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Mastery of quantitative skills is increasingly critical for student success in life sciences, but few curricula adequately incorporate quantitative skills. Quantitative Biology at Community Colleges (QB@CC) is designed to address this need by building a grassroots consortium of community college faculty to (1) engage in interdisciplinary partnerships that increase participant confidence in life science, mathematics, and statistics domains; (2) generate and publish a collection of quantitative skills--focused open education resources (OER); and (3) disseminate these OER and pedagogical practices widely, in turn expanding the network. Currently in its third year, QB@CC has recruited 70 faculty into the network and created 20 modules. Modules can be accessed by interested biology and mathematics educators in high school, 2-year, and 4-year institutions. Here, we use survey responses, focus group interviews, and document analyses (principles-focused evaluation) to evaluate the progress in accomplishing these goals midway through the QB@CC program. The QB@CC network provides a model for developing and sustaining an interdisciplinary community that benefits participants and generates valuable resources for the broader community. Similar network-building programs may wish to adopt some of the effective aspects of the QB@CC network model to meet their objectives.

Coursework that is dependent on experiential learning, such as that offered in the laboratory-based sciences, can present barriers for a variety of students. These barriers can be magnified for students who experience disabilities that impact their access to the full depth of the course content and materials. Our unique perspective was formed primarily by supporting two blind students at two institution types across multiple biological science departments. In this paper, we explain the barriers we find are currently impacting blind and visually impaired (VI) students' access to STEM as well as some tools to navigate creating more equitable and accessible spaces to support blind/VI students in STEM. More specifically, we provide general recommendations for working with blind/VI students using a student-centered approach to planning and daily interactions, followed by tips and tools for preparing accessible materials and a case study on how to use learning outcomes to modify course activities to be more useful for blind/VI students, and lastly we provide recommendations for important collaborations.

We explored the impacts of a mathematics prerequisite on student success in Introductory Biology, focusing on students historically underserved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Specifically, we studied Introductory Biology student outcomes 5 years before and 6 years after adding the prerequisite. Students who had not previously passed Intermediate Algebra had a 54.91% chance of passing Introductory Biology, compared with a ??69.25% chance for students who had passed this math course. Furthermore, we found a disproportionate benefit of passing the math course for Pell Grant recipients. When considering pre- versus post-prerequisite terms of Introductory Biology, we found pass rates were significantly higher after the mathematics prerequisite was required, but grades were not. After the mathematics prerequisite, enrollments in Introductory Biology temporarily decreased in comparison to a similar chemistry course and the college's overall enrollments, a potential cost to students. Pell Grant recipients and women took Introductory Biology at the same rate as before, and contrary to our hypothesis, we saw the proportion of persons excluded due to ethnicity or race (PEER) students enrolled in Introductory Biology was higher after the implementation. This study provides a model for assessing prerequisites in a local context and contributes evidence that mathematical prerequisites can benefit students.

Barriers to transfer students include lost credit caused by lack of curricular alignment across institutions of higher learning. This is particularly evident in series courses like introductory biology. We propose to streamline transfer issues using a shared set of course-level learning outcomes (CLOs) developed collaboratively by faculty across multiple institutions. Our biggest challenge was the development of CLOs aligned to Vision and Change and broad enough for large-scale implementation. We present the CLOs generated by the Northwest Biosciences Consortium faculty network along with data on faculty buy-in to using Vision and Change in their curriculum. Additionally, we found an increased familiarity with and use of Vision and Change in curriculum development over time. Finally, we provide information on implementation of CLOs and suggestions of methods for aligning curricula across networks.

Biology education research (BER), currently conducted mostly at four-year colleges and universities, is changing the culture of teaching biology and improving student success. We are community college faculty participating in the NSF-funded CC Bio INSITES network, getting training and support in BER to ask questions to improve student success in our highly diverse classes. Our research adapts and validates existing BER surveys and interventions in Hispanic-serving college settings, with pre-health professions' students, and with traditionally underserved populations in STEM. BER projects serve assessment and program review goals common across many community colleges, and when implemented with high-impact practices, BER measures the gains in student retention and success. We call for support to continue changing the culture of discipline-based education research at community colleges.

Community college biology faculty play an important role in educating the future STEM workforce. These faculty rely on professional organizations to provide programming and networking opportunities to enhance their professional development.

The 2019 Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference (UBER GRC), titled "Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education," brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working to identify, promote, and understand widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching, learning, and success strategies in undergraduate biology. Graduate students and postdocs had the additional opportunity to present and discuss research during a Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) that preceded the GRC. This report provides a broad overview of the UBER GRC and GRS and highlights major themes that cut across invited talks, poster presentations, and informal discussions. Such themes include the importance of working in teams at multiple levels to achieve instructional improvement, the potential to use big data and analytics to inform instructional change, the need to customize change initiatives, and the importance of psychosocial supports in improving undergraduate student well-being and academic success. The report also discusses the future of the UBER GRC as an established meeting and describes aspects of the conference that make it unique, both in terms of facilitating dissemination of research and providing a welcoming environment for conferees.

Quantitative skills are an important competency for undergraduate biology students and should be incorporated early and frequently in an undergraduate's career. Community colleges (CCs) are responsible for teaching introductory biology to a large proportion of biology and prehealth students, and quantitative skills are critical for their careers. However, we know little about the challenges and affordances that CC instructors encounter when incorporating quantitative skills into their courses. To explore this, we interviewed CC biology instructors (n = 20) about incorporating quantitative biology (QB) instruction into their classes. We used a purposeful sampling approach to recruit instructors who were likely to have tried evidence-based pedagogies and were likely aware of the importance of QB instruction. We used open coding to identify themes related to the affordances to and constraints on teaching QB. Overall, our study participants met with challenges typical of incorporating new material or techniques into any college-level class, including perceptions of student deficits, tension between time to teach quantitative skills and cover biology content, and gaps in teacher professional knowledge (e.g., content and pedagogical content knowledge). We analyze these challenges and offer potential solutions and recommendations for professional development to support QB instruction at CCs.

More often than not, faculty have limited opportunities to interact with colleagues that teach similar classes at nearby institutions. Particularly in regions with many institutions and institution types within a close geographic area, these interactions can be important to support student transfer between institutions. Increasingly, our students do not go to just one institution for the UG degrees but transfer from one to many different institutions over the course of their degree. The development of a regional network was our solution to this problem. The aim of the Northwest Biosciences Consortium (NWBC) was a broad implementation of the Vision & Change recommendations with two emphases: (1) incorporation of Vision and Change recommendations into the introductory biology curriculum for majors and non-majors, and (2) curricular support for students transitioning between and within institutions. We describe how these objectives shaped the development of the NWBC along with other formative factors, the lessons we learned from this work, and recommendations regarding the development of a regional faculty network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses various articles within the issue on topics including change models for pedagogical reforms in education, number of hours of professional development for the success of pedagogical reforms, and innovative new approaches in the teaching methods.

Nearly half of all undergraduates are enrolled at community colleges (CCs), including the majority of U.S. students who represent groups underserved in the sciences. Yet only a small minority of studies published in discipline-based education research journals address CC biology students, faculty, courses, or authors. This marked underrepresentation of CC biology education research (BER) limits the availability of evidence that could be used to increase CC student success in biology programs. To address this issue, a diverse group of stakeholders convened at the Building Capacity for Biology Education Research at Community Colleges meeting to discuss how to increase the prevalence of CC BER and foster participation of CC faculty as BER collaborators and authors. The group identified characteristics of CCs that make them excellent environments for studying biology teaching and learning, including student diversity and institutional cultures that prioritize teaching, learning, and assessment. The group also identified constraints likely to impede BER at CCs: limited time, resources, support, and incentives, as well as misalignment between doing research and CC faculty identities as teachers. The meeting culminated with proposing strategies for faculty, administrators, journal editors, scientific societies, and funding agencies to better support CC BER., (© 2017 J. N. Schinske et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)