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IntroductionThe benefits of actively engaging students is especially relevant for teaching undergraduate students about evolutionary processes and content. Examining eco-immunological data can help students overcome the naïve conception that humans are not evolving or affected by evolutionary pressures. MethodsHere, we used graphical reasoning in two evolution courses (small/honors and large/regular) to teach students about eco-immunology in humans and non-human organisms during a unit on the evolution of life-history traits. The module challenged students to (i) distinguish between immunological and evolutionary fitness, (ii) evaluate graphical data from the primary scientific literature on energy allocation and trade-offs, and (iii) integrate these proximate and ultimate processes into a more wholistic understanding of on-going human evolution. Student performance and perceptions were measured through closed and open response items. Open response items were thematically analyzed to identify salient themes. ResultsStudent performance in the large class increased significantly on items related to fitness, energy trade-offs, and graphical reasoning, while student performance in the small class increased just for items related to energy trade-offs. Student confidence in graphical reasoning, perceptions of the importance of graphical reasoning, and perceptions of the value of interdisciplinary research was high for both classes. Student narrative examples regarding confidence, perceptions of graphical reasoning, and perceptions of interdisciplinary research are presented. DiscussionWe conclude that students can increase their performance and perceptions of eco-immunology and graphical reasoning through an active learning, graph reading module. Furthermore, students can be introduced to the field of immunology through their evolution courses. 

Audience segmentation can be used to identify target audiences in environmental public engagement and communication, but few studies have used segmentation to study biodiversity conservation behavior. This study used segmentation to better understand perceptions and behaviors around different types of actions related to native plant gardening. With a United States representative survey (n = 1,200), we measured beliefs and intentions to engage in personal-sphere (i.e., individual), social diffusion (i.e., encouraging others to act), and civic action behavior (e.g., voting). A latent class analysis (LCA) revealed four distinct groups within the population: Disengaged, Potential Adopters, Potential Amplifiers, and Potential Advocates. Each class comprised approximately one-quarter of the United States population. We found that certain groups are more receptive to personal-sphere behavior, while others may be more receptive to social diffusion behavior or civic action behavior. The groups varied by key distinguishing characteristics: perceptions around civic action, previous personal-sphere and social diffusion behavior, and intentions to engage in personal-sphere action. Findings revealed opportunities to create tailored public engagement strategies to engage different groups in urban biodiversity conservation behavior. 

Abstract Disruptions to education systems (e.g., the COVID‐19 pandemic) evoke a range of responses from teachers. Teachers are required to learn new skills, attend to students' social emotional needs, modify their instructional approaches, and discover innovative ways to engage their students in science, technology, and engineering courses, all while managing their own professional and personal needs. Although teachers of all disciplines adjust their instructional and curricular approaches in response to disruptions, the impetus for this study was to explore the unique challenges of science teachers during the COVID‐19 pandemic that affected their sense of agency (sense of control). To understand how science teachers acquired, used, and invested in capital (i.e., available resources with the potential to meet identified challenges) to achieve professional agency, we studied 113 science teachers in 2020−2021 when they experienced disruptions associated with the pandemic. An analysis of open‐ended responses from 60 teachers indicates that teachers who achieved agency shared four attributes. They (i) demonstrated an awareness of needed capital, (ii) acquired capital, (iii) used capital, and (iv) dedicated effort toward capital‐building for future use. Our findings inform science teacher educators and schools that are committed to mitigating science teacher attrition by understanding how teachers respond to personal and professional stresses. 

Speaker tracking in spontaneous naturalistic data continues to be a major research challenge, especially for short turn-taking communications. The NASA Apollo-11 space mission brought astronauts to the moon and back, where team based voice communications were captured. Building robust speaker classification models for this corpus has significant challenges due to variability of speaker turns, imbalanced speaker classes, and time-varying background noise/distortions. This study proposes a novel approach for speaker classification and tracking, utilizing a graph attention network framework that builds upon pretrained speaker embeddings. The model’s robustness is evaluated on a number of speakers (10-140), achieving classification accuracy of 90.78% for 10 speakers, and 79.86% for 140 speakers. Furthermore, a secondary investigation focused on tracking speakers-of-interest(SoI) during mission critical phases, essentially serves as a lasting tribute to the 'Heroes Behind the Heroes'. 

Education about scientific publishing and manuscript peer review is not universally provided in undergraduate science courses. Since peer review is integral to the scientific process and central to the identity of a scientist, we envision a paradigm shift where teaching peer review becomes integral to undergraduate science education. 

Apollo 11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the Moon and return them safely. As part of NASA’s goal in assessing team and mission success, all voice communications within mission control, astronauts, and support staff were captured using a multichannel analog system, which until recently had never been made available. More than 400 personnel served as mission specialists/support who communicated across 30 audio loops, resulting in 9,000+ h of data. It is essential to identify each speaker’s role during Apollo and analyze group communication to achieve a common goal. Manual annotation is costly, so this makes it necessary to determine robust speaker identification and tracking methods. In this study, a subset of 100hr derived from the collective 9,000hr of the Fearless Steps (FSteps) Apollo 11 audio data were investigated, corresponding to three critical mission phases: liftoff, lunar landing, and lunar walk. A speaker recognition assessment is performed on 140 speakers from a collective set of 183 NASA mission specialists who participated, based on sufficient training data obtained from 5 (out of 30) mission channels. We observe that SincNet performs the best in terms of accuracy and F score achieving 78.6% accuracy. Speaker models trained on specific phases are also compared with each other to determine if stress, g-force/atmospheric pressure, acoustic environments, etc., impact the robustness of the models. Higher performance was obtained using i-vector and x-vector systems for phases with limited data, such as liftoff and lunar walk. When provided with a sufficient amount of data (lunar landing phase), SincNet was shown to perform the best. This represents one of the first investigations on speaker recognition for massively large team-based communications involving naturalistic communication data. In addition, we use the concept of “Where’s Waldo?” to identify key speakers of interest (SOIs) and track them over the complete FSteps audio corpus. This additional task provides an opportunity for the research community to transition the FSteps collection as an educational resource while also serving as a tribute to the “heroes behind the heroes of Apollo.”