RCN-UBE: Creation of the Biology Educator/Researcher Cross-Segment Collective

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The 2012 President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Report expressed the need to increase the number of STEM college graduates by one million to fill current and future demand for STEM professionals. In the ensuing discussions, community-college and transfer students have been a neglected population. These individuals are particularly relevant as roughly one-quarter of college students nationwide begin their higher-education career at a two-year institution, including a disproportionate number of underrepresented students. The Biology Educator/Researcher Cross-Segment Collective (BERCC) aims to improve community college and transfer student outcomes by facilitating the formation of faculty learning communities (FLC) comprised of faculty from two- and four-year institutions. FLC members will work to collaboratively and iteratively develop evidence-based teaching practices or programs, assess their effectiveness, and share their experiences and disseminate the resulting products through biology education publications, conference presentations, and the BERCC website. These partnerships will lead to closer ties between neighboring colleges and universities, improved educational experiences for students, and a greater wealth of educational resources for instructors across the country. BERCC aims to improve educational outcomes for community-college and transfer students in the biological sciences. Specifically, the Collective's objectives are to: 1) Increase implementation of evidence-based practices in biology courses or programs to improve student outcomes at multiple higher education institutions; 2) Form faculty learning communities comprised of individuals representing a variety of institution types to develop the practices mentioned in objective 1); and 3) Assess implementation of objectives 1 and 2 in a scholarly manner to capture student outcomes across institutional contexts, while contributing to the growing body of Biology Education Research (BER). BERCC will leverage existing resources in the BER community, including the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER), the Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching (SI), the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education (JMBE) and the journal CourseSource. By piloting this program at two regions across the country, California and North Carolina, BERCC will establish a sustainable model to bring together two- and four-year colleagues who are committed to improving outcomes for their community college and transfer student populations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.