RCN-UBE Incubator: Biology through art: an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to teaching biology

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This project establishes an interdisciplinary network of biologists and artists to develop and implement teaching practices that integrate artistic expression with biology education. This approach builds on the demonstrated cognitive and academic benefits of art-enhanced instruction in biology courses to increase creativity, course engagement, and concept comprehension by diverse students: traditional and non-traditional, and biology majors and non-majors. This project’s rationale is rooted in two national trends. First, undergraduate students are becoming increasingly “non-traditional”, and these students show lower degree completion rates and more difficulty integrating into university life than their traditional counterparts. Second, this proposal is a response to recent calls from national advisory bodies for the integration of education in biology and the sciences with the arts and humanities, as well as emphasis on the college graduate as a scientifically literate member of society. To engage diverse students with diverse learning preferences, this project emphasizes concrete, immediate expression of concepts in biology, and encourages thinking about concepts from diverse perspectives. By providing opportunities for students to interpret and express course material in personal, creative ways, this project addresses the achievement gap faced by non-traditional students and enriches the course experience of biology majors and non-majors. This project has two main objectives: establish a collaborative network of biologists and artists to develop and implement methods and techniques of art-enhanced instruction in undergraduate biology courses and increase course engagement and concept comprehension among biology-majors and non-majors through art-enhanced instruction. To achieve the first objective, the network will hold a series of meetings to develop feasible art-enhanced course material, as well as appropriate assessment approaches and metrics for project evaluation. Ten art-enhanced biology instruction and ten non-art-enhanced biology courses will be implemented at four institutions (two HSIs, a teaching-focused university, and an international institution that includes programs offered through a Native American education center); three courses for non-majors and seven for majors. Major courses will include lower level (General Biology) and upper level (Invertebrate Zoology, Ecology, Cell Biology, and Microbiology) biology. Formative evaluation will assess the processes through which the network develops and implements the integration of artwork in biology courses and summative evaluation will examine the outcomes of implementation through assessment data on student course engagement and concept comprehension. This project is being funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, as part of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).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.