There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task,…

Columbia University offers two innovative undergraduate science-based bioethics courses for student majoring in biosciences and pre-health studies. The goals of these courses are to introduce future scientists and healthcare professionals to the ethical questions they will confront in their professional lives, thus enabling them to strategically…

Interest in faculty careers decreases as graduate training progresses; however, the process underlying career-interest formation remains poorly defined. To better understand this process and whether/how it differs across social identity (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender), we conducted focus groups with 38 biomedical scientists who received PhDs…

The biology education community focuses a great deal of time and energy on issues of "what" students should be learning in the modern age of biology and then probing the extent to which students are learning these things. There has been increased focus over time on the "how" of teaching, with attention to questioning the…

In this article, the author's attempt to provide an overview of the types of student resistance one might encounter in a classroom, as well as share hypotheses from other disciplines about the potential origins of student resistance. In addition, they offer examples of classroom strategies that have been proposed as potentially useful for…

This feature is designed to point "CBE-Life Sciences Education" readers to current articles of interest in life sciences education, as well as more general and noteworthy publications in education research. URLs are provided for the abstracts or full text of articles. This themed issue focuses on recent studies of concepts and…

Many institutions require candidates for faculty positions to present a teaching demonstration as part of the interview process. To help job candidates prepare for this and to assist departments in planning how to structure this portion of the interview, we surveyed biology faculty from community and liberal arts colleges and master's- and…

In this paper, we examine the impact of implementing three systemic practices on the diversity and institutional culture in biomedical and public health PhD training at Brown University. We hypothesized that these practices, designed as part of the National Institutes of Health-funded Initiative to Maximize Student Development (IMSD) program in…

Research in science education has documented achievement gaps between men and women in math and physics that may reflect, in part, a response to perceived stereotype threat. Research efforts to reduce achievement gaps by mediating the impact of stereotype threat have found success with a short values-affirmation writing exercise. In biology and…

The ability to interpret experimental data is essential to understanding and participating in the process of scientific discovery. Reading primary research articles can be a frustrating experience for undergraduate biology students because they have very little experience interpreting data. To enhance their data interpretation skills, students…

We present an exploratory study of biologists' ideas about higher-order cognition questions. We documented the conversations of biologists who were writing and reviewing a set of higher-order cognition questions. Using a qualitative approach, we identified the themes of these conversations. Biologists in our study used Bloom's Taxonomy to…

The Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment (CREATE) strategy for teaching and learning uses intensive analysis of primary literature to improve students' critical-thinking and content integration abilities, as well as their self-rated science attitudes, understanding, and confidence. CREATE…

Problem-based learning (PBL) was originally introduced in medical education programs as a form of small-group learning, but its use has now spread to large undergraduate classrooms in various other disciplines. Introduction of new teaching techniques, including PBL-based methods, needs to be justified by demonstrating the benefits of such…

The leap from science student to scientist involves recognizing that science is a tentative, evolving body of knowledge that is socially constructed and culturally influenced; this is known as The Nature of Science (NOS). The aim of this study was to document NOS growth in first-year premedical students who participated in a science book club as a…

Undergraduate experiences in lower-division science courses are important factors in student retention in science majors. These courses often include a lecture taught by faculty, supplemented by smaller sections, such as discussions and laboratories, taught by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Given that portions of these courses are taught by…