Research Initiation Award: Investigating Instructional Conditions for Robust Learning in Biology

历史上的黑人学院和大学本科课程（HBCU-UP）通过研究启动奖为历史上的黑人学院和大学的初级和中级职业教师提供支持，他们正在建立新的研究项目或重新定向和重建现有的研究项目。预计该奖项将有助于进一步提高教师的研究能力和效率，并改善家庭机构的研究和教学。该奖项旨在评估教学干预对学生成功的影响，利用STEM教育中的教育软件，特别是在生物科学方面。该项目旨在通过在智能在线导师中整合主动学习和计算思维，使用通常应用于系统生物学和基因组学等领域的“途径代数”方法，使本科生生物学课程现代化。重点将是开发和完善教育软件，以教授这种描述生物途径和解决问题技能的正式逻辑语言。该项目旨在提高学生整合推理技能和概念知识的能力，通过学习指定新内容的摘要并使用这种语言描述自己的理论，促进深入学习和转移到新主题。这一创新的影响将通过经验评估，最终的软件将被广泛传播，影响其他机构的生物学教育，并作为STEM领域（包括经济学和社会科学）最佳实践的典范。该奖项反映了NSF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。

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) through Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness and improve research and teaching at the home institution. This award to Bethune-Cookman University aims to evaluate the impact of pedagogical interventions on student success utilizing educational software in STEM Education, specifically in the biological sciences. This project aims to modernize the undergraduate biology curriculum by integrating active learning and computational thinking in an intelligent online tutor, using a “pathway algebra” approach commonly applied to fields like systems biology and genomics. The focus will be on developing and refining educational software to teach this formal logical language for describing biological pathways and problem-solving skills. The project aims to improve students' ability to integrate reasoning skills and conceptual knowledge, promoting deeper learning and transfer to new topics by learning to specify summaries of new content and describe their own theories using this language. The impact of this innovation will be empirically evaluated, and the resulting software will be widely disseminated, impacting biology education at other institutions, and serving as a model for best practices in STEM fields, including economics and social sciences.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.