Next Steps for Vision and Change: Moving from Setting the Vision to Change

On July 15–17, 2009, 544 biology faculty from 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, along with researchers, administrators, students, and other educational stakeholders from around the country, met in Washington, DC, to help create a blueprint for the future of undergraduate biology education (Summers, 2009 ). Hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the meeting set out to mobilize the nation's undergraduate biology educators to ensure that the biology they teach in their classrooms reflects the biology they practice in the lab and field, and that all students—majors and nonmajors alike—gain a better understanding of the nature of science and the natural world (Mervis, 2009 ). The charge for the meeting (Transforming Undergraduate Education in Biology: Mobilizing the Community for Change) noted that the need for change reflects the radical changes in the science itself as well as the knowledge we are gaining about how people learn and the best ways to ensure that learning takes place. The meeting concentrated on how people have effected change, the results when they did so, and how the attendees and their colleagues could most effectively incorporate this knowledge and understanding into their own approaches to undergraduate education in biology. Videos, slides, and other materials from the meeting are posted at the conference website (AAAS, 2009a ). A culminating summary publication is anticipated in spring 2010.

The executive summary provides an overview of some of V&C's key recommendations regarding next steps in the effort to mobilize the biology community. It is, in essence, a call for national service. A publication discussing these recommendations and action items in more depth will be available later this year. Meanwhile, we highly recommend reading the Executive Summary of V&C, the NAS report (NAS, 2010), and a seminal article by Labov et al. (2010) summarizing the synergy created by these several reports on the changing nature of studies in biology and concomitant need to change biology education. Then, take action! Our hope is to see the formation of a community of biologists, similar to that forming in geology (Manduca et al., 2010): one that will advance biology undergraduate education so it truly reflects the discipline it serves.

The Vision and Change effort to explore and implement needed changes in undergraduate biology education has been ongoing since 2006. It is now time to take stock of changes that have occurred at the faculty and single-course levels, and to consider how to accomplish the larger-scale changes needed at departmental and institutional levels. This article is a continuation of our efforts to keep people informed about the next steps for Vision and Change, in particular ongoing activities that need community (your) input, and what resources are available to support the Vision stated in 2009: “the biology we teach should reflect the biology we do” (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011 ).

PULSE Vision & Change Rubrics

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Community is a term currently applied in both science and science education. We often think of in biological terms as a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. But within human context, the term community means those sharing a common intent or belief. These communities share resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other common conditions affecting the identity of the participants. At NABT, these communities are found in secondary, two-year, and four-year colleges and universities, just to name a few. However, it is not just within each but between communities that interaction, intent, and beliefs exist. At the July American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and National Science Foundation (NSF) Conference (Transforming Undergraduate Biology Education: Mobilizing the Community for Change), NABT was highlighted as the organization that develops among life science educators. NSF/AAAS Conference convened more than 500 college and university faculty and more than 100 science societies (http://www.visionandchange.org/). According to Dr. James P. Collins, NSF's Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, the purpose of the meeting was to prepare a generation of scientists to communicate science as a 'precise, predictive, and reliable' way of knowing the world. efforts of NSF and AAAS, along with HHMI and MBS, over the past two years culminated with a challenge to biologists and biology educators to begin to change undergraduate biology education. Alan I. Leshner of AAAS stated, Scientists must find new ways to engage with the public. One cannot just exhort 'we all agree you should agree with us.' It's a much more interactive process that's involved. It's time consuming and can be tedious. But it's very important. He continued, The goal of undergraduate education should be to give students a 'fundamental knowledge of what science is, and what it is not, along with some key concepts.' Leshner, AAAS CEO and Conference Co-Chair, also serves as Executive Editor of the journal, Science. He emphasized that technologies are allowing scientists to ask questions and obtain knowledge at an incredible rate. Estimates of how the knowledge base of biology is increasing overwhelm me. You often hear that the knowledge base in molecular genetics alone is doubling every 12 months. How can we as scientists and science educators, cope with so rapid an increase of knowledge? With each discipline of biology exploring its own area of content and discoveries, the idea of a biology education has become more difficult. However, even as these disciplines have developed separately over the past 50 years, other disciplines have begun to unify them. Over the past ten years, a colleague of mine (a well-known sedge biologist and taxonomist) has had to integrate the newer methods of DNA and protein analysis in his field. Another colleague, a herpetologist, is developing techniques of turtle classification by examining the mitochondrial DNA of turtle toenails. Why have the NSF, AAAS, HHMI, and AIBS put so much emphasis on undergraduate biology education over the past few years? Simply put, Now is the time! Now is the time for our members to become fully engaged, involved in assessment, creating opportunities, capitalizing on institutional change, and bringing teaching in line with how biologists work (Dr. Wanda E. Ward, Acting Assistant Director, Directorate for Education and Human Resources, NSF). One area of change recommended during the Conference was the development of between these varied societies. Specifically, NABT was highlighted as the organization that was important in developing among life-science educators. Now is the time to bring the varied disciplines together to forge a unified and focused effort on undergraduate biology education. NSF Director Arden Bement stated that the status quo in science education is not achieving the results we need. …

Fueling educational reform: Bio2010--biology for the future.

This editorial discusses next steps toward sustaining the journal.

Meeting report: the first National Academies Summer Institute for Undergraduate Education in Biology.

CBE is pleased to launch a new feature called Points of View (POV).POVs address issues faced by many people within the life sciences education realm.We will present two or more opposing POVs back-to-back on a particular topic to promote

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are playing a critical role today in helping America overcome a looming shortage of scientists and engineers who are vital to the nation's future economic growth and competitiveness. Despite meager funding and a lack of public recognition, these educational institutions are producing a large share of the nation's African American graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Biology education research (BER) can be a major contributor to the herculean task of modernizing and transforming biology education. However, as researchers in a relatively young and still small field, BER practitioners now find themselves fragmented across 64 biology-related societies and lacking agreement on a core research agenda, a convenient professional network, and venues of dissemination. To begin addressing these needs, the newly formed Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) held an inaugural meeting in September 2010 at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. The 29 participants (Figure 1) included faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students engaged in empirical research and professional development, as well as journal editors, textbook writers, and a textbook editor. The diversity of this group contributed to a thoughtful, reflective, and productive meeting, whose major goals were to 1) define BER, 2) identify challenges to its practice, 3) formulate overarching research questions, and 4) outline the role of SABER in supporting the BER community. The consensus views of the participants on each of these goals are described in the paragraphs below. Figure 1: SABER Founding Members: Teri Balser, Clarissa Dirks, Mary Pat Wenderoth, Janet Branchaw, Rob Brooker, Peggy Brickman, Malcolm Campbell, Mark Connelly, Erin Dolan, Scott Freeman, Mark Hens, Jenny Knight, Kathryn Miller, Jennifer Momsen, Lisa Montplaisir, ... The outcomes of this meeting are timely in the context of the recently released summary report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education, A Call to Action, which charged the biology community with “creating, using, assessing, and disseminating effective practices in teaching and learning” (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2010 ). By providing the infrastructure needed to create a vibrant network of practitioners, SABER is well positioned to support biology education researchers in generating empirical evidence that can effect meaningful changes in undergraduate biology education.

Symposium “Completing the Data Pipeline: Collections Data Use in Research, Education and Outreach. The conference theme, Collections and Data in an Uncertain World, turns the spotlight on a number of opportunities that can advance the experience of undergraduate biology education. Today, millions of records from Natural History Collections worldwide are available to students and educators through portals such as iDigBio, https://www.idigbio.org/portal/search. These records facilitate explorations for disciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding of a changing and uncertain biodiversity landscape across space and time. Biological and paleontological specimens data can be combined with ecological or geological data to investigate large scale questions related to climate change, invasive species or resource management. This session highlights resources and initiatives of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) for undergraduate students and faculty that focus on emerging developments in core competencies, careers and diversity. For too long, undergraduate biology/ecology education has centered primarily round mastery of disciplinary content often involving rote learning. The Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education conference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2009 identified a set of core competencies that include understanding of the nature of science, communication, collaboration, and quantitative skills. These skills, and the fluency across disciplines such as ecology, environmental science, evolutionary biology and systematics are the hallmarks of the 21st century biologist. www.visionandchange.org ESA has long advocated active learning in the classroom. In 2006, ESA education leaders launched, Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE), an education journal designed to promote inquiry, scientific thinking, collaborative work, formative evaluation, and alternative assessment in the college classroom. Today, the LifeDiscoveryEd Digital Library (LDDL), www.lifediscoveryed.org, built on the metadata architecture of ESA’s EcoEd Digital Library established in 2006, serves three disciplinary society communities including ESA, Botanical Society of America (BSA) and Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), encouraging cross-dissemination of resources. Together, the three societies form the LifeDiscovery partners and co-organize the Life Discovery – Doing Science Biology Education conference (LDC) every 18 months, www.esa.org/ldc. A unique feature of the LDC is the Education Share Fair where participants may present teaching ideas at any stage of development to solicit feedback from their peers. In a response to a need for a more robust approach to advancing data literacy, ESA joined with the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project, to offer a series of Faculty Mentoring Networks (FMN) launched in 2016, https://qubeshub.org, http://esa.org/fed/fmn/. Additionally, ESA is a pioneer in undergraduate diversity mentoring through the Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability (SEEDS) program, www.esa.org/seeds which has a campus chapter network in 100 campuses developed since 1996. In 2016, ESA became involved in the 3dnaturalists project, led by Colorado State University, that seeks to understand how bioblitzes might make a difference in recruiting and retaining underrepresented minorities in ecology and sustainability sciences. In 2017, ESA joined the Core Team of the Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education (BLUE) network project to liaise with relevant scientific and professional societies and to provide input on engaging diverse participants in the project This session will discuss: how ESA’s education initiatives can be leveraged for faculty professional development in the Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education (BLUE) project. the ways that engaging students in biodiversity data in ecology research will open the doors to building key biological science competencies and 21st century careers the potential of using place-based specimen data through bioblitzes to engage minority students in a culturally responsive scientific endeavor. how ESA’s education initiatives can be leveraged for faculty professional development in the Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education (BLUE) project. the ways that engaging students in biodiversity data in ecology research will open the doors to building key biological science competencies and 21st century careers the potential of using place-based specimen data through bioblitzes to engage minority students in a culturally responsive scientific endeavor.

This has been an exciting year in biology education research (BER). A National Research Council (NRC) report was published on discipline-based education research (DBER) that "investigates learning and teaching in a

O n the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a new mantra is taking hold in the halls of our headquarters. A fuller version of AAAS's newly restated mission might read “Advancing Science and Technology for the Benefit of All People.” It describes an expanding leadership role for AAAS on behalf of science and technology and their contributions to society. It derives from the recognition that in contrast to specialty or honorific societies, AAAS is meant to be inclusive. Although specialty societies may understandably choose to focus on advancing individual disciplines, the largest general scientific society in the world must have grander goals. It must serve both the broad multinational science and technology community and the society at large. The new mantra also reflects the understanding that although some individual scientists do their work solely because of its intrinsic interest, our community recognizes its broader responsibilities. Our inclusiveness makes our members not only scientists but scientist citizens: citizens of a broad science and engineering enterprise who can work together to help ensure that advances in science and technology will benefit all people. This is an enhanced focus for AAAS, not a new one. As the new chief executive officer of the association, I've been struck by the breadth and impact of our diverse ongoing programs. However, I've also been struck by how few in the science community know the scope of AAAS's work on their behalf. There is, of course, our flagship journal, Science , and our many online products that serve, for example, young investigators seeking new and alternative careers, or science journalists and policy-makers seeking the latest, hottest findings. There's our exceptional annual meeting—a place where one can sample from a fully stocked cafeteria of the latest issues and findings across all of science and technology. But AAAS also carries out many less visible but important programs. AAAS science and policy programs have become the most authoritative source for analyses of R&D funding trends and implications. They are widely used by practicing scientists, funding agency heads, and congressional policy-makers. The AAAS R&D Colloquium every spring is a major forum for discussions that often help shape the future of science funding. AAAS's Center for Science, Technology and the Congress provides vital information to policy-makers through issue papers and Capitol Hill briefings. AAAS-sponsored fellows are well placed in federal funding and policy-making agencies and offices. A wide array of science education and human resource development programs foster high national standards for elementary and secondary science education and advance the goal that all people be well equipped to enter a world dominated by science and technology. AAAS programs also help ensure increased access to science and engineering for underrepresented groups. As just one example, the association was very proud when last month President Bush presented a special mentoring award to the AAAS Entry Point! program for its success in helping disabled people enter the scientific workforce. AAAS international programs reflect the fact that we are part of a global science and engineering enterprise. They involve such diverse activities as monitoring and reporting on science and human rights issues around the world, fostering collaborations among cross-national scientific communities, and helping build scientific infrastructure in developing countries. Our mission requires that we advance science and technology and their application throughout the world. I see my primary mission as expanding the association's leadership role in and on behalf of science and innovation in a global context. As we hone our array of ongoing programs and frame new ones, meaningful impact will be the prime criterion for inclusion. A sign in my office reads “If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well!” And to expand our leadership we must also expand the visibility of AAAS programs. We need to share the “secret” that AAAS serves both its members and society so well. As we implement our new mantra, we'll be calling on members to help us better serve society; not only in academe but also in schools, public media, and the halls of government. In the coming years, as you reflect on your AAAS membership, I hope you will take ever greater pride in being part not only of the oldest general scientific society in the world but also one of the most valuable.

For the past decade, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with faculty scientists, administrators, and other stakeholders from around the United States, have been guiding a national reform movement in undergraduate biology education (Brewer and Smith 2011). As the discipline undergoes this national reform movement, life science faculty have been challenged to teach biology the way we practice biology; to foster in our students an appreciation for the scientific process that can be even more important and informative than any collection of memorized facts (Brewer and Smith 2011). With this challenge as the guidepost, biology educators and researchers have developed pedagogical methods designed to infuse core concepts and competencies into every course, research experience, and learning opportunity that students encounter during their undergraduate career as a major in the biological sciences. This same approach applies to entomology majors, introductory entomology courses, and other courses that focus on insect biology. These pedagogical methods can be applied across the curriculum in a way that addresses the learning ability (novice first-year learners through expert upper-level learners) of students enrolled in each course, and that challenges their scientific and critical thinking in a way that traditional course presentation methods may not. Tree pedagogical methods that have been widely implemented in response to the …