Evolving the culture of biology: Promoting graduate teaching assistant professional development to foster inclusion, efficacy, and evidence-based practices

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This project aims to serve the national interest by implementing evidence-based teaching practices in biology. Based on the ongoing need to improve the state of undergraduate biology education, the research team plans to develop training for administrators, STEM faculty, and staff. The Evolving the Culture in Biology (ECB) Scholars will, in turn, train graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants at their institutions. The effort will be designed to foster the adaptation and implementation of intentional, inclusive, evidence-based teaching practices by graduate teaching assistants and undergraduate learning assistants through participation in teacher professional development (Teaching Assistant – Teaching Professional Development, TA-TPD). A set of six regional ECB Workshops are planned, which will extend the team’s prior work that was supported through the NSF Research Coordination Networks for Undergraduate Education initiative. The Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform (TCSR) model guides the effort. The research and evaluation activities will investigate the effectiveness of the workshops and the association of project activities and factors with the expected outcomes of the project.There are three interconnected objectives: (1) Develop regional workshops that will host workshop ECB Scholars from at least ten unique institutions, reaching a vast number of institutions over the four years, while reducing expenses for travel; (2) Engage each ECB Scholar to participate in a contextually rooted reflective process to develop or enhance existing the Teaching Assistants Teaching Professional Development (TA-TPD) activities at their institutions. (3) Evaluate the efficacy of workshops and TA-TPD using a mixed methods research design for formative and summative purposes and the generation of knowledge. Based on the Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform model and in parallel with the evaluation, the research team plans to conduct a mixed methods research effort that is guided by the following research question: What are the impacts of the ECB program on ECB Scholars and their institutions? What are the outcomes for Teaching Assistants who participation in Teaching Professional Development activities? A rich set of data will be collected through pre-post surveys, focus groups, and document analysis using quantitative descriptive approaches and qualitatively-derived frameworks that are grounded in the empirical data and the Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform model (contextual factors, personal factors, teacher thinking and beliefs, and instructional practices). The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.