Abstract
The 2011 report, Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action, provided the impetus to mobilize the undergraduate life sciences education community to affect change in order to enhance the educational experiences of life sciences majors. The work of the appointed Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) Vision and Change (V&C) Leadership Fellows has focused on the development of programs and resources to support departmental change. In this report, we present a qualitative assessment of several documents generated from the PULSE V&C Leadership Fellow Recognition Team. The Recognition Team developed two initiatives to provide departments with feedback on their change process. The first initiative, the validated PULSE V&C Rubrics, enables departments to collaboratively self-assess their progress in enacting change. The second initiative, the PULSE Recognition Program, involves completion of the aforementioned Rubrics and a site-visit by two Recognition Team members to provide external insights and suggestions to foster a department’s change process. Eight departments participated in the Recognition Program in 2014. An evaluation of the documents yielded from the Recognition Program review of seven of the eight departments and a comparison of Rubric scores from before and three years following the site-visits uncovered several common elements required for successful department level change. These elements include an institutional culture that values and supports excellence in teaching and learning with resources and infrastructure, a departmental emphasis on program and course level assessment, and, most importantly, a departmental champion who actively supports endeavors that enhance teaching excellence.
Highlights
Multiple change efforts are underway to improve the success of students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)
A department positioned for sustained change would be strong in the three areas we have identified as broad characteristics that support change: support systems, departmental practices that support teaching and learning, and adoption of best practices in education (Tables 1–3)
Our data suggest that it is possible for a department to change even with weaknesses in some of these areas
Summary
Multiple change efforts are underway to improve the success of students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The body of knowledge regarding how people learn is expanding and high impact practices to support enhanced learning have been identified [1,2,3] These practices are often incorporated into individual courses and learning is measured at the course level. In 2009, a series of conversations began about the future of biology education encompassing the changes in the field of biology and the research on cognition, teaching and learning. These conversations involved faculty, students, and professional society representatives, and culminated in a meeting that same year hosted by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The report summarized meeting discussions and included a number of recommendations [5] such as 1) undergraduate biology curricula should foster scientific literacy in the following core concepts: evolution; pathways and transformation of energy and matter; information flow, exchange and storage; structure and function; and systems; 2) core competencies should be addressed in areas including the process of science; the interdisciplinary nature of science and the integration of science into society; communication and collaboration; quantitative reasoning; modeling, simulation, computational and systems level approaches; as well as the ability to use large databases to analyze data. 3) the Vision and Change [4] document recommended that faculty adopt evidence-based practices in education to introduce their students to the core concepts and competencies and to assess their learning in these areas
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
