2021 Teaching & Assessment Symposium
Training Future Biology Faculty through a Transformative Course-based Education Research Experience
Location
Virtual
Description
The trajectory of undergraduate science education is increasingly reliant on faculty to practice evidence-based teaching (EBT) in their courses to improve student retention and outcomes. Research indicates that EBT interventions do not have lasting effects on faculty teaching practice, potentially because of lacking support, feedback, and investment. Future science faculty, such as graduate students, tend to be more receptive to learning about EBT. We propose that graduate students must have transformative teaching experiences to become advocates and life-time users of EBT in their future classrooms. Transformative experiences are characterized by expansion of perception, experiential value, and motivated use. We investigated whether conducting discipline-based education research (DBER) could promote transformative experiences for biology graduate students to integrate new perspectives about EBT and education research into their developing professional identities as teachers and researchers. We conducted an ethnographic case study to qualitatively examine how graduate students participating in DBER as a course-based project connected research and learning experiences to their views of teaching practices. Our research questions were: (1) What experiential value do graduate students perceive from doing biology education research? (2) How do graduate students connect biology education research to their disciplinary identity and professional development? Our preliminary qualitative analysis of written reflection assignments students completed throughout the semester suggests that graduate students often experienced one facet of transformative experience, expansion of perception, about DBER in tandem with perceiving competence as researchers and evolving interest in teaching. While data analysis is still underway, our findings so far support how conducting mentored DBER may be transformative for graduate students in both researcher and teacher roles that future faculty must fill.
Training Future Biology Faculty through a Transformative Course-based Education Research Experience
Virtual
The trajectory of undergraduate science education is increasingly reliant on faculty to practice evidence-based teaching (EBT) in their courses to improve student retention and outcomes. Research indicates that EBT interventions do not have lasting effects on faculty teaching practice, potentially because of lacking support, feedback, and investment. Future science faculty, such as graduate students, tend to be more receptive to learning about EBT. We propose that graduate students must have transformative teaching experiences to become advocates and life-time users of EBT in their future classrooms. Transformative experiences are characterized by expansion of perception, experiential value, and motivated use. We investigated whether conducting discipline-based education research (DBER) could promote transformative experiences for biology graduate students to integrate new perspectives about EBT and education research into their developing professional identities as teachers and researchers. We conducted an ethnographic case study to qualitatively examine how graduate students participating in DBER as a course-based project connected research and learning experiences to their views of teaching practices. Our research questions were: (1) What experiential value do graduate students perceive from doing biology education research? (2) How do graduate students connect biology education research to their disciplinary identity and professional development? Our preliminary qualitative analysis of written reflection assignments students completed throughout the semester suggests that graduate students often experienced one facet of transformative experience, expansion of perception, about DBER in tandem with perceiving competence as researchers and evolving interest in teaching. While data analysis is still underway, our findings so far support how conducting mentored DBER may be transformative for graduate students in both researcher and teacher roles that future faculty must fill.
Comments
Lightning Talk by 2020 Assessment Mini-Grant Recipient