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ABSTRACT In undergraduate life sciences education, open educational resources (OERs) increase accessibility and retention for students, reduce costs, and save instructors time and effort. Despite increasing awareness and utilization of these resources, OERs are not centrally located, and many undergraduate instructors describe challenges in locating relevant materials for use in their classes. To address this challenge, we have designed a resource collection (referred to as Open Resources for Biology Education, ORBE) with 89 unique resources that are primarily relevant to undergraduate life sciences education. To identify the resources in ORBE, we asked undergraduate life sciences instructors to list what OERs they use in their teaching and curated their responses. Here, we summarize the contents of the ORBE and describe how educators can use this resource as a tool to identify suitable materials to use in their classroom context. By highlighting the breadth of unique resources openly available for undergraduate biology education, we intend for the ORBE to increase instructors’ awareness and use of OERs.

Research seminars are a staple within biology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments across academic institutions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, academic institutions across the U.S. had to rapidly transition courses, research programs, and other events from in-person to virtual environments—and departmental research seminars were no exception. We explored the perceptions of biology department seminar speakers and organizers regarding the benefits and challenges they experienced in the virtual format. We asked three primary research questions: (1) What challenges and benefits do invited seminar speakers in biology departments perceive regarding presenting seminars in the virtual environment? (2) What challenges and benefits do organizers of biology department seminars perceive regarding organizing seminars in the virtual environment? (3) How did biology department seminars change during the transition from an in-person to virtual format? In total, 39 seminar organizers and 90 seminar speakers completed surveys focused on their perceptions of virtual seminars. Using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, we found that numerous benefits and challenges are perceived by seminar speakers and organizers regarding virtual seminars. Speakers and organizers perceived similar benefits of virtual seminars including accessibility and diversity, while perceived challenges included the loss of professional networking opportunities and academic community. There was overwhelming consensus from speakers and organizers alike that virtual departmental seminars are professionally and academically valuable. However, while speakers’ chief motivator was in furthering their own networks, research collaborations, and research visibility, organizers primarily valued their own students’ or trainees’ career development as well as their own departmental community. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential benefits of continuing virtual seminars outside of the context of the COVID-19 pandemic from an equity perspective while also highlighting issues that must be addressed by organizers and attendees to ensure seminars retain their value.

Abstract Critical thinking, which can be defined as the evidence‐based ways in which people decide what to trust and what to do, is an important competency included in many undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. To help instructors effectively measure critical thinking, we developed the Biology Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking in Ecology (Eco‐BLIC), a freely available, closed‐response assessment of undergraduate students' critical thinking in ecology. The Eco‐BLIC includes ecology‐based experimental scenarios followed by questions that measure how students decide on what to trust and what to do next. Here, we present the development of the Eco‐BLIC using tests of validity and reliability. Using student responses to questions and think‐aloud interviews, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the Eco‐BLIC at measuring students' critical thinking skills. We find that while students generally think like experts while evaluating what to trust, students' responses are less expert‐like when deciding on what to do next.

Free-choice learning occurs when individuals have autonomy in what and how they learn, and often takes place in informal settings such as zoos. To describe goal-setting and -achievement of biology undergraduates at a regional zoo, we primarily asked: (1) What types of learning goals do students set for themselves for a trip to the zoo?; and (2) What activities do students intend to engage in on a zoo trip? Participating students completed the first portion of a goal-setting assessment prior to entering the zoo, which asked students to develop learning and activity goals for themselves. At the conclusion of the zoo trip, students completed the second portion of this survey, which asked whether students achieved their goals, and if not, why. We found that most students devised learning goals related to gaining knowledge and identified passive interactions with animals as activities they hoped to engage in during their trip.

ABSTRACT There has always been a need for engaging assessments in online learning environments, though the COVID-19 pandemic further emphasized this need. Instructors across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines have begun to implement escape room activities as effective and engaging learning tools in their classrooms. For our virtual introductory ecology course in spring 2021, we developed a student-designed escape room assessment which aligned with several course goals and covered a broad range of ecology concepts. The learning objectives of this assignment asked students to (i) create a themed “room” filled with ecology-based riddles and puzzles that represented a novel virtual escape room for their peers based on an important ecological topic, (ii) summarize and synthesize primary literature into clues and locks to educate their peers about an ecological topic, and (iii) use critical thinking and discussion of ecological topics with peers to solve their peers’ escape rooms. We found that while students generated distinct escape room activities and focused on various ecological topics, student scores on this assessment, as well as student feedback, indicated that the escape rooms were conducive to learning, novel, and accessible in the virtual learning environment. We suggest that student-designed escape room assessments are an effective way for students to learn course material in a fun, engaging, and creative manner, and our spring 2021 implementation suggests that this activity may be an effective assessment for online settings.

ABSTRACT In discipline-based education research (DBER), early career scholars, such as graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, observe a slew of possible career pathways. Yet, there is a lack of opportunities to learn about such pathways, particularly when transitioning from traditional science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) disciplinary training into a DBER position. Thus, the DBER Scholars-in-Training Professional Development subcommittee was created within the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) community to develop a collection of workshops that would serve the greatest professional development needs of early career scholars entering DBER. Through a series of surveys disseminated over multiple years, early career scholars expressed interest in better navigating their career options, which led to the development of the career panel workshop, held during the 2019 and 2020 SABER Annual National Conferences. In this report, we explore the development, implementation, and results of two career panel workshops and compare and contrast the 2019 in-person workshop with the 2020 virtual workshop. We also offer our insights on the value of the career workshop, discuss the next steps, and explore valuable resources for those planning on organizing similar events.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are widely used instructional materials that are freely available and promote equitable access. OER research at the undergraduate level largely focuses on measuring student experiences with using the low cost resources, and instructor awareness of resources and perceived barriers to use. Little is known about how instructors work with materials based on their unique teaching context. To explore how instructors engage with OER, we surveyed users of CourseSource, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes lessons primarily for undergraduate biology courses. We asked questions aligned with the OER life cycle, which is a framework that includes the phases: Search, Evaluation, Adaptation, Use, and Share. The results show that OER users come from a variety of institution types and positions, generally have positions that focus more on teaching than research, and use scientific teaching practices. To determine how instructors engage throughout the OER life cycle, we examined the frequency of survey responses. Notable trends include that instructors search and evaluate OER based on alignment to course needs, quality of the materials, and ease of implementation. In addition, instructors frequently modify the published materials for their classroom context and use them in a variety of course environments. The results of this work can help developers design current and future OER repositories to better coincide with undergraduate instructor needs and aid content producers in creating materials that encourage implementation by their colleagues.

Abstract COVID‐19 presented the world with trauma and isolation, but many people, including educators, have offered bright spots of creativity and engagement. As we confronted these issues in our own ecology classroom, we sought solutions to carry‐forward the learning objectives we set for our students in January 2020, yet encourage interaction with the sensitivity that a pandemic requires. In the rapid transition to online course delivery, we opted to retain the original end‐of‐semester poster project in our introductory ecology course. However, we experimented with a new virtual platform where students could disseminate their work and communicate with the community. In this paper, we discuss the Mozilla Hubs virtual reality platform that we used for our event. We also collected qualitative data to share the benefits and challenges of this experience felt by the students, the instructors, and external observers.

Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students’ science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students’ recognition of their peers, with inconsistent patterns across introductory science and engineering courses. Toward finding the source of this variation, we examine whether a gender bias exists in students’ nominations of strong peers across three different remote, introductory physics courses with varying student populations (varying demographics, majors, and course levels). We also uniquely evaluate possible racial or ethnic biases and probe the relationship between instructional context (whether lecture or laboratory) and recognition. Some of our results replicate previous findings (such as the association of course grade and small class section enrollment with nominations), while others offer contradictions. Comparing across our three courses and the prior work, results suggest that course level (whether first-year students or beyond-first-year students) might be more associated with a gender bias in peer recognition than other variables. Surprisingly, we also find instances of racial or ethnic biases in favor of students from backgrounds historically underrepresented in science. Finally, we find that the nomination patterns differ when students nominate individuals strong in the lecture material versus the laboratory material. This work serves as an important step in determining which courses and contexts exhibit biases in peer recognition, as well as how students’ perceptions of one another form in remote teaching environments.

Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between instructional contexts (lecture and laboratory) and styles (active and traditional). Such studies also find inconsistent results as to whether and how student-level variables (e.g., grades and demographics) relate to the formation of interaction networks. In this cross-sectional research study, we investigate these relationships further by examining lecture and lab interaction networks in four different remote physics courses spanning various instructional styles and student populations. We apply statistical methods from social network analysis—exponential random graph models—to measure the relationship between network formation and multiple variables: students’ discussion and lab section enrollment, final course grades, gender, and race or ethnicity. Similar to previous studies of in-person courses, we find that remote lecture interaction networks contain large clusters connecting many students, while remote lab interaction networks contain smaller clusters of a few students. Our statistical analysis suggests that these distinct network structures arise from a combination of both instruction-level and student-level variables, including the learning goals of each instructional context, whether assignments are completed in groups or individually, and the distribution of gender and major of students enrolled in a course. We further discuss how these and other variables help to understand the formation of interaction networks in both remote and in-person physics courses.

Abstract Climate change is a critical environmental issue and is a recommended core concept in the Ecological Society of America’s 4‐Dimensional Ecology Education framework. Limited work describes K‐12 students’ conceptions of the biotic impacts of climate change, yet research is lacking to explore undergraduate students’ conceptions on this topic. Our goal was to describe undergraduate student conceptions of the biotic outcomes of climate change, and characterize how these student conceptions of animal responses to climate change align with accepted scientific ideas. We used an interpretive qualitative research design and interviewed 13 undergraduate students who were enrolled in either an introductory biology or general ecology course. Through two independent codings of the same dataset, we separately addressed each of our research goals. Prior to this study, we identified three general biotic outcomes from climate change, which were confirmed by outside experts: changes to an animal’s Growth and Survival, their Reproduction, or their Distribution. Our student interviewees as a whole mentioned all three of these outcomes, and most individuals mentioned all three in their responses. Additionally, we found that most student ideas were aligned with Scientific conceptions, while a third of student ideas contained some scientific conceptions but were incomplete. Only a small percent of conceptions voiced in our sample were identified as alternative conceptions that did not align with accepted scientific ideas. These findings are important for educators who teach climate change, as they suggest that undergraduate students come to our classes with productive resources; however, our findings also identify concepts where students may struggle or enter classrooms with a more incomplete understanding.

As physics laboratory courses (labs) transition from traditional, model-verifying activities to discovery-based investigations, it becomes crucial to understand the role of the instructor in the implementation of various lab types. Prior work has started to address this need by examining either coarse-grained frequencies or fine-grained content of instructor interactions in labs. However, neither of these methods offer both a detailed and time-efficient procedure for measuring such interactions, which is required for comparisons across multiple sessions of several types of labs. Here we describe and present the results of a new approach to quantifying student-instructor interactions in labs by analyzing video recordings and drawing on techniques of social network analysis. Across five sections of three lab course offerings, we find that there is a higher total level of interaction between students and instructors in reformed discovery-based labs than in traditional labs. We find no clear pattern in the durations of student-initiated and instructor-initiated interactions across various instructors and lab types. The results suggest that the amount of interaction between instructors and students during lab is more a product of the instructional design than an individual instructor’s implementation of that design. This work is a preliminary step toward understanding the extent to which student-instructor interactions support the improved outcomes observed in discovery-based labs compared with traditional labs.

Understanding social interactions among students comprises a rich area of physics education research. Here we focus on the social interactions in introductory physics laboratories (labs). Most existing research in such contexts focuses on within-group social dynamics, however, we argue that interactions between different lab groups are just as valuable, especially in nontraditional (reformed) labs where students have more control over the experimental designs. Using video recordings of lab sessions and social network analysis methods, we examined whether and for how long groups interact with each other, comparing across three offerings of an introductory mechanics course. We observed significant variability in the interactions across lab sessions and no clear pattern in how strongly lab groups were connected in the networks between the different courses. More prolonged intergroup interactions, however, occurred in three of the four reformed lab sections, as compared to a traditional lab section and a reformed lab section that took place in the evening. We also developed a group-level social role classification scheme based on groups’ interaction patterns, identifying four roles: noninteractors, information seekers, responders, and mutual interactors. We found that groups in the traditional lab section disproportionately acted as noninteractors, indicating that many groups in this lab did not engage in intergroup interactions at all. In contrast, groups in reformed lab sections took on the remaining three roles more frequently. We also found possible relationships between the distributions of the social roles within each type of lab by the groups’ gender compositions. All-male groups took on interactive roles more often than all-female and mixed-gender groups in the reformed lab sections, but not in the traditional lab. Results indicate that the amount of time students spend on intergroup interactions may depend on the lab curriculum itself, the time of day of the section, and/or the student population of the section. Still, instructors can encourage collaboration between lab groups through direct prompts, but such prompts need to be repeated throughout the semester.

Previous work has identified that recognition from others is an important predictor of students' participation, persistence, and career intentions in physics. However, research has also found a gender bias in peer recognition in which student nominations of strong peers in their physics course disproportionately favor men over women. In this study, we draw on methods from social network analysis and find a consistent gender bias in which men disproportionately undernominate women as strong in their physics course in two offerings of both a lecture course (for science and engineering, but not physics, majors) and a distinct lab course (for science, engineering, and physics majors). We also find in one offering of the lecture course that women disproportionately undernominate men, contrary to what previous research would predict. We expand on prior work by also probing two data sources related to who and what gets recognized in peer recognition: students' interactions with their peers (who gets recognized) and students' written explanations of their nominations of strong peers (what gets recognized). Results suggest that the nature of the observed gender bias in peer recognition varies between the instructional contexts of lecture and lab. In the lecture course, the gender bias is related to who gets recognized: both men and women disproportionately overnominate their interaction ties to students of their same gender as strong in the course. In the lab course, the gender bias is also related to what gets recognized: men nominate men more than women because of skills related to interactions, such as being helpful. These findings illuminate the different ways in which students form perceptions of their peers and add nuance to our understanding of the nature of gender bias in peer recognition.

Learner-centered classrooms encourage critical thinking and communication among students and between students and their instructor, and engage students as active learners rather than passive participants. However, students, faculty, and experts often have distinct definitions of learner-centeredness, and the paucity of research comparing perspectives of these different groups must be resolved. In the current study, our central research question was how do student, faculty, and expert observer perceptions of learner-centeredness within biology classrooms compare to one another? We sampled 1114 students from fifteen sections of a general biology course for non-majors, and complete responses from 490 students were analyzed. Five valid and reliable tools (two faculty; two student; and one expert observer) evaluated the learner-centeredness of each participating section. Perceptions of learner-centered instructors often aligned with those of expert observers, while student perceptions tended not to align with either group. Interestingly, students perceived learner-centered instructors as less learner-centered if they taught at non-traditional times and/or in large-enrollment sections, despite their focus on student learning. Perceptions of learner-centeredness in the biology classroom are complex and may be best captured with more than one instrument. Our findings encourage instructors to be cognizant that the approaches they employ in the classroom may not be interpreted as learner-centered, in the same manner, by students and external observers, particularly when additional course factors such as enrollment and scheduling may encourage negative perceptions of learner-centered practices.

Critical thinking is the process by which people make decisions about what to trust and what to do. Many undergraduate courses, such as those in biology and physics, include critical thinking as an important learning goal. Assessing critical thinking, however, is non-trivial, with mixed recommendations for how to assess critical thinking as part of instruction. Here we evaluate the efficacy of assessment questions to probe students' critical thinking skills in the context of biology and physics. We use two research-based standardized critical thinking instruments known as the Biology Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking in Ecology (Eco-BLIC) and Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking (PLIC). These instruments provide experimental scenarios and pose questions asking students to evaluate what to trust and what to do regarding the quality of experimental designs and data. Using more than 3000 student responses from over 20 institutions, we sought to understand what features of the assessment questions elicit student critical thinking. Specifically, we investigated (a) how students critically evaluate aspects of research studies in biology and physics when they are individually evaluating one study at a time versus comparing and contrasting two and (b) whether individual evaluation questions are needed to encourage students to engage in critical thinking when comparing and contrasting. We found that students are more critical when making comparisons between two studies than when evaluating each study individually. Also, compare-and-contrast questions are sufficient for eliciting critical thinking, with students providing similar answers regardless of if the individual evaluation questions are included. This research offers new insight on the types of assessment questions that elicit critical thinking at the introductory undergraduate level; specifically, we recommend instructors incorporate more compare-and-contrast questions related to experimental design in their courses and assessments.