skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Increasing Faculty Involvement in the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Learning Experience
Synospis More and more, we see that advances in life sciences are made because of Interdisciplinary collaborations. These collaborations are the future—they are necessary to solve the world’s most pressing problems and grand challenges. But are we preparing the next generation of scientists and the community for this future? At the University level, a number of initiatives and studies have suggested the need to reintegrate biology education and have made arguments that for students to build core competencies in biology, their education needs to be interdisciplinary. At the K-12 level, progress is being made to make learning interdisciplinary through the implementation of the Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS). As NGSS is implemented, it will fundamentally change life sciences education at the K-12 level. However, when seeing the effect these initiatives and studies have had on the courses offered to students for their undergraduate biology degree, they still appear to be often siloed, with limited integration across disciplines. To make interdisciplinary biology education more successful, we need biologists, who for one reason or another have not been part of these conversations in the past and are more involved. We also need to increase communication and collaboration between biologists and educational researchers.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1905148
PAR ID:
10309483
Author(s) / Creator(s):
 ;  ;  
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Integrative and Comparative Biology
Volume:
61
Issue:
3
ISSN:
1540-7063
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. (, Connected science learning)
    Historically, K–12 science education and curriculum development has been organized and enacted in silos by subject areas (biology, chemistry, physics, Earth and space science) with very little focus on the connectivity and relationships between them. In recent decades, however, major educational stakeholders such as the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) have called for an integrated and interdisciplinary K–12 science education (NSTA 2020). In addition, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States 2013) include crosscutting concepts that link subjects, ideas, and practices. These calls for an interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education include broadening the canvas and focus to encompass computing and the computational sciences. Computing and computational thinking have received considerable attention because they are instrumental in solving the problems of the 21st century (Wing 2006), both known and unknown. Computing-based algorithms will be the drivers of healthcare, national security, and financial markets (Luckin 2018). As the student Gabriella noted in the opening quote, coding (and computational thinking) has potential uses in subjects not yet imagined—subjects both in the traditional school sense of the word, as well as personal and civic uses. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, Integrative And Comparative Biology)
    Synopsis Pursuing cutting edge questions in organismal biology in the future will require novel approaches for training the next generation of organismal biologists, including knowledge and use of systems-type modeling combined with integrative organismal biology. We link agendas recommending changes in science education and practice across three levels: Broadening the concept of organismal biology to promote modeling organisms as systems interacting with higher and lower organizational levels; enhancing undergraduate science education to improve applications of quantitative reasoning and modeling in the scientific process; and K-12 curricula based on Next Generation Science Standards emphasizing development and use of models in the context of explanatory science, solution design, and evaluating and communicating information. Out of each of these initiatives emerges an emphasis on routine use of models as tools for hypothesis testing and prediction. The question remains, however, what is the best approach for training the next generation of organismal biology students to facilitate their understanding and use of models? We address this question by proposing new ways of teaching and learning, including the development of interactive web-based modeling modules that lower barriers for scientists approaching this new way of imagining and conducting integrative organismal biology. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Journal of Research in Science Teaching)
    Recent documents pertaining to K-12 education have fostered a connection between engineering and science education to help better prepare our students and future citizens to better meet the current and future challenges of our modern and technological society. With that connection, there has been a concerted effort to raise the visibility of engineering within K-12 science education, which is reflected in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the recently released Next Generation Science Standards. As states look towards the adoption and implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards, it is important to take a deeper look at the shift in K-12 science education that is being suggested by these documents and what that means in terms of the potential changes for states that have chosen to adopt these standards. The main research question that has guided the work for this paper is: What is the extent and quality of the engineering that is present in state science standards and the Next Generation Science Standards? This paper will present a detailed analysis of the landscape of engineering in K-12 policy before and after the release of the NGSS through a comparative case study of academic state science standards and Next Generation Science Standards. This comparison provides insight into what the widespread adoption of the NGSS would mean in terms of potential changes in the way we implement science education in the United States. 
    more » « less
  4. (, Journal of college science teaching)
    The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) on which they are based, describe a new vision for science education that includes having students learn science in a way that more closely aligns to how scientists and engineers work and think. Accomplishing this goal will require teacher educators to make important shifts in the ways they prepare future science teachers (NRC, 2012). Many science teaching methods courses are being reformed to better support future science teachers to meet the ambitious goals of the NGSS. Specifically, these reform efforts require evidence-based and standards-aligned tools to help preservice teachers align instruction with the new science standards. This study utilized the methodology of Improvement Science “Plan, Do Study, Act” cycles in order to design a Three-Dimensional Mapping Tool (3D Map) as a visual scaffold for use in science teaching methods courses to support preservice teachers in unpacking the components of NGSS and to promote discourse related to the three-dimensionality of planning instruction. The 3D Map provides a visualization of key elements of the NGSS, while being flexible enough to accommodate established teaching strategies. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Education (AI4EDU@AAAI))
    With the increasing use of online interactive environments for science and engineering education in grades K-12, there is a growing need for detailed automatic analysis of student explanations of ideas and reasoning. With the widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), an important goal is identifying the alignment of student ideas with NGSS-defined dimensions of proficiency. We develop a set of constructed response formative assessment items that call for students to express and integrate ideas across multiple dimensions of the NGSS and explore the effectiveness of state-of-the-art neural sequence-labeling methods for identifying discourse-level expressions of ideas that align with the NGSS. We discuss challenges for idea detection task in the formative science assessment context. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email