Mounting experimental evidence suggests that subtle gender biases favoring men contribute to the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including many subfields of the life sciences. However, there are relatively few evaluations of diversity interventions designed to reduce gender biases within…

Measuring students' conceptual understandings has become increasingly important to biology faculty members involved in evaluating and improving departmental programs. We developed the Molecular Biology Capstone Assessment (MBCA) to gauge comprehension of fundamental concepts in molecular and cell biology and the ability to apply these concepts in…

The primary measure used to determine relative effectiveness of in-class activities has been student performance on pre/posttests. However, in today's active-learning classrooms, learning is a social activity, requiring students to interact and learn from their peers. To develop effective active-learning exercises that engage students, it is…

In science education, dissections of animals are an integral part of teaching, but they often evoke negative emotions. We aimed at reducing negative emotions (anxiety, negative affect [NA]) and increasing positive affect (PA) and self-efficacy by an experimental intervention using a predissection video to instruct students about fish dissection.…

SCALE-UP-type classrooms, originating with the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies project, are designed to facilitate active learning by maximizing opportunities for interactions between students and embedding technology in the classroom. Positive impacts when active learning replaces lecture are well…

The purpose of this study was to examine the educational impact of an intervention, the inquiry-focused textbook "Integrating Concepts in Biology" ("ICB"), when used in a yearlong introductory biology course sequence. Student learning was evaluated using three published instruments: 1) The Biology Concept Inventory probed depth…

The high attrition rate among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors has long been an area of concern for institutions and educational researchers. The transition from introductory to advanced courses has been identified as a particularly "leaky" point along the STEM pipeline, and students who struggle early in…

The complex concepts and vocabulary of biology classes discourage many students. In this study, a pretest-posttest model was used to test the effectiveness of an educational card game in reinforcing biological concepts in comparison with traditional teaching methods. The subjects of this study were two biology classes at Bulacan State…

Online plagiarism tutorials are increasingly popular in higher education, as faculty and staff try to curb the plagiarism epidemic. Yet no research has validated the efficacy of such tools in minimizing plagiarism in the sciences. Our study compared three plagiarism-avoidance training regimens (i.e., no training, online tutorial, or homework…

Learning assistant (LA) programs have been implemented at a range of institutions, usually as part of a comprehensive curricular transformation accompanied by a pedagogical switch to active learning. While this shift in pedagogy has led to increased student learning gains, the positive effect of LAs has not yet been distinguished from that of…

Many biomedical PhD trainees lack exposure to business principles, which limits their competitiveness and effectiveness in academic and industry careers. To fill this training gap, we developed Business and Management Principles for Scientists, a semester-long program that combined didactic exposure to business fundamentals with practical…

Postsecondary education often requires students to use higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as analysis, evaluation, and creation as they assess situations and apply what they have learned during lecture to the formulation of solutions. Summative assessment of these abilities is often accomplished using short-answer questions (SAQs). Quandary…

Although researchers in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education are currently using several methods to analyze learning gains from pre- and posttest data, the most commonly used approaches have significant shortcomings. Chief among these is the inability to distinguish whether differences in learning gains are due…

The scientific process is nonlinear, unpredictable, and ongoing. Assessing the nature of science is difficult with methods that rely on Likert-scale or multiple-choice questions. This study evaluated conceptions about the scientific process using student-created visual representations that we term "flowcharts." The methodology,…

This report builds upon our previous study, which described five patterns of why college graduates join National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded diversity-focused Postbaccalaureate Research Education Programs (PREP). A 2015 report from the NIH showed that a high fraction of PREP participants matriculate into PhD and MD/PhD programs. This current…