践生物学家使用的技能方面得到指导。这些技能包括科学交流、合作、定量推理和解决问题的能力。这项工作的基本目标是生产工具，将有助于提高本科生物技能训练。该项目将产生两种工具——《生物技能指南》和《生物技能覆盖计划调查》——旨在供教师在审查和加强教学时单独使用，或一起使用，以帮助院系完成课程改革过程。《生物技能指南》将把关于技能培训的一般建议转化为可在课堂上教授的具体任务描述，阐明学生掌握每种技能的意义。程序性调查将揭示哪些技能在系里的课程中已经被很好地涵盖了，哪些是缺乏的，以及每种技能在哪些特定的课程中被教授。管理人员可以使用该调查的数据来决定在何处进行改革努力和资源，生物技能指南可以支持个别课程或整个课程的重新设计。该项目生产的工具旨在支持全国的教育工作者，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（AAAS） 2011年发表的报告《本科生物学教育的愿景与变革》（Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education）确定了大学生物学课程应该围绕的六项基本技能，即核心能力进行构建。本计划将透过开发工具，协助个别及系系改善核心能力的教学，详细阐述“展望与改变”的核心能力。具体来说，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计划调查。《生物技能指南》将是一套学习目标，并附有支持活动的例子，阐明六项核心能力中的每一项。该指南将由双方共同起草并反复修订，并将各种两年制和四年制院校教育工作者的专业知识结合起来。最终产品将通过向全国数百名生物教育者和从业者发送的调查来验证。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》将定义生物学本科生掌握这些技能的意义。通过在不同类型的机构、不同的分支学科和课程水平的生物教育者之间达成共识，该指南将描述哪些学习目标对生物专业最重要。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。经过验证的《生物技能指南》将被改编成《生物技能覆盖计划调查》，为各部门提供一种比现有工具获得更细致的能力覆盖评估的方法。这项调查将使生物系能够在内部审查能力学习目标的课程范围。为了确保调查具有广泛的适用性，将在教师访谈和多个机构的试点实施之后对其进行迭代修订。总之，这些工具可以用来使部门的做法与《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.