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The meeting "Conceptual Assessment in the Biological Sciences" was held March 3-4, 2007, in Boulder, Colorado. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and hosted by University of Colorado, Boulder's Biology Concept Inventory Team, the meeting drew together 21 participants from 13 institutions, all of whom had received National Science Foundation funding for biology education. Topics of interest included Introductory Biology, Genetics, Evolution, Ecology, and the Nature of Science. The goal of the meeting was to organize and leverage current efforts to develop concept inventories for each of these topics. These diagnostic tools are inspired by the success of the Force Concept Inventory, developed by the community of physics educators to identify student misconceptions about Newtonian mechanics. By working together, participants hope to lessen the risk that groups might develop competing rather than complementary inventories.

For the past 20 years, numerous reports have called for change and reform of undergraduate education to improve student learning, persistence, and graduation rates for students in STEM. Many change efforts have been started but few have reached the transformational level of entire programs, departments, or colleges in the STEM disciplines. In order to facilitate more institutional-level STEM reform, the authors created a model that provides both a process and content scaffold that campus leaders can use to plan, implement, and evaluate change efforts in undergraduate STEM education beyond redesign of a single course or isolated program. This article describes the eight stages of a model for institutional change: develop a vision; review the landscape and capacity; identify and analyze challenges; choose strategies/ interventions/opportunities; determine readiness for action; implementation; measure results; and disseminate and plan next steps. The importance of organizational learning, multilevel leadership, and thoughtful development of the team are described, as are primary assumptions within the model. Information on how to implement the model is provided, including examples from campus case studies. Significant barriers commonly encountered in change projects are described to help campus leaders prepare in advance to address them. Implicit biases that were uncovered during work with campus teams in developing the model are described along with ways to address them for project success.

The article focuses on the significance of quantitative reasoning (QR) skills in education curriculum. Topics discussed include the importance of teaching QR in interdisciplinary curriculum, various challenges which contributed to the proposal of teaching QR skills according to the Mathematical Association of America, and several learning outcomes associated with QR skills considering various factors which includes math skills, problem solving, and application of skills.