Developing Teaching Tools to Promote Transfer of Core Concept Knowledge Across Biological Scales and Sub-disciplines.

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving curricula in biology education. This project will develop, test, and publish a collection of Core Concept Teaching Tools (CCTTs) that teach students how to transfer their knowledge of biology core concepts across scales and sub-disciplines to understand novel and complex biological phenomena. The Vision and Change (V&C) report (AAAS, 2011) identified five core concepts in biology and called on undergraduate biology instructors to use these concepts to connect their teaching and their students’ learning across biological scales and subdisciplines. The report highlighted the need to prepare undergraduate biology students to contribute to emerging interdisciplinary fields that address complex problems by building their ability to make connections across seemingly disparate pieces of information, concepts, and questions. However, currently available instructional tools primarily focus on teaching core concepts in sub-disciplinary contexts. The CCTTs developed as part of this project will address the need for instructional tools that teach students to transfer core concept knowledge across scales and subdisciplines.The project will bring biology educators with expertise across scales and sub-disciplines together to participate in faculty learning communities to develop, test, and publish a collection of CCTTs in CourseSource. Each CCTT will begin with a brief narrative describing a complex biological phenomenon. The activities and questions following the narrative will be constructed using Branchaw and Cary’s Conceptual Elements Framework (2017) to guide students through the process of recognizing the core concept elements in the narrative, recalling what they have already learned about those core concept elements, and applying their prior knowledge to understand the novel phenomenon described in the narrative. Approximately 45 CCTTs will be developed, and pilot tested at diverse institutions across the nation, before they are published in CourseSource. Instructors will be able to search the CourseSource database for CCTTs by subdisciplines, core concepts, and conceptual elements, and download them for free. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.