The Guided Group Activities To Enhance Ways of Learning in Biology (GATEWAY Learning in Biology) project is testing the efficiency of GATEWAY activities--in-class, pencil-and-paper exercises done by small groups in a large lecture setting--designed to increase student understanding of three particularly important and difficult challenges for students in introductory biology: understanding the processes of evolution; developing the ability to interpret phylogenetic trees; and appreciating the principles of experimental design. These concepts are fundamental but are particularly susceptible to misconceptions and present well-defined teaching problems.
Intellectual Merit The work is one of the first examples of "2nd-generation" research in STEM education, where investigators test alternative active learning exercises instead of comparing active-learning to passive-learning approaches. The alternative small-group approaches being compared in the large lecture setting are guided, in-class activities to be completed by groups of 3-4 students. The GATEWAY exercises are being added to a large-enrollment course at the University of Washington (UW) that has already implemented such innovations as peer Teaching Assistants, weekly practice exams, automated response systems (clickers), and inquiry-based labs, but not extensive small-group work. The guided activities are also being tested in a small lecture class at a 2-year community college to ascertain their effectiveness in classes with a different student population, class size, and institutional setting. Involvement of numerous undergraduates in conducting the research is: (1) providing a conduit for student feedback on the design of the in-class activities; (2) exposing students to STEM education research early in their careers; and (3) providing insight into students' thought processes that lead to misconceptions of key concepts in biology.
Broader Impact The GATEWAY activities developed and tested in this research have the potential to impact the approximately 300,000 students who take introductory biology in the U.S. each year. The use of graduate students as research assistants and undergraduates as research advisors for this study helps broaden the base of young professionals with experience in STEM education research and contributes to the development of a growing and vibrant national STEM education research network.
This project is being co-funded by funds from the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Emerging Frontiers Division.
This project’s goal was to develop and test the effectiveness of in-class activities designed to increase introductory biology student understanding of three challenging concepts: natural selection, experimental design and phylogenetic tree analysis (tree-thinking). During the course of the grant, we were able to develop activities focused on two other topics that are traditionally difficult for beginning biology students: the Hardy-Weinberg principle and the biological consequences of climate change. For each of these five topics, we had two contrasting hypotheses about the best way to design the activities. For example, we hypothesized that students might learn the principles of experimental design better if they had to construct their own experiment versus analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of an existing experiment. To test these hypotheses experimentally, we designed different activities, assigned them at random to different groups in the same class to complete at the same time, and tested student understanding of the topic in an online quiz assigned just before and just after doing the in-class exercise. These experiments represent some of the largest randomized trials ever conducted in biology education. Their intellectual merit rests in data we’ve generated indicating that in several cases, activities based on one hypothesis led to significantly higher learning gains than the contrasting hypothesis. For example, we found that: Students who had to build a phylogenetic tree from scratch performed better than students who’d been challenged to analyze an existing phylogenetic tree; Students have a much better understanding of how natural selection works after they’ve learned how mutations occur in DNA; There is a strong gender effect in learning about climate change—women understand the biological consequences of climate change much better if they complete an activity based on local examples as opposed to more extreme examples from other geographic regions; Students who designed an experiment and students who analyzed an existing experiment did equally well on the assessment questions we asked, and both groups performed at a level that was indistinguishable from 1st-year graduate students in a PhD program. However, only the students who designed an experiment did better than students who received a traditional lecture on the topic, Interestingly, we also found that students who sit next to each other in class to collaborate on the activities tended to be similar in terms of gender, ethnicity, and academic achievement. Finally, we have been able to introduce better statistical tools for analyzing these types of pre/post testing data, for assessing learning gains after a specific lesson. The project’s broader impacts lie in its support for "scientific teaching"—the effort to transform the way college science courses are taught by making decisions about how we teach based on evidence. Using the in-class activities developed here and other techniques, we’ve shown that more students are succeeding in our introductory biology courses than ever before. We are in the process of publishing papers describing the five evidence-based activities that could potentially be used by the 300,000 students who take introductory major’s biology in the U.S. each year. In addition, the undergraduate and graduate students who assisted on the project have been introduced to research in science education, and are continuing to pursue careers with teaching as a major focus.
