Developing Cross-Disciplinary Biological Teaching Tools with NSF Undergraduate Education Grant
Janet Branchaw (University of Wisconsin), Jenny Knight (University of Colorado) and Audrey Lew (UC Irvine)The National Science Foundation awarded Audrey Chen Lew (UC Irvine), Janet Branchaw (University of Wisconsin), and Jenny Knight (University of Colorado) a grant to develop teaching tools to promote transfer of core concept knowledge across biological scales and sub-disciplines. The grant meets the need to prepare undergraduate biology students to contribute to emerging interdisciplinary fields that address complex problems by building their ability to make connections across seemingly disparate pieces of information, concepts and questions. Previous work from Chen Lew’s research group found that non-biology majors often struggle to understand the core concepts and their connections across disciplines when they take the life science general education requirement. The NSF-funded project will address this need by bringing educators with expertise across biological sub-disciplines to develop and publish a collection of Core Concept Teaching Tools (CCTTs) that guide students to identify and apply the core concepts across scales and subdisciplines when presented with novel biological phenomena. The collection of CCTTs will be published in CourseSource, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that accepts lessons grounded in research-based pedagogical techniques. Congresswoman Katie Porter congratulated Chen Lew on the monumental accomplishment and thanked her for her dedication and service to the community.
