Leveraging faculty expertise in CREATE pedagogy to transform teaching and maximize student outcomes through courses focused on scientific literature at 2- and 4-year institutions

美国总统科学和技术顾问委员会(PCAST)在2012年预测，除非采取措施促进美国学生完成科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)学位，否则在不久的将来将没有足够的STEM毕业生来填补STEM职位。PCAST和本科生物学教育的愿景与变化，最近的一份文件反映了代表不同科学领域和学术机构的500多名生物教师的观点，呼吁让学生参与科学过程，作为确保未来STEM专业劳动力准备充分的一种手段。创建(考虑、阅读、阐明假设、分析和解释数据、思考下一个实验)教学/学习策略旨在通过让学生在其学术生涯的开始和后期对科学文献进行深入分析来改善本科科学教育。它为PCAST和愿景与变革带来的挑战提供了一个潜在的低成本答案。通过为期数天的研讨会(由国家科学基金会将于0681536、1323005、1021443到期的拨款支持)，私人投资机构介绍教师创造，跟踪研讨会校友将他们的课程转变为创造课程，并监测研讨会的影响、教师能力和学生在创造课程中的认知(过程技能)和/或情感(态度/信念)收获。该项目旨在获取由经过研讨会培训的教师开发的Create‘有效实践’和创新，并改进和测试社区大学环境中的Create方法。它将使研究人员能够简化和加强他们的努力，以收集关于教师使用该技术和学生学习结果的证据，帮助教师开发专门适合于入门生物学课程和在社区大学使用的技术，以及评估对其他社区大学队列的影响。该项目建立在一项试点研究的基础上，在该研究中，作者密切跟踪了一组与会者(CBE生命科学教育，(2014)13：224-242)。在为期两年的项目的第一年，PIS将与经验丰富的CREATE教员举行焦点小组，为周末的会议做准备，会议将其中一部分人聚集在一起，捕捉他们对CREATE战略的创新，并共同开发方法，在四年制和社区学院环境中更有效地整合CREATE。同样在第一年，社区学院CREATE教员将与PIS和社区学院项目顾问合作，开发适用于社区学院一年级生物学的完整CREATE课程。在第二年，PIS将把Create的测试，包括新颖的课程，扩展到另外四所社区学院。除了检查学生的学习结果，这项研究还将捕捉到对促进或抑制教师教学实践转变的因素的新见解。作为一个整体，这个为期两年的研究项目将产生重要的CREATE课程资源和出版物，这些资源和出版物将促进通过CREATE战略改变科学教学方法，并研究学生的结果和促进或抑制教师教学改革的因素。该项目由生物科学局、生物基础设施司和教育与人力资源局、本科教育司联合资助，以支持应对《展望与变革》中提出的挑战的努力：行动呼吁http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) predicted in 2012 that, unless measures are taken to facilitate US students' completion of degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), there will not be enough STEM graduates to fill STEM jobs in the near future. Both PCAST and Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, a recent document reflecting the views of more than 500 biology faculty representing a variety of scientific fields and academic institutions, call for engaging students in the scientific process as one means of ensuring a well prepared professional STEM workforce in the future. The CREATE (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, Think of the next Experiment) teaching/learning strategy aims to improve undergraduate science education by engaging students, at the beginning as well as at the advanced stages of their academic careers, in intensive analysis of the scientific literature. It provides one potential low cost answer to the challenges posed by PCAST and Vision and Change. Through multiday workshops (supported by NSF grants DUE 0681536, 1323005, 1021443), the PIs have introduced faculty to CREATE, followed workshop alumni as they transformed their courses into CREATE courses, and monitored workshop impact, teacher ability and student cognitive (process skills) and/or affective (attitude/beliefs) gains in CREATE courses. The project is designed to capture CREATE 'effective practices' and innovations developed by workshop-trained faculty, and to improve and test CREATE approaches for community college settings. It will enable the investigators to streamline and enhance their efforts to gather evidence on both faculty use of the technique and student learning outcomes and to help faculty develop techniques specifically appropriate for introductory biology courses and use at community colleges, as well as to assess CREATE impact on additional community college cohorts.The project builds on a pilot study in which the authors closely followed a set of workshop attendees (CBE Life Science Education, (2014) 13:224-242). The PIs will in year 1 of the two-year project hold focus groups with experienced CREATE faculty in preparation for a weekend conference bringing together a subset of these, to capture their innovations to the CREATE strategy and jointly develop ways to more effectively integrate CREATE in both four-year and community college settings. Also in year 1, community college CREATE faculty will work with the PIs and a Community College Project Consultant to develop a full CREATE curriculum applicable to first-year Biology at community colleges. In year 2, the PIs will extend testing of CREATE, including the novel curriculum, to four additional community colleges. In addition to examining student learning outcomes, this research will capture new insights into the factors that either promote or inhibit the transformation of faculty teaching practices. Taken as a whole, this two-year research project will produce significant CREATE curricular resources and publications that will facilitate changing science pedagogy via the CREATE strategy and study both student outcomes and factors that promote or inhibit faculty pedagogical change. This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.