Enhancing Disciplinary Learning to Diversify Biology Degree Pathways and Career Pursuits in the Ecological and Evolutionary Sciences

在改善本科STEM教育：西班牙裔服务机构（HSI）计划的支持下，这个第二轨道项目旨在通过整合课程、部门和机构层面的循证改革，使生态学和进化生物学学位参与和职业追求多样化。本项目基于这样的观点：学科学习是学生选择专业、升入高年级课程、获得学位和职业参与的核心组成部分，是一个关键但未被充分研究和利用的公平指标。因此，学科学习是实现STEM学科多样化的潜在基础战略。因此，监控学习对于教师、院系和机构来说至关重要，以经验确定本科课程是促进学科包容还是排斥。该项目采用了一种新的公平框架，整合了捕捉学习关键方面的措施，并允许利益相关者生成有意义的公平目标进展指标。这个新指标有可能填补本科院校在循证决策方面的空白。在课堂规模上，该项目将通过以下方式开始对门户生物学课程进行改革：(i)通过与文化相关的课程交织，扩展最近出版的主动学习和以误解为重点的教学方法；（ii）将本科助教计划整合到生物学课程中，以最大限度地提高学生的参与度和包容性；（三）发展生态与进化相关的职业模块，将学科概念与现实世界的应用联系起来。因为门户生物学只是学生学术之旅的开始，这个项目通过在教授下一级生态学和进化课程的教师之间建立一个教师学习社区而扩展到系级规模。这一步骤将为将改革扩展到学位途径的下一个课程序列奠定基础。在机构规模上，该项目加强了与主要机构中心的新生伙伴关系，在学生大学生活的早期就开发和部署有关生态学和进化职业的模块。从这项工作中产生的方法、材料和结果将被出版，并与其他西班牙裔和少数民族服务机构广泛分享。HSI计划旨在加强本科STEM教育，扩大STEM参与，并在HSI进行能力建设。考虑到hsi的多样化性质和背景，实现这些目标需要创新的方法来激励机构和社区转型，并促进基础研究(i)关于参与式学生学习，（ii）关于如何有效地多样化和增加STEM参与，以及（iii）提高我们对如何在hsi建立机构能力的理解，这些都是由该计划支持的。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 2 project aims to diversify Ecology and Evolutionary Biology degree participation and career pursuits by integrating evidence-based reforms at the course, departmental, and institutional levels. This project is grounded in the perspective that disciplinary learning, which is a central component to a student’s declared major, their advancement to upper-division coursework, degree attainment and career participation, is a critical yet understudied and underutilized equity indicator. As such, disciplinary learning is a potentially foundational strategy for diversifying STEM disciplines. Therefore, monitoring learning is essential for instructors, departments, and institutions to empirically determine whether undergraduate coursework is fostering disciplinary inclusion or exclusion. Using a novel equity framework, this project integrates measures that capture critical facets of learning and allow stakeholders to generate meaningful indicators of progress towards equity goals. This new indicator has the potential to fill a gap in evidence-based decision making at undergraduate institutions.At the classroom scale, the project will begin reform efforts in gateway biology courses by (i) expanding a recently published active-learning and misconception-focused instructional approach through the interweaving of culturally-relevant curricula, (ii) integrating an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program into biology classes to maximize student engagement and inclusion, and (iii) developing Ecology and Evolution-related career modules to link disciplinary concepts to real-world applications. Because gateway biology is only the beginning of a student’s academic journey, this project extends to the departmental scale by establishing a faculty learning community among faculty who teach the next level of ecology and evolution courses. This step will lay the groundwork to expand reforms into the next sequence of courses in the degree pathway. At the institutional scale, the project strengthens nascent partnerships with key institutional centers to develop and deploy modules about ecology and evolution careers directly into the classroom early in a student’s college experience. The approaches, materials, and results emerging from this work will be published and shared broadly with other Hispanic and Minority Serving Institutions. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs are supported by this program.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.