Biology

The mission of an AAU-UCD partnership is to foster evidence-based, sustainable innovation in STEM instruction through development of cultures of data and evidence around instruction and learning that encourage experimentation, build urgency, and enable change.

The UA AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Project has three primary goals: Redesign courses in five disciplines to include more evidence-based strategies, shift the culture at UA toward greater emphasis on collaborative active-learning pedagogies, and explore and develop Collaborative Learning Spaces (CLS).

The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University began a pilot program to develop the communication skills of graduate Teaching Assistants. The goal was to improve undergraduates’ experience in a gateway course, with the long-term goal of bolstering retention of students in the STEM disciplines.

LabMatch was created to foster meaningful research collaborations between first and second year undergraduate students and graduate students in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Northwestern University Ventures in Biology Education (nuViBe) aims to reshape Northwestern undergraduate bioscience education and prepare students to pursue cutting-edge research, advanced degrees, and professional careers in biological and biomedical sciences.

Michigan State University is instituting reform of the gateway courses in biology, physics, and chemistry with an ultimate goal to design and implementation of a set of coherent gateway courses where students learn how to engage with the core ideas of the discipline in scientifically plausible ways.

The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) at Indiana University Bloomington provides leadership and expertise to enable innovation in curricula, implementation of powerful technologies and pedagogies in and beyond the classroom, and student engagement with learning resources and materials to promote critical analytic and research skills.

Indiana University Bloomington was an early creator of new majors that bring together interdisciplinary faculty using innovative pedagogy for instruction. For example, Human Biology is an intellectually-vibrant inter- and multi-disciplinary major that challenges students to gain a holistic view of humanity.

Cornell University is undertaking campus-wide and discipline-specific initiatives to provide graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with practical experience in planning for, stimulating, and assessing undergraduate learning with lunchtime workshops and targeted events on developing assessment skills.

Cornell University has initiated institution-wide changes to the core undergraduate biology curriculum to transition from traditional lecture based instruction to incorporation of active learning techniques. The first phase of this five-year transition will focus on four large introductory courses.