Is it a doctor’s job to get the best outcomes for their patients or to tell the truth? What happens when these two things are not aligned? These are questions that ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý students have to wrangle with in Biol 180: Introductory Biology. The goal, says , UW assistant professor of biology, is to have students experience a more nuanced side of biology. There is not always one right answer, and issues of power and relationships often come into play.

Theobald aims to connect the biology concepts the students learn in class to real-world issues, something she hopes will help both retain students in the biology major at the UW and help non-majors in the class with their future careers.

Just how common is it for biology curricula to include real-world examples? One way to answer this question is to look at educational resources for biology instructors.

In published in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, Theobald and her team examined almost 3,000 science guidelines and assessment questions from 16 sources — including MCAT practice questions and questions from the Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science and AP biology tests — for any connections to society. Of the approximately 200 elements — about 7% — that had real-world implications, many discussed ethics and public health issues.

UW News spoke with Theobald; lead author , UW postdoctoral fellow in biology; and co-author , UW doctoral student in biology, to find out more about these results and what they mean for biology education today.

Why do you think so few learning objectives and assessment questions were connected to real-world examples?

Carly Busch: One reason is probably that there’s a perception that real-world connections are not a part of the primary purpose of the course, that they only belong as an addendum or an aside.

This perception makes sense in some ways, given how departments and institutions have conceptualized biology and what biology undergraduate students expect to get out of a biology degree. But the lack of these connections to society was also remarkable, because I think they play a really important role in developing undergraduate students holistically and broadly as they continue on in their science careers. Real-world examples can support students’ interest in science and help them develop their scientific identity.

Madison Meuler: I think there is also a belief of, “Oh well, this is an intro biology class. If this person is going to be a scientist, they’ll get training in the societal stuff later.” But I think there’s value in having this type of information even in intro courses.

Students in these courses may or may not go on to major in biology, and may or may not pursue a career in STEM. But even if this is their only science course in college, what could they take away from it that can help them be an informed citizen in the world?

Science plays a huge role in politics and in a lot of decisions that affect people’s day-to-day lives. It’s a missed opportunity if you’re not making those connections in the classroom. We want students, regardless of their future careers, to at least walk away being equipped with some skills to critically analyze the role that science is playing in society.

You found that roughly half of the questions that did mention society only vaguely referenced real-world scenarios. Can you give examples of implicit versus explicit mentions?

CB: So the most vague mention was from the American Association of Immunologists’ recommendations for an undergraduate immunology course. This is one of the advanced subtopics that they list: the implications of Emil Von Behring’s . We coded it as a vague mention because some of those implications could be related to society, not only focused on scientific experiments.

An example of explicit incorporation is from the bioinformatics core competencies. It asks students to explain the implications, good and bad, of being able to walk into a doctor’s office and have your genome sequenced and analyzed, or of being able to obtain genetic information from direct-to-consumer testing services. There we have a very clear example of students being asked to think about how the science concept fits in with society.

Do you think that connecting science to society can help retain students in science?

CB: We haven’t tested this yet, but based on prior research, there is reason to believe that incorporating these connections is going to help students be more engaged in what they’re learning in class. Engagement is closely tied to students’ performance outcomes, which often make or break their decision to persist in a major.

There is also a theory that helping students apply what they’re learning in the classroom to things happening in their lives and in their communities .

This is something I am excited to study in the future — to understand how making these connections expands students’ perceptions of what science is and who does science. The types of research questions that most scientists ask are on topics they personally are interested in. Maybe they study wildflowers in Washington because they love hiking, and they’ve always been struck by how beautiful the flowers are. That’s the beauty of being an academic researcher: You get to explore all of the different things that you’re curious about.

MM: Connecting content to real-world experiences could also increase retention by helping students feel a sense of belonging in the classroom. You’re far less likely to persist in a class if you feel like you don’t belong in that physical space, right? The course content definitely plays a role in that.

I think that making these connections between content and societal issues could help students start thinking things like, “Oh, this is a thing I care about, how could I design a study that could provide evidence to help inform a policy decision?”

Elli Theobald: Students have said to me, “I don’t want to be a scientist because I want to help people.” And that’s a problem. If we’re teaching science in a way that makes it feel like it isn’t helping people, then we’re doing something wrong. It’s just such a huge disservice to biology because we’ll lose so many amazing and capable students who could push our field forward.

This study looked at biology education resources. Do you know if biology instructors are already incorporating more real-world connections in their courses? ��

CB: If instructors aren’t getting support but they’re still making these connections in the classroom, it’s because they are putting that onus on themselves and choosing to add it. I applaud all instructors who are making these connections, and I fully expect that more connections are being made than and in these resources. We are currently collecting actual course materials from intro bio courses to see where instructors are making these connections.

But I also think that it would be such a valuable resource for instructors to have more support in making those connections. Here’s where I think really bolstering the amount of resources for instructors could provide more scaffolding for instructors to be able to provide a variety of connections, or to even recognize opportunities to make these connections in the course objectives. One of my hopes for this work is that it helps to provide motivation for those sorts of materials.

ET: Instructors are amazing. They’re working so hard to connect the content in some way to students’ lives, or to find the best, coolest examples. They need to have support from their institutions to be able to do more of this in their classrooms.

This research was funded by The National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Theobald atellij@uw.edu Busch at cbusch3@uw.edu and Meuler at mmeuler@uw.edu.

With K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the country reconvening this autumn for in-person instruction — many after more than a year of remote or hybrid learning — some educators are calling for teachers to embrace more “active learning” methods in the classroom. These methods differ from traditional lecture formats by engaging students with in-class tasks like partner discussions to learn subject matter and reinforce core concepts. In studies, many active learning methods improve grades and student knowledge.

In a published Oct. 1 in Science, a group led by at Carnegie Mellon University is advocating for a fresh look at active learning and its potential as classrooms and lecture halls again fill with students. Two co-authors from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s Department of Biology — assistant teaching professor and lecturer emeritus — highlight the role that active learning methods have in promoting equity. In STEM education, active learning methods can eliminate inequities for students from underrepresented backgrounds, something Theobald and Freeman have studied as part of the UW’s Biology Education Research Group.

Theobald sat down with UW News to talk about the current state of active learning methods, research into their effectiveness and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Q: You teach here at the UW. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected teaching at colleges and universities?

ET: Oh, it’s had so many effects. There has been so much disruption — some that is easily recognized, and some that isn’t. For instance, people are touting that online learning is more accessible. And on the one hand, it is. For example, there’s no commute for students. But on the other hand, there are disadvantages in terms of accessibility. Students need quiet, private spaces that are free from distraction and a good internet connection. But with remote learning, the distractions from other parts of their lives become part of their “classroom.”

And that’s just considering logistics and practicality. What has really suffered in the pandemic is the community that students experience in the classroom. I think a lot of research in active learning methods has told us that those communities — those connections — are central to learning. In our piece, we try to drive home that students need each other. They need to learn from each other. And students need to understand that they’re not alone in the learning process. A lot of that is lost online.

What messages are you trying to send with this new article?

ET: I think the message we’re trying to send centers on what I and a ton of others are feeling right now. We’re going back to in-person teaching and learning. What will that look like? The group of us who came together to write this policy forum piece are all people who have made education research our life’s work. We think this return to in-person instruction is an opportunity to discuss and reflect. Going back to in-person instruction shouldn’t mean just going back to pre-pandemic teaching methods. What could be done better?

What are some active learning methods used today?

ET: Well, it really depends on what type of classroom or learning environment you’re talking about — whether K-12 or undergraduate.

For me, I teach at the undergraduate level. The methods you can employ there can take many forms: Turn to your neighbor and discuss this concept for a few minutes, or complete a short, in-class worksheet that reinforces a key concept.

We’re designing these active learning methods around the future assessments for course performance. They’re opportunities to practice. When you practice a musical instrument, you’re rehearsing for a performance later. Or when you practice a sport, it’s for a game later. Whatever the form, think of these active learning methods as a practice for the exams, projects and presentations that students can use to demonstrate how well they know the subject matter.

Which educational settings employ active learning methods?

ET: In general, higher education — particularly STEM education — is just a little bit behind K-12 in adopting active learning, I think. Before coming to UW, I worked as a middle and high school teacher, and active learning is how I was taught to teach. I couldn’t dream of walking into a class and just lecturing at my students. I would’ve been eaten alive.

In K-12 settings, I think there’s definitely value seen in active learning, and there has been a lot of research backing up the effectiveness of active learning in these settings. And I think in higher education settings, recent research backs up its effectiveness as well in improving learning outcomes, boosting grades and reducing inequities in student outcomes.

Could active learning methods be improved?

ET: Oh yes. In any teaching method, there is always room to improve. Studies show that active learning improves learning outcomes, but there’s also a lot of variation in the results. Why is that?

Well, one new focus as a potential answer is that you have to consider hearts as well as minds when teaching: Getting away from lectures and incorporating active learning will engage minds, but you can’t just have active learning alone. You also need to foster a sense of psychosocial “comfort” in the classroom.

How do you create this sense of psychosocial comfort?

ET: This is one of our avenues of active investigation! We’re exploring the hypothesis that students need this sense of psychosocial safety — knowing, for example, that their professor cares deeply about their success. What we’re trying to emphasize in the Science piece is that, by this theory, you need to do both: Students learn best in the types of collaborative environments that active learning methods can provide, and you also need to create an environment where students feel supported and feel that instructors care deeply about their success.

More research must be done to test this “heads and hearts” hypothesis, but we believe this could be key to bringing equity into STEM undergraduate education. It could go a long way toward improving equity in higher education classrooms.

For more information, contact Theobald at ellij@uw.edu.

Students from different backgrounds in the United States enter college with equal interest in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But that equal interest does not result in equal outcomes. Six years after starting an undergraduate STEM degree, roughly twice as many white students finished it compared to African American students.

A new study by researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý shows that teaching techniques in undergraduate STEM courses can significantly narrow gaps in course performance between students who are overrepresented and underrepresented in STEM. In a published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports that switching from passive techniques, such as traditional lectures, to inquiry-based “active learning” methods has a disproportionate benefit for underrepresented students, a term that encompasses low-income students and Latinx, African American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students.

The researchers used a meta-analysis approach, which combined student-level data from dozens of individual studies, to investigate how student performance changed when instructors incorporated more active learning methods into undergraduate STEM courses. They found that the achievement gap between overrepresented and underrepresented students narrowed on exam scores by 33% and course passing rates by 45%. For “high-intensity” active learning courses, in which students spent at least two-thirds of total class time engaged in active learning, the gap for exam scores shrank by 42% and 76%, respectively, for passing rates.

“Our study shows that broad implementation of active learning in undergraduate STEM courses can have a dramatic effect on reducing achievement gaps, resulting in more positive outcomes for students who are underrepresented in STEM fields,” said lead and co-corresponding author , a research associate and instructor in the UW Department of Biology.

Research has shown that the achievement gaps in college STEM degree programs occur in part because students from underrepresented backgrounds tend to score lower on exams and have lower passing rates in entry-level undergraduate STEM courses. As a result, more underrepresented students switch majors or drop out of college. Six years after starting a STEM degree, 43% of white students and 52% of Asian American students have finished it. But completion rates drop to between 20 and 30% for Latinx, African American and Native American students, the National Academy of Sciences. Disparities in earning STEM degrees also exist between students from high- and low-income backgrounds, said Theobald.

College STEM courses using traditional, passive methods like lectures. In contrast, active learning techniques, which include a variety of discussion-based and problem-solving teaching methods, have not been widely adopted.

“You can sum up the difference between passive and active teaching methods in three simple words: ‘Ask, don’t tell,’” said co-corresponding author , principal lecturer in the UW Department of Biology. “The goal of active learning is to engage students and get them to use their higher-order cognitive skills — instead of simply memorizing definitions.”

Active learning approaches include in-class group activities to work in depth on specific concepts, using class time for peer interaction, problem-solving assignments and calling on students at random.

In a , a UW team led by Freeman used a more classical meta-analysis approach to show that active learning methods boost average student performance. For this new study, they used a different meta-analysis approach that tracks individual participants and breaks down the impact of active learning between overrepresented and underrepresented students. The researchers had to sort through more than 1,800 published and unpublished studies before finding the few dozen that both compared active and passive techniques and also had data on student demographics, according to Freeman. The student exam score data they used came from 15 studies — representing more than 9,000 students — while the data on passing rates came from 26 studies of more than 44,000 students.

On average, the team saw that active learning methods narrowed the achievement gaps significantly in both exam scores and passing rates between overrepresented and underrepresented student groups.

Future research is needed to understand why active learning disproportionately benefits students from underrepresented backgrounds. These learning techniques could create a more welcoming and inclusive environment, which may be especially important for students who often feel as if they don’t belong in STEM, or “feel excluded,” said Theobald. Active learning may also help students comprehend material better by taking them through complex concepts step by step, with regular check-in moments. This targeted, intensive practice may disproportionally help students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, by ensuring they understand the material and don’t fall behind.

“These are loud, active rooms, with lots of dynamic interactions and opportunities to discuss and learn at a level you simply don’t get using a traditional lecture,” said Freeman.

Though they saw the greatest gap-narrowing effects in courses that devoted more than two-thirds of class time to active learning, both Freeman and Theobald caution instructors to take it slow in incorporating the approach.

“If you have a lecture-based course that you’ve already taught even just a few times, changing it can take a lot of work,” said Theobald. “College professors and instructors already have so many demands on their time — mentoring graduate students, applying for grants, conducting research, writing papers, grading, teaching. I understand that it’s a lot to ask them to flip their classes like this. So I advise people to start small and incorporate active learning techniques over time.”

The increasingly clear benefits of active learning may mean that colleges and universities, as well as professional societies, could provide incentives and assistance to professors and instructors who want to take the plunge, added Freeman.

“It’s time to reward people for getting good results in the classroom, because now we see that the benefits are even greater than we thought,” said Freeman.

UW co-authors on the study are Mariah Hill, Elisa Tran, Sweta Agrawal, Nicole Arroyo, Shawn Behling, Dianne Laboy Cintrón, Jacob Cooper, Gideon Dunster, Jared Grummer, Kelly Hennessey, Jennifer Hsiao, Nicole Iranon, Leonard Jones II, Hannah Jordt, Marlowe Keller, Melissa Lacey, Caitlin Littlefield, Alexander Lowe, Shannon Newman, Vera Okolo, Savannah Olroyd, Brandon Peecook, Sarah Pickett, David Slager, Itzue Caviedes-Solis, Kathryn Stanchak, Camila Valdebenito, Claire Williams and Kaitlin Zinsli. Additional co-authors are Nyasha Chambwe from the Institute for Systems Biology and Vasudha Sundaravaradan from Shoreline Community College. The research was funded by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

For more information, contact Freeman at 206-543-1620 or srf991@uw.edu and Theobald at 206-543-7321 or ellij@uw.edu. Theobald is currently traveling, but still available for media requests.

It has become an almost essential element of academic life, from college lecture halls to elementary classrooms: the group assignment.

Dreaded by some, loved by others, group projects typically aim to build teamwork and accountability while students learn about a topic. But depending on the assignment and the structure of the groups, a project can turn out to be a source of great frustration — for instructor and students alike — or the highlight of the school year.

Now a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-led study of college students has found that the social dynamics of a group, such as whether one person dominates the conversation or whether students work with a friend, affect academic performance. Put simply, the more comfortable students are, the better they do, which yields benefits beyond the classroom.

“They learn more,” explained , a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology and the lead author on the , published July 20 in PLOS ONE. “Employers are rating group work as the most important attribute in new recruits and new hires. If students are able to demonstrate that they have worked successfully in groups, it would seem that they should be more likely to land the job.”

Theobald is part of the UW’s Biology Education Research Group lab, formed by several faculty members in the Department of Biology about a decade ago to research how to most effectively teach biology to undergraduates.

A separate by the BERG lab on group work, published in the July issue of Active Learning in Higher Education, finds that college students, when given a choice of whom to sit and work with in a large classroom setting, gravitate toward those who appear most like them — whether by gender, race and ethnicity, or academic skills.

Over the years, research spanning K-12 through post-secondary education has pointed to the value of group work in fostering collaborative skills and in cementing learning through interaction. In the sciences, labs are a common, though not the only, form of group work, Theobald said. As with many disciplines, STEM fields lend themselves to readings, worksheets and other activities that can be completed by multiple people working together.

For this study, researchers compared survey responses and test scores stemming from two different project styles — single-group and “jigsaw” — with three assignments each during two sections of an introductory biology class at the UW. Each of the 770 students enrolled in one of the two sections of the course experienced each project style at least once. In a single-group activity, student groups completed a worksheet together, relying on their notes and textbooks. In a jigsaw, student groups were assigned specific sections of the worksheet; students then were shuffled to new groups in which each person in the group had completed a different section of the worksheet and could teach their new groupmates what they had learned. Students took an eight-question test after each assignment.

The study found that students who reported a “dominator” in the group fared worse on the tests than those who didn’t express that concern. It also found that students who said they were comfortable in their group performed better than those who said they were less comfortable.

The jigsaw activity appeared to result in more collaboration: Students were 67 percent less likely to report a dominator in jigsaws than in single-group activities. “This suggests that jigsaw activities with intentional structure more effectively promote equity than group activities with less intentional structure,” researchers wrote.

The nearly 770 students who completed all the assignments, tests and surveys had formed two- and three-person groups with those who sat near them in class. (Jigsaw assignments later shuffled initial groups.) Two-thirds of participants were female; people of color, including students who identify as Asian, Under-Represented Minority, and International, made up more than half of respondents.

While the gender and racial and ethnic makeup of the participants informed the study, Theobald said, researchers don’t have details on who worked with whom so as to extrapolate from the composition of groups. For instance, were the experiences of women who worked with men different from those of women who worked in all-female groups? If a group contained only one person of color, what was that person’s experience compared to the rest of the group? That kind of information is ripe for further research, Theobald said.

However, one noticeable data point emerged: International and Asian American students were six times as likely to report a dominator than white American students. “Not all students experience group work the same way,” researchers wrote in the study. “If one student dominates a conversation, it can be particularly jarring to students from cultural backgrounds that place more emphasis on introspection and thinking on one’s own as opposed to a direct relationship between talking as a way to work through ideas.”

��Though the data was collected from college students, the findings translate to other settings, Theobald said. She pointed to a Google conducted to determine what made groups successful — establishing group routines and expectations (“norms”) and adding a brief window at the beginning of work time for casual talk. Such findings, along with those of the UW study, can inform employers as well as K-12 teachers about productive group work, she said.

The younger the students, the more structure a teacher is likely to have to establish, Theobald added. But when teachers make an assignment sufficiently interesting and complex, and manage student behavior, there is a potential for students to work together happily and productively.

“If we can get our groups to be more comfortable, students should learn better and work better,” Theobald said.

The National Science Foundation funded the study.

Co-authors on the paper were , principal lecturer in biology, and , faculty coordinator for biology instruction, both at the UW; Sarah Eddy of Florida International University; and Daniel Grunspan of Arizona State University.

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For more information, contact Theobald at ellij@uw.edu.

Grant number: NSF DUE 1244847