Broader Impacts

We aim for our research to generate knowledge and create resources to assist college biology instructors in using evidence-based teaching.

As part of our research on teacher knowledge, we created videos of active-learning instruction in large college biology courses. These videos provide a chance to see active learning in action, which may be important for instructors who have not had the chance to observe this type of evidence-based teaching before. We created REALISE to make these videos freely available. In addition to the videos we created, we curated videos made by other groups to create a collection of high quality videos to help college instructors learn about active learning. Check out the REALISE Videos site here.

Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM

Education (IUSE) program under award #1504904. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations

expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science

Foundation.

Teaching for Student Success

Learn about our research in an episode of Teaching for Student Success. Hosted by Steven Robinow, this podcast explores evidence-based teaching practices for college faculty and administrators. Listen to our episode here: https://www.teachingforstudentsuccess.org/episodes/tessa-andrews

Evolution Education

Our research on evolution education also results in resources for instructors. Our analysis of all peer-reviewed literature relevant to undergraduate evolution education resulted in a searchable database of all of these papers (Ziadie & Andrews 2018). This is a great resource for instructors to find papers relevant to teaching specific concept in evolution. This dataset includes 316 papers about undergraduate evolution education and 92 papers about high school evolution education. These papers are sortable by evolution topic (e.g., natural selection, tree thinking, speciation, Hardy-Weinberg), instructional focus (e.g., student thinking, instructional strategy, assessment, goals), type of work (e.g., empirical, descriptive, literature review, author's perspective), journal, and year published. You can find this searchable file in the Supplemental Material of Ziadie & Andrews (2018).

Also, check out our recent "Tips & Tricks" article in American Biology Teacher for a quick guide to capitalizing on collective knowledge.

Dr. Andrews and colleagues also publish research about student thinking and detailed descriptions of how to implement instructional strategies. Here are links to publications and supplemental materials:

Learn about misconceptions undergraduates have about genetic drift

Six exercises to teach natural selection to undergraduates

Guided-inquiry lab to introduce natural selection and genetic variation using a topic inherently interesting to students (human "race")

A discussion of human evolution to elicit and challenge student misconceptions about natural selection