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Inaccurate sex and gender narratives have saturated the political landscape, resulting in legal restrictions for people with queer genders. Biology educators can correct these false narratives by teaching scientifically accurate and queer gender and intersex inclusive sex and gender curriculum. Here, we interviewed four undergraduate biology instructors who were working to reform their sex and gender curriculum. Using their reformed curriculum to promote conversation in the interviews, we asked participants about their curriculum, their reform process, and the obstacles they faced in implementing their reformed curriculum. We noticed the instructors' journeys to reforming involved intense personal work and education, both at the beginning and iteratively throughout implementation. We found instructors focused on changing language and using a variety of inclusive activities in their undergraduate biology classroom, ranging from highlighting scientists with queer genders to assigning students to research the experiences of people with queer genders with adolescent hormone therapy. Instructors mentioned obstacles to implementing reformed curriculum, including fear of potentially isolating students and concern about the instructor's own positionality. Removing obstacles and supporting the process of unlearning exclusive ways of teaching sex and gender topics may bolster instructor efforts to provide more accurate and inclusive biology education., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life-science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight recent large-scale studies from the K-12 literature that can inform undergraduate teaching. The first characterizes how the sense of belonging can influence whether students offer their ideas during class. The second explores the how instructor-student relationships can be leveraged to improve teaching. The third explores whether rubrics or exemplars are better at helping students develop quality feedback on their own writing.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education that can inform life science education. The first characterizes how instructor beliefs about intelligence are communicated to students in the classroom. The second explores how instructor identity as a researcher may lead to different types of teaching identities. The third presents an alternative way to characterize students' success that is based in Latinx college student values.

Undergraduate research is lauded as a high-impact practice owing to the array of benefits that students can reap from participating. One unexplored construct that may affect student intent to persist in research is research anxiety, defined as the sense of worry or apprehension associated with conducting research. In this study, we surveyed 1272 undergraduate researchers across research-intensive, master's-granting, and primarily undergraduate institutions to assess the relationship among student demographics, research anxiety, and intent to pursue a research career. Using structural equation modeling, we identified that women and students with higher grade point averages (GPAs) were more likely to report higher levels of research anxiety compared with men and students with lower GPAs, respectively. Additionally, research anxiety was significantly and negatively related to student intent to pursue a research-related career. We coded students' open-ended responses about what alleviates and exacerbates their anxiety and found that experiencing failure in the context of research and feeling underprepared increased their research anxiety, while a positive lab environment and mentor-mentee relationships decreased their anxiety. This is the first study to examine undergraduate anxiety in the context of research at scale and to establish a relationship between research anxiety and students' intent to persist in scientific research careers.

Biology is the study of the diversity of life, which includes diversity in sex, gender, and sexual, romantic, and related orientations. However, a small body of literature suggests that undergraduate biology courses focus on only a narrow representation of this diversity (binary sexes, heterosexual orientations, etc.). In this study, we interviewed students with queer genders to understand the messages about sex, gender, and orientation they encountered in biology and the impact of these messages on them. We found five overarching themes in these interviews. Students described two narratives about sex, gender, and orientation in their biology classes that made biology implicitly exclusionary. These narratives harmed students by impacting their sense of belonging, career preparation, and interest in biology content. However, students employed a range of resilience strategies to resist these harms. Finally, students described the currently unrealized potential for biology and biology courses to validate queer identities by representing the diversity in sex and orientation in biology. We provide teaching suggestions derived from student interviews for making biology more queer-inclusive.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education that can inform life science education. The first assesses the impact of a novel study strategy: having students deliberately make mistakes and correct them. The second encourages educators to think more carefully about the impact of different types of interest on student learning. The third reminds us of the impact of personal beliefs in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Biologists produce knowledge that can be applied to both global and personal challenges. Thus, communicating this knowledge to the general public is becoming increasingly important. One way information can move between different communities is through boundary spanners. Boundary spanners are individuals embedded in both communities who can communicate information known by one community to the other. We explore whether undergraduate biology majors can act as boundary spanners connecting their biology departments to laypeople in their personal networks. We conducted 20 interviews with upper-division first-generation college students at a large Hispanic-serving institution. These students were engaging in everyday conversations about science with people in their personal networks. They engaged in behaviors that characterize boundary spanners: translating scientific language into more common language and knowledge building, that is, providing background concepts that community members need to understand a topic. Finally, students were sometimes perceived as credible resources and sometimes were not. We explore some of the causes of this variation. The boundary spanning of undergraduates could help address one of the major challenges facing the scientific community: spreading the use of scientific knowledge in personal and policy decision making.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three recent studies from the fields of psychology and higher education that can inform practices in the life sciences. The first is a synthesis paper that builds a unifying framework for the diverse activities that fall under the umbrella term "active learning." This paper emphasizes a novel aspect of the active-learning classroom: student agency. The second paper employs an underutilized framework in biology education research, quantitative critical theory, to explore why faculty-student interactions may not be universally beneficial. The third paper explores how valuing relationships can keep first-generation college students from reaching out for help when they need it. Together, these last two papers help researchers understand the perceived costs and benefits of seeking help from faculty.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three that explore how different types of stress can produce different educational outcomes, how studying by writing questions can improve performance, and how faculty beliefs about intelligence can influence students' interest in and evaluation of a course.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three studies drawing on psychology and learning sciences to understand how to increase student motivation to engage in scientific writing, how drawing can enhance learning, and whether spacing, or distributed practice, matters in actual classes.

Individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and otherwise nonstraight and/or non-cisgender (LGBTQ+) have often not felt welcome or represented in the biology community. Additionally, biology can present unique challenges for LGBTQ+ students because of the relationship between certain biology topics and their LGBTQ+ identities. Currently, there is no centralized set of guidelines to make biology learning environments more inclusive for LGBTQ+ individuals. Rooted in prior literature and the collective expertise of the authors who identify as members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community, we present a set of actionable recommendations to help biologists, biology educators, and biology education researchers be more inclusive of individuals with LGBTQ+ identities. These recommendations are intended to increase awareness of LGBTQ+ identities and spark conversations about transforming biology learning spaces and the broader academic biology community to become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one exploring classroom talk and how it impacts conceptual learning; one identifying a unique influence on evolution acceptance: statistical understanding; and the last a genetics lesson that reduces racial bias.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one exploring what researchers actually mean when they talk about relevance; one describing the relationships between instructor mindset about intelligence and performance gaps in the classroom; and the last describing a novel short intervention to reduce student's perceptions of costs.

Our first two experiments on adapting a high-structure course model to an essentially open-enrollment university produced negative or null results. Our third experiment, however, proved more successful: performance improved for all students, and a large achievement gap that impacted underrepresented minority students under traditional lecturing closed. Although the successful design included preclass preparation videos, intensive active learning in class, and weekly practice exams, student self-report data indicated that total study time decreased. Faculty who have the grit to experiment and persevere in making evidence-driven changes to their teaching can reduce the inequalities induced by economic and educational disadvantage., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one addresses the relationships between active learning and teaching evaluations; one presents an observation tool for documenting metacognition in the classroom; and the last explores things teachers can say to encourage students to employ scientific reasoning during class discussions.

Mounting evidence of the efficacy of active learning has prompted educators to consider adoption of these practices in college-level classrooms. One tenet of active learning is that most, if not all, students have the ability to learn. Instructors' perspectives on learning, however, may or may not be aligned with this. One belief held by some educators is that intelligence is fixed, that is, some students are more intelligent and have a higher ability to learn than others. Instructors with a fixed mindset may not be convinced that their investment in developing active-learning materials will be as fruitful as the education evidence suggests, because these instructors may not believe that most students can grow in their learning. Here, we explored the relationship between fixed mindsets and the adoption of active-learning strategies. We found that instructors with higher fixed mindsets were less persuaded that active-learning strategies were a good idea and less likely to implement the teaching practices. Our research suggests that development initiatives should explicitly address educators' lay theories of intelligence ( fixed or growth mindset) to support successful implementation of active learning.

Many current faculty believe that teaching effort and research success are inversely correlated. This trade-off has rarely been empirically tested; yet, it still impedes efforts to increase the use of evidence-based teaching (EBT), and implement effective teaching training programs for graduate students, our future faculty. We tested this tradeoff for graduate students using a national sample of life science PhD students. We characterize how increased training in EBT impacts PhD students' confidence in their preparation for a research career, in communicating their research, and their publication number. PhD students who invested time into EBT did not suffer in confidence in research preparedness, scientific research communication, or in publication number. Instead, overall, the data trend towards a slight synergy between investing in EBT and research preparation. Thus, the tension between developing research and teaching skills may not be salient for today's graduate students. This work is proof of concept that institutions can incorporate training in EBT into graduate programs without reducing students' preparedness for a research career. Although some institutions already have graduate teaching programs, increasing these programs at scale, and including training in EBT methods could create a new avenue for accelerating the spread of evidence-based teaching and improved teaching across higher education., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Achievement gaps between underrepresented minority (URM) students and their white peers in college science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms are persistent across many white-majority institutions of higher education. Attempts to reduce this phenomenon of underperformance through increasing classroom structure via active learning have been partially successful. In this study, we address the hypothesis that the achievement gap between white and URM students in an undergraduate biology course has a psychological and emotional component arising from stereotype threat. Specifically, we introduced a values affirmation exercise that counters stereotype threat by reinforcing a student's feelings of integrity and self-worth in three iterations of an intensive active-learning college biology course. On average, this exercise reduced the achievement gap between URM and white students who entered the course with the same incoming grade point average. This result suggests that achievement gaps resulting from the underperformance of URM students could be mitigated by providing students with a learning environment that removes psychological and emotional impediments of performance through short psychosocial interventions., (© 2017 H. Jordt et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

Active learning in college classes and participation in the workforce frequently hinge on small group work. However, group dynamics vary, ranging from equitable collaboration to dysfunctional groups dominated by one individual. To explore how group dynamics impact student learning, we asked students in a large-enrollment university biology class to self-report their experience during in-class group work. Specifically, we asked students whether there was a friend in their group, whether they were comfortable in their group, and whether someone dominated their group. Surveys were administered after students participated in two different types of intentionally constructed group activities: 1) a loosely-structured activity wherein students worked together for an entire class period (termed the 'single-group' activity), or 2) a highly-structured 'jigsaw' activity wherein students first independently mastered different subtopics, then formed new groups to peer-teach their respective subtopics. We measured content mastery by the change in score on identical pre-/post-tests. We then investigated whether activity type or student demographics predicted the likelihood of reporting working with a dominator, being comfortable in their group, or working with a friend. We found that students who more strongly agreed that they worked with a dominator were 17.8% less likely to answer an additional question correct on the 8-question post-test. Similarly, when students were comfortable in their group, content mastery increased by 27.5%. Working with a friend was the single biggest predictor of student comfort, although working with a friend did not impact performance. Finally, we found that students were 67% less likely to agree that someone dominated their group during the jigsaw activities than during the single group activities. We conclude that group activities that rely on positive interdependence, and include turn-taking and have explicit prompts for students to explain their reasoning, such as our jigsaw, can help reduce the negative impact of inequitable groups.

The primary measure used to determine relative effectiveness of in-class activities has been student performance on pre/posttests. However, in today's active-learning classrooms, learning is a social activity, requiring students to interact and learn from their peers. To develop effective active-learning exercises that engage students, it is important to gain a more holistic view of the student experience in an active-learning classroom. We have taken a mixed-methods approach to iteratively develop and validate a 16-item survey to measure multiple facets of the student experience during active-learning exercises. The instrument, which we call A ssessing S tudent P erspective of E ngagement in C lass T ool (ASPECT), was administered to a large introductory biology class, and student responses were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. The 16 items loaded onto three factors that cumulatively explained 52% of the variation in student response: 1) value of activity, 2) personal effort, and 3) instructor contribution. ASPECT provides a rapid, easily administered means to measure student perception of engagement in an active-learning classroom. Gaining a better understanding of students' level of engagement will help inform instructor best practices and provide an additional measure for comprehensively assessing the impact of different active-learning strategies., (© 2017 B. L. Wiggins, S. L. Eddy, et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

Chemical communication via chemosensory signaling is an essential process for promoting and modifying reproductive behavior in many species. During courtship in plethodontid salamanders, males deliver a mixture of non-volatile proteinaceous pheromones that activate chemosensory neurons in the vomeronasal epithelium (VNE) and increase female receptivity. One component of this mixture, Plethodontid Modulating Factor (PMF), is a hypervariable pheromone expressed as more than 30 unique isoforms that differ between individual males-likely driven by co-evolution with female receptors to promote gene duplication and positive selection of the PMF gene complex. Courtship trials with females receiving different PMF isoform mixtures had variable effects on female mating receptivity, with only the most complex mixtures increasing receptivity, such that we believe that sufficient isoform diversity allows males to improve their reproductive success with any female in the mating population. The aim of this study was to test the effects of isoform variability on VNE neuron activation using the agmatine uptake assay. All isoform mixtures activated a similar number of neurons (>200% over background) except for a single purified PMF isoform (+17%). These data further support the hypothesis that PMF isoforms act synergistically in order to regulate female receptivity, and different putative mechanisms are discussed.

Recent reform efforts in undergraduate biology have recommended transforming course exams to test at more cognitively challenging levels, which may mean including more cognitively challenging and more constructed-response questions on assessments. However, changing the characteristics of exams could result in bias against historically underserved groups. In this study, we examined whether and to what extent the characteristics of instructor-generated tests impact the exam performance of male and female and middle/high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) students enrolled in introductory biology courses. We collected exam scores for 4810 students from 87 unique exams taken across 3 yr of the introductory biology series at a large research university. We determined the median Bloom's level and the percentage of constructed-response questions for each exam. Despite controlling for prior academic ability in our models, we found that males and middle/high-SES students were disproportionately favored as the Bloom's level of exams increased. Additionally, middle/high-SES students were favored as the proportion of constructed-response questions on exams increased. Given that we controlled for prior academic ability, our findings do not likely reflect differences in academic ability level. We discuss possible explanations for our findings and how they might impact how we assess our students., (© 2016 C. D. Wright, S. L. Eddy, et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2016 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other's mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.

Postdoctoral positions in biology education research (BER) are becoming increasingly common as the field grows. However, many life science graduate students are unaware of these positions or do not understand what these positions entail or the careers with which they align. In this essay, we use a backward-design approach to inform life science graduate students of postdoctoral opportunities in BER. Beginning with the end in mind, we first discuss the types of careers to which BER postdoctoral positions lead. We then discuss the different types of BER postdoctoral positions, drawing on our own experiences and those of faculty mentors. Finally, we discuss activities in which life science graduate students can engage that will help them gauge whether BER aligns with their research interests and develop skills to be competitive for BER postdoctoral positions., (© 2016 M. L. Aikens, L. A. Corwin, et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2016 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

In response to calls for implementing active learning in college-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, classrooms across the country are being transformed from instructor centered to student centered. In these active-learning classrooms, the dynamics among students becomes increasingly important for understanding student experiences. In this study, we focus on the role a student prefers to assume during peer discussions, and how this preferred role may vary given a student's social identities. In addition we explore whether three hypothesized barriers to participation may help explain participation difference in the classroom. These barriers are 1) students are excluded from the discussion by actions of their groupmates; 2) students are anxious about participating in peer discussion; and 3) students do not see value in peer discussions. Our results indicate that self-reported preferred roles in peer discussions can be predicted by student gender, race/ethnicity, and nationality. In addition, we found evidence for all three barriers, although some barriers were more salient for certain students than others. We encourage instructors to consider structuring their in-class activities in ways that promote equity, which may require more purposeful attention to alleviating the current differential student experiences with peer discussions., (© 2015 S. L. Eddy, S. E. Brownell, et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2015 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

There is extensive evidence that active learning works better than a completely passive lecture. Despite this evidence, adoption of these evidence-based teaching practices remains low. In this paper, we offer one tool to help faculty members implement active learning. This tool identifies 21 readily implemented elements that have been shown to increase student outcomes related to achievement, logic development, or other relevant learning goals with college-age students. Thus, this tool both clarifies the research-supported elements of best practices for instructor implementation of active learning in the classroom setting and measures instructors' alignment with these practices. We describe how we reviewed the discipline-based education research literature to identify best practices in active learning for adult learners in the classroom and used these results to develop an observation tool (Practical Observation Rubric To Assess Active Learning, or PORTAAL) that documents the extent to which instructors incorporate these practices into their classrooms. We then use PORTAAL to explore the classroom practices of 25 introductory biology instructors who employ some form of active learning. Overall, PORTAAL documents how well aligned classrooms are with research-supported best practices for active learning and provides specific feedback and guidance to instructors to allow them to identify what they do well and what could be improved., (© 2015 S. L. Eddy et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2015 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

We present an innovative course-based undergraduate research experience curriculum focused on the characterization of single point mutations in p53, a tumor suppressor gene that is mutated in more than 50% of human cancers. This course is required of all introductory biology students, so all biology majors engage in a research project as part of their training. Using a set of open-ended written prompts, we found that the course shifts student conceptions of what it means to think like a scientist from novice to more expert-like. Students at the end of the course identified experimental repetition, data analysis, and collaboration as important elements of thinking like a scientist. Course exams revealed that students showed gains in their ability to analyze and interpret data. These data indicate that this course-embedded research experience has a positive impact on the development of students' conceptions and practice of scientific thinking., (© 2015 S. E. Brownell et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2015 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

Although gender gaps have been a major concern in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines such as physics and engineering, the numerical dominance of female students in biology has supported the assumption that gender disparities do not exist at the undergraduate level in life sciences. Using data from 23 large introductory biology classes for majors, we examine two measures of gender disparity in biology: academic achievement and participation in whole-class discussions. We found that females consistently underperform on exams compared with males with similar overall college grade point averages. In addition, although females on average represent 60% of the students in these courses, their voices make up less than 40% of those heard responding to instructor-posed questions to the class, one of the most common ways of engaging students in large lectures. Based on these data, we propose that, despite numerical dominance of females, gender disparities remain an issue in introductory biology classrooms. For student retention and achievement in biology to be truly merit based, we need to develop strategies to equalize the opportunities for students of different genders to practice the skills they need to excel., (© 2014 S. L. Eddy et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2014 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

At the college level, the effectiveness of active-learning interventions is typically measured at the broadest scales: the achievement or retention of all students in a course. Coarse-grained measures like these cannot inform instructors about an intervention's relative effectiveness for the different student populations in their classrooms or about the proximate factors responsible for the observed changes in student achievement. In this study, we disaggregate student data by racial/ethnic groups and first-generation status to identify whether a particular intervention-increased course structure-works better for particular populations of students. We also explore possible factors that may mediate the observed changes in student achievement. We found that a "moderate-structure" intervention increased course performance for all student populations, but worked disproportionately well for black students-halving the black-white achievement gap-and first-generation students-closing the achievement gap with continuing-generation students. We also found that students consistently reported completing the assigned readings more frequently, spending more time studying for class, and feeling an increased sense of community in the moderate-structure course. These changes imply that increased course structure improves student achievement at least partially through increasing student use of distributed learning and creating a more interdependent classroom community., (© 2014 S. L. Eddy and K. A. Hogan. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2014 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

To test the hypothesis that lecturing maximizes learning and course performance, we metaanalyzed 225 studies that reported data on examination scores or failure rates when comparing student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses under traditional lecturing versus active learning. The effect sizes indicate that on average, student performance on examinations and concept inventories increased by 0.47 SDs under active learning (n = 158 studies), and that the odds ratio for failing was 1.95 under traditional lecturing (n = 67 studies). These results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning. Heterogeneity analyses indicated that both results hold across the STEM disciplines, that active learning increases scores on concept inventories more than on course examinations, and that active learning appears effective across all class sizes--although the greatest effects are in small (n ≤ 50) classes. Trim and fill analyses and fail-safe n calculations suggest that the results are not due to publication bias. The results also appear robust to variation in the methodological rigor of the included studies, based on the quality of controls over student quality and instructor identity. This is the largest and most comprehensive metaanalysis of undergraduate STEM education published to date. The results raise questions about the continued use of traditional lecturing as a control in research studies, and support active learning as the preferred, empirically validated teaching practice in regular classrooms.