Introductory biology courses are widely criticized for overemphasizing details and rote memorization of facts. Data to support such claims, however, are surprisingly scarce. We sought to determine whether this claim was evidence-based. To do so we quantified the cognitive level of learning targeted by faculty in introductory-level biology courses. We used Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to assign cognitive learning levels to course goals as articulated on syllabi and individual items on high-stakes assessments (i.e., exams and quizzes). Our investigation revealed the following: 1) assessment items overwhelmingly targeted lower cognitive levels, 2) the cognitive level of articulated course goals was not predictive of the cognitive level of assessment items, and 3) there was no influence of course size or institution type on the cognitive levels of assessments. These results support the claim that introductory biology courses emphasize facts more than higher-order thinking.

Biology of the twenty-first century is an increasingly quantitative science. Undergraduate biology education therefore needs to provide opportunities for students to develop fluency in the tools and language of quantitative disciplines. Quantitative literacy (QL) is important for future scientists as well as for citizens, who need to interpret numeric information and data-based claims regarding nearly every aspect of daily life. To address the need for QL in biology education, we incorporated quantitative concepts throughout a semester-long introductory biology course at a large research university. Early in the course, we assessed the quantitative skills that students bring to the introductory biology classroom and found that students had difficulties in performing simple calculations, representing data graphically, and articulating data-driven arguments. In response to students' learning needs, we infused the course with quantitative concepts aligned with the existing course content and learning objectives. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by significant improvement in the quality of students' graphical representations of biological data. Infusing QL in introductory biology presents challenges. Our study, however, supports the conclusion that it is feasible in the context of an existing course, consistent with the goals of college biology education, and promotes students' development of important quantitative skills.

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) may receive professional development (PD) to enhance their teaching of undergraduates. However, data about the effectiveness of these PD programs are almost entirely self-reported. Using an evaluation framework, we found that TA multidimensional data were more informative for evaluating the efficacy of TA PD.

This quasi-experimental study identifies specific features of the SCALE-UP classroom space most helpful for teaching and learning and directly tests the impact of classroom technology on student learning, attitudes, and satisfaction.

Systems, as a core and crosscutting concept in science, can serve as a unifying paradigm for biology that helps frame how biology is taught. This article presents the biology systems-thinking (BST) framework, which describes the requisite skills for thinking about biological systems.

Despite its value in higher education, academic rigor is a challenging construct to define for instructor and students alike. How do students perceive academic rigor in their biology course work? Using qualitative surveys, we asked students to identify “easy” or “hard” courses and define which aspects of these learning experiences contributed to their perceptions of academic rigor. The 100-level students defined hard courses primarily in affective terms, responding to stressors such as fast pacing, high workload, unclear relevance to their life or careers, and low faculty support. In contrast, 300-level students identified cognitive complexity as a contributor to course rigor, but course design elements—alignment between instruction and assessments, faculty support, active pedagogy—contributed to the ease of the learning process. Overwhelmingly, all students identified high faculty support, learner-centered course design, adequate prior knowledge, and active, well-scaffolded pedagogy as significant contributors to a course feeling easy. Active-learning courses in this study were identified as both easy and hard for the very reasons they are effective: they simultaneously challenge and support student learning. Implications for the design and instruction of rigorous active-learning college biology experiences are discussed.

No abstract

932ESSAY M ichigan State University rightfully claims one of the most beautiful campuses in the Midwest. Each spring, we anticipate a commencement gilded with tulips and crabapple blossoms. In autumn, the campus beams with golden oaks and fi ery maples. As a potential subject for inquiry learning, phenology, the study of recurrent natural events, is appealing for many reasons.Phenologic studies have relatively few logistical constraints compared with many topics in biology. Virtually every habitat imaginable undergoes cyclical or seasonal changes that can be observed through local plants, animals, or other organisms. Documenting phenological patterns can be a straightforward and cost-effective strategy for engaging students in the science of observation with little need for additional equipment or supplies.The subject of phenology is both timely and scientifi cally relevant. Interannual variability in factors such as temperature and precipitation can shift the timing of phenologic events by days to months, with realworld impacts ranging from ecosystem function (e.g., plant-pollinator interactions) to regional economies (e.g., agriculture and tourism). Larger-scale trends over long periods of time serve as important indicators of environmental changes, including climate change (1).Finally, phenology is complex. Seemingly simple processes, such as the changing color of leaves, actually result from myriad interactions occurring across molecular-to ecosystem-level scales. As a complex system, phenology encompasses multiple biological processes that can be explored from diverse disciplinary perspectives across scales of space and time (2, 3) (see the fi rst photo).Our introductory labs are taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs) ranging in both teaching experience and disciplinary expertise. As the real face of the lab, TAs bear immediate responsibility for motivating student learning and bringing new instructional strategies into the classroom. They recognized that the labs we had been teaching, in which students followed protocols to confi rm known outcomes, did not refl ect the biology that motivated each of us to become biologists. We believed that in order to change both the content and culture of our labs, we would need to fully engage TAs as collaborators in the reform process.In summer 2008, we invited TAs to a 2-day "boot camp" to learn about evidence-based teaching practices (2, 3) and to provide input about goals for reforming labs. TAs said that labs should provide students opportunities to experience how science is done-not as a series of methodological steps, but as a way to ask questions, test ideas, and evaluate evidence. In addition, TAs wanted labs to be more authentic and to refl ect the uncertainty of science as it is practiced. Students would pursue questions in which a "right" answer might not be known.To incorporate these goals, TAs worked in small groups to rewrite existing labs, framing them as inquiry investigations with explicit and measurable learning objectives. Five TAs collaborated...