A Community-Building Framework for Collaborative Research Coordination across the Education and Biology Research Disciplines.

Since 2009, the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Biological Sciences has funded Research Coordination Networks (RCN) aimed at collaborative efforts to improve participation, learning, and assessment in undergraduate biology education (UBE). RCN-UBE projects focus on coordination and communication among scientists and educators who are fostering improved and innovative approaches to biology education. When faculty members collaborate with the overarching goal of advancing undergraduate biology education, there is a need to optimize collaboration between participants in order to deeply integrate the knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. In this essay we propose a novel guiding framework for bringing colleagues together to advance knowledge and its integration across disciplines, the "Five 'C's' of Collaboration: Commitment, Collegiality, Communication, Consensus, and Continuity." This guiding framework for professional network practice is informed by both relevant literature and empirical evidence from community-building experience within the RCN-UBE Advancing Competencies in Experimentation-Biology (ACE-Bio) Network. The framework is presented with practical examples to illustrate how it might be used to enhance collaboration between new and existing participants in the ACE-Bio Network as well as within other interdisciplinary networks.

Learner-centered teaching in nonmajors introductory biology: the impact of giving students choices.

Learner-centered teaching represents more than creating a course where students are actively engaged. Rather it is articulated by a shift in the balance of power, function of content, role of the instructor, purpose of assessment, and/or responsibility for learning in a course. To make the learning environment in a large-enrollment nonmajors Biology course more learner-centered, students were given the responsibility to: 1) select course topics, 2) determine the types and weights of course assignments used to assess learning, and 3) individually decide, prior to being assigned work, the weight of exams and projects. Combined survey results from two learner-centered sections of the course (n = 137) indicate that a majority of the students found that choosing the topics enhanced their learning of course material. Students also reported that they put more effort into the parts of the course that they had weighted more heavily. In addition, results support that students are reflective of the learner-centered environment, confident in their ability to learn biological topics and more interested in biology than they thought they would be. Finally, course averages from the learner-centered courses were significantly higher than course grades from instructor-centered versions of the course.