The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak mandated a rapid transition to online classes with little warning. Previous literature studying the effect of this sudden shift demonstrated enormous impacts on instructors and students. However, the details concerning science instructor assessment choices during this time are less clear. We asked biology instructors to reflect on the changes they made to their assessments of student learning during the emergency transition to remote instruction in spring of 2020 and whether the potential changes were motivated by equity concerns. We also asked that instructors describe the assessment changes they intended to keep in future semesters. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we found that instructors removed forms of assessment more often than they added them, and the most common changes included how instructors administered exams and engaged students through participation. Instructors reported that equity concerns motivated their decision-making, particularly their concern over students’ ability to access learning resources. Instructors indicated they would keep many of the changes they made in response to COVID-19. Our research shows the pandemic dramatically altered how instructors assessed students in biology, but equity-based decisions leading to lasting change may be one positive outcome for future students.

The Learning Assistant (LA) Program is a near-peer teaching model with three key components: 1) reevaluation of curriculum and lesson design to incorporate undergraduate LAs as a central part of the course, 2) a seminar attended by first-time LAs where they learn about education theory, and 3) weekly meetings where LAs and course instructors reflect on previous weeks and prepare for upcoming lessons. Thus, faculty instructors collaborate with undergraduate students who have introductory pedagogical knowledge to improve curricula. In this study, we surveyed faculty to understand how they characterize their conversations with their LA teaching partners and perceive the impact of LAs on their approach to teaching. We found that faculty discuss course content and pedagogy with their LAs and believe that LAs provide new viewpoints that inform their own teaching. Additionally, faculty believe working with LAs led to spending more class time on student-centered active learning activities. This provides new perspectives on the mutually beneficial nature of the LA-faculty relationship, including evidence that working with LAs confers professional development for faculty. Furthermore, we present a potential mechanism by which the LA model improves student outcomes by stimulating a shift toward evidence-based teaching methods.

Student self-assessment surveys were utilized to look at student study habits in several areas. Both self-reported study time and study methods were explored. Surveys were given to students after receiving their graded exams. When compared to the federal definition for a credit hour (two hours outside of class for each hour spent in class), it was found that most students study less than the minimum recommended study time. Little difference in reported study hours was seen between high performing students and low performing students (who reported the highest amount of study time). When broken into methods of study, higher performing students reported higher percentages of time in active study methods (e.g., attempting practice problems) while lower performing students spent more time in more passive study methods (e.g. reviewing lecture notes). Additionally, students were asked to analyze why they lost points on examinations in a number of different categories. Lower performing students were able to recognize the reasons for their performance (attributing much of their performance to reasons such as not understanding terms, or not understanding concepts) but were not able to use it to increase future performance.

Pedagogical approaches for supporting students’ argumentative writing in science laboratories have not been fully established. This paper examines the development of argumentative abilities in undergraduate students enrolled in chemistry laboratory courses that employed two teaching sequences: (1) an argumentative writing workshop for conceptual learning and (2) weekly laboratory report writing for application of knowledge gained in the workshop. The four workshop modules guided students through the process of identifying three key components of arguments (evidence, justifications and claims), selecting appropriate and inappropriate justifications, constructing justifications and conclusions, and analyzing experimental errors. Student performance in formulating scientific arguments was evaluated through instructors’ assessment of evidence used in Results, justifications provided in Discussion and claims made in Conclusions of a laboratory report. Student performance improved from 60.9±3.4 to 91.5±8.0 in Introductory Chemistry I Lab and 60.7±5.2 to 91.7±5.4 in Introductory Chemistry II Lab. Students rated the helpfulness of the writing workshop [(3.6±0.1)/5.0], weekly writing [(4.1±0.3)/5.0] and instructors’ feedback [(4.4 ± 0.5)/5.0] for both introductory and advanced chemistry laboratories positively. The format of this writing workshop can be used for online teaching or incorporated into any science laboratory course with the development of appropriate content modules.

High structure courses ask students to be active participants in the learning process with pre-class content acquisition and assessment, in-class active learning exercises, and after-class review assignments. While faculty may suggest certain strategies for success in high structure courses, it is unknown what students find valuable and what kinds of advice they would give future students. The goal of the study was therefore to analyze student advice for success from various college high structure biology and engineering courses. Students in eight different courses from two different universities all taught by the same instructor gave advice to future students on the last day of class. Over 2000 pieces of advice were coded using an iterative qualitative methodology and four major categories and 15 total sub-categories were identified. Students most frequently gave advice on study tips, followed by course expectations, interactions with their classmates and instructors, and positive thinking and this advice pattern was similar for all courses in this study. Due to the similarity of the advice, this suggests that students are giving advice on the course structure itself and thus the advice is generalizable to many college science and engineering courses.

Faculty at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS University) recognized the potential benefits for collaborative teaching and learning across disciplines. Research and development of an “Interprofessional Case Learning Project” (ICLP) lay the foundation for creation and implementation of a Project-Based Learning course. This course, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives of an Infectious Disease – Malaria,” introduced innovative interdisciplinary pedagogy into the curriculum of the School of Arts & Sciences. Designed by biologists, chemists, historians and publish health faculty, this course introduced senior Premed majors to varied methods and theories as they worked in groups to solve problems related to the infection, prevention, and treatment of an infectious disease. Students’ deliverables included journal-quality research papers and posters presented at the School of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference.

As ethical issues involving computer technologies and social media become more common, there is increasing interest in what role ethics should play in Computer Science education. As a result, Computer Science departments worldwide have increased efforts to examine relevant ethical issues in undergraduate Computer Science education to prepare emerging professionals to face relevant issues when they enter the computing workforce. As part of these efforts, a public R-1 Hispanic Serving Institution located on the US-Mexico border piloted a leadership course based on the Relational Leadership Model (Komives et al., 2013). This leadership model provides a broad idea of leadership that focuses on developing and exercising leaders' ethical awareness by engaging in discussions of ethical issues. The pilot course was organized around the implementation of a cooperative pedagogical tool known as structured academic controversy (Johnson et al., 1996). We describe in detail the strategy for implementing this approach, discuss key elements of students' final reflections about their participation in the academic controversy and present the quantitative results examining students' understanding of leadership and satisfaction with the pilot course.

Active learning provides students with meaningful and introspective roles in education. However, it’s difficult to achieve in online class settings, particularly for biology laboratories initially designed to offer direct interactions with live organisms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a transition towards online learning was required in higher education institutions, creating challenges and opportunities to reform and rethink teaching practices. Here, we report our success in designing and implementing an at-home lab for an undergraduate invertebrate biology course. The objective was for students to learn about cnidarian photosymbiosis in a three-week-long experiment using live anemones. Additionally, we tested if learning outcomes are improved when adding a learning-by-teaching experience. We divided the 19 participating students into two groups where half created videos to teach their experiment to a hypothetical high-school audience, and half made video reports for their instructors. We observed that the teaching group showed better topic comprehension than the reporting group. Overall, students responded positively to this online learning experience and expressed an increased understanding of cnidarian photosymbiosis. We provide recommendations for implementing this lab with greater success and at larger scales. We argue that adding teaching scenarios in remote learning can benefit students’ overall knowledge comprehension.

Active learning is the new standard for teaching in higher education. As more faculty seek to expand their teaching practices by including active learning activities that promote higher levels of learning, many are doing so in small doses by temporarily postponing traditional lectures in favor of group activities. While there is evidence demonstrating that active learning practices can facilitate higher performance and information retention, our previous work showed that social personality differences can affect an individual’s performance in group-oriented active learning exercises. The results from this work indicated a possible dose-dependent effect driving the correlations observed between performance and social personality compared to passive lectures. This study builds on our previous work by analyzing if hosting comparatively few active learning classes is leading to a dose-dependent effect on student performance by personality type in the active learning setting. Our findings from this research demonstrate that social personality-based differences in performance on topics taught using active learning diminish with increased exposure to active learning. We also found that students of all personality types perform better on memorization-based questions than on higher-order questions in general, but that their performance on higher-order thinking questions improved after participating in active learning.

A common course activity used by emergency management faculty is the screening of Hollywood disaster films to provide students an opportunity to apply key disaster concepts learned in lecture. When college courses were abruptly moved online in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States, emergency management faculty had to quickly modify this assignment to meet the needs of the online format. This paper reports the experience of several faculty in modifying this pedagogical technique, as well as identifies unintended benefits including the opportunity for professional networking, science communication, and public engagement.