In 2009 the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held a workshop/meeting that included a representative segment of the nation's biology university and college faculty (500 attendees in all) in a discussion of the need for change in the way we approach biology undergraduate education in light of the vast changes in the discipline itself. That meeting resulted in a 2011 publication, Vision and Change in Biology Undergraduate Education: A Call for Action, that has, so far, been distributed to more than 6000 people and a web page that has had about 5,000 hits. The essential outline and general contents of the publication reflect the discussions at the 2009 meeting and were, in fact, written by a consortium of attendees. That meeting and the subsequent dissemination of its findings benefitted from the support of representatives from the National Institute of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Academy, and the Directorates of Biology and of Education and Human Resources within NSF. The current project is a follow up to the initial effort and fulfills a request by meeting attendees to determine the community's response to the meeting and its publications (both in print and on the web). Representatives of the United States Department of Agriculture have joined the group planning this meeting.
Intellectual Merit: This project involves a large segment of the biology community. It is concerned with discovering how change occurs within biology undergraduate education and covers such topics as: what have faculty, institutions of higher education, and professional societies done in response to the widespread call for change; what were the outcomes of these actions for change; how were these outcomes documented; and has the unit of change included more than just one or two faculty members to involve a department or set of departments in a coordinated effort to change teaching approaches within courses and across the department. This sort of information can provide a useful base for educational researchers interested in describing change efforts in academia, as well as provide information to interested faculty and institutions on how to uccessfully institute new approaches in teaching their discipline.
Broader Impact: The breadth of institutions, fields within biology, and faculty that are included speaks for the broader impact of this project. In addition AAAS serves all STEM disciplines so the publicity given this effort can result in other disciplines trying similar efforts to improve their approaches to undergraduate education. The original effort has already catalyzed an interest from the engineering community. The fact that recent published efforts by both the American Academy of Medical Colleges (as concerns the preparation of pre-medical and medical students) and the Educational Testing Service (as concerns AP Biology) mirror the concerns and suggestions within the original Vision and Change publication heightens community interest in the results of this seminal meeting.
