This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project is a collaborative endeavor involving Rochester Institute of Technology and Alfred University. It addresses the need for biological sciences courses to encourage students to think critically, focus on unifying concepts, and practice experimental design, analysis of data, and scientific models. Evidence reveals that the shift to these emphases requires the use of interactive instructional practices that have been shown to increase student learning gains. The modules being created by this project include many instructional practices that have been found to be effective in improving deep understanding of core concepts in biology defined by the Vision and Change initiative (http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/) and the Next Generation Science Standards (www.nextgenscience.org/). The cornerstone of each module will be a new genre of web-based learning tools called Interactive Video Vignettes (IVVs). IVVs incorporate lessons learned from education and cognitive research on how people learn. They promote active learning by engaging learners with real-world problems, providing needed support, feedback, and guidance for the students, and requiring them to reflect on their own learning processes.
The PI team is creating 14 modules that help biology students overcome common conceptual and learning difficulties and enrich student understanding of how scientific knowledge is constructed through observation and experimentation. The design and implementation of the modules are informed by the results of a pilot project carried out by the PI team. In that project, dramatic student learning gains were observed when IVVs were used in an introductory biology and an upper level cell biology course. The PI team is extending their research on the learning outcomes to include the use of all of the newly developed IVVs. The research methods include pre- and post-instruction assessment to examine student learning gains, comparative learning gains of students using the IVVs and students in traditional lecture classes, and direct queries (surveys and interviews) concerning students' attitudes to the biological sciences. Modules tested at RIT and Alfred University will subsequently be studied at a broad range of institutions recruited by the PI team. The knowledge resulting from these research studies is informing the design of STEM courses and the ways in which these effective instructional practices can be effectively integrated into traditional biology curricula nationwide.
