An award has been made to the University of Florida to coordinate a series of targeted assessment activities that will help evaluate an ambitious, year-long project supported by the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). Last September, the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH, and NSF) appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in the undergraduate life science education community. All Fellows met in October, 2012 and have since organized into four working groups to address different challenges to reforming how biology is taught at all types of undergraduate institutions. The Vision and Change Leadership Fellows are focusing on how life science departments can encourage and reward faculty members? efforts to improve undergraduate life sciences education. Such improvements should increase student learning, should increase retention rates for students in the sciences, and should prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens.
The current award is to fund a multi-step assessment of the PULSE project. The evaluators will attend the second workshop planned for June 3-6, 2013 to better understand the PULSE project and to begin planning for stakeholder interviews. The evaluation team will develop instruments to determine if the PULSE project is achieving its goals, to evaluate several of the resources and tools being developed by the Fellows, and to determine the successes and challenges faced by the Fellows. Evaluation of the PULSE program will help measure the influence and effectiveness of large-scale initiatives on implementation of organizational change at the national level. The resulting assessment reports to be used to initiate conversations about the impacts of the PULSE program with the wider scientific community, to encourage programmatic revisions, and to use the PULSE program as an example of how to inspire, motivate, and assist the life science community in implementing Vision and Change. As appropriate, results from the evaluation will be submitted to members of the Steering Committee, distributed to Fellows, and shared with the life sciences community, primarily via the www.pulsecommunity.org website.
This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to support Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.
