Poster and WIP presentations are listed with upcoming presentations first. Completed presentations are at the bottom of the page. 

Friday, July 30

Best Practices and Recommendations for Designing Activities for Highlighting Diverse Scientists Through Quantitative Skill Development  

Faculty Mentoring Networks: Community Professional Development for the Digital Age

Learning about Protein Structure and Function with Molecular CaseNet

Project EDDIE Module Adaptations and Faculty Mentoring Networks

Authors: Andrew Haveles, University of Wisconsin-River Falls

Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration) is a suite of education projects composed of STEM disciplinary and educational community members. The EDDIE community collaborates on developing flexible classroom teaching modules using public datasets to engage students in STEM and improve their quantitative reasoning. Teaching modules span topics such as ecology, limnology, geology, hydrology, and environmental sciences. The EDDIE community also supports each other through professional development needed activities for instructors interested in teaching with data and scientific inquiry. The Project EDDIE Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN), in collaboration with QUBES, is one of these professional development opportunities that bring together faculty interested in teaching scientific concepts and quantitative reasoning using environmental data-driven inquiry by using EDDIE modules that embed these concepts. Each EDDIE FMN iteration results in participants generating a published adaptation of an EDDIE module that have been tailored to fit their course goals, classroom environments, and students’ abilities. These final products have been collected on a resource page to illustrate the flexibility of EDDIE modules and the pedagogical approaches used by the EDDIE community that may be of use in your own teaching. Future Project EDDIE FMNs, including Fall 2021, will be upcoming and focus on the implementation of new EDDIE modules that were developed by instructors just like you. Learn more about Project EDDIE.

Poster Materials

Meet the presenter during Community Hour

July 30th from 11 am - 12 pm ET

Zoom Information

Forum Discussion

Monday, July 26

Consumable Science – Teaching Students to Translate Science for the General Public

Creating ownership through creative writing: Advice columns as term papers in an upper-level Animal Behavior course

HITS: A network to create inquiry-based case studies that make high-throughput approaches and discovery accessible    

Promises and Pitfalls of Incorporating Molecular Case Studies in Biochemistry Courses

Authors: Didem Vardar-Ulu, Boston University; Elizabeth Pollock, Stockton University

Case-based Learning (CBL) is a pedagogical tool that offers unparalleled material contextualization by linking developing knowledge with real-life applications.  CBL is especially valuable in interdisciplinary courses like biochemistry, where students synthesize scientific knowledge from multiple disciplines to achieve mastery. 

Traditional Case Studies typically follow a “read, interpret, answer” format that provides limited insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying the presented case.  Molecular Case Studies (MCSs) were developed to address this shortcoming by having students engage in scientific literature, explore and analyze various bioinformatics data, and discuss cases in molecular detail.  In MCSs, independent and collaborative activities are designed for students to create scientific connections while discovering molecular principles through guided questions and hands-on visualizations.  Despite its educational benefits, successfully incorporating MCS into existing curriculum is very challenging.  Especially as class size increases, careful implementation adjustments are needed to ensure the benefits of CBL shown to be most effective in small groups.

In this WIP Presentation we will be sharing with you our experiences in using MCSs within a variety of biochemistry courses over the past four semesters that also span the shift from in-person to online teaching.   We’ll talk about our motivation, our observational and anecdotal findings including student feedback and talk about the adjustments we needed to do along the way to adapt them for each unique learning environment. Besides presenting our own experiences this session, we would also like to hear from you, your questions and concerns about using this resource and try to answer them as best as we can based on our experiences.

Tuesday, July 27

Genome Hunters: A Quantitative Biology Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE)

LearnR Apps

Operationalizing Bloom’s Taxonomy for Interdisciplinary Science Explorations    

Authors: Shuchismita Dutta (Rutgers University) and Debra Linton (Central Michigan University)

We would like to lead a brainstorming session around the idea of using Bloom’s Taxonomy to structure and facilitate collaborations to develop curricular materials (e.g., cooperative group activities, laboratory modules, case studies) that help students explore interdisciplinary connections. We find that, when trying to develop interdisciplinary modules, identifying or creating tasks that require integrating higher order thinking in both disciplines is difficult. This is due, in part, to challenges in articulating and communicating expectations for those objectives across disciplines. We hypothesize  that systematically using Bloom’s taxonomy to identify learning objectives for foundational knowledge, conceptual understanding, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation in both disciplines can help us identify the areas of intersection that exist between the two content areas. These areas of intersection, particularly in the objectives around analysis, evaluation, and creation may provide a clear target for the development of activities and assessments that require students to integrate complex ideas and make connections between mechanisms at multiple hierarchical levels (e.g., cells to organisms to ecosystems) and across disciplines (e.g., molecular biology and ecology).

Rediscover your inner STEM child        

Author: Raffaella Diotti, Bronx Community College

This is an ongoing project that stemmed from the need to implement activities that would allow students, particularly students in intro classes that are not interested in biology per se, to ease the fear of science, feel more engaged with the process of science and to remind them that they witness scientific reactions and phenomena every day in their life.  Before the pandemic they were meant to supplement the official lab experiments, but during the pandemic some of these activities became the only way for the students to do some hands-on “labs” when all classes were online. Because we could not provide them with material and had to rely on what students already owned or could easily find, we worked on simplifying the protocols and shifted the focus from data collection to other professional/scientific skills (following the protocol, collecting observations, presenting their results, etc.). The students reported their experience during their oral exam and they were also asked to create a video presentation of the experiments either individually or as a group. 

Meet the presenter during Community Hour

July 27th from 5 pm - 6 pm ET

Zoom Information

Forum Discussion

Wednesday, July 28

Factor Structure Assessment of the Students Support Needs Scale-Augmented for African-American STEM Students

Grappling with Graphs:  New tools for improving graphing practices among biology students

Solving Research Problems Through Scientific Communication

Tying ecological concepts to environmental issues

Author: Sarah Sojka, Randolph College

Understanding ecology is key for environmental studies and science students. However, students often struggle to relate these ecological concepts to the environmental issues they care about and often compartmentalize material from different courses. To address this, I redesigned an introductory ecology class for environmental studies and science students, as well as students taking the course for general education, to present content in four units, each tied to a pressing environmental issue. The textbook for the course was developed using a course redesign grant from VIVA (Virtual Library of Virginia) and matches the format of the class. The student response to the redesigned class and textbook was positive and students demonstrated an ability to tie the ecological concepts from the class to environmental issues. The textbook is available on Pressbooks.

Meet the presenter during Community Hour

July 28th from 11 am - 12 pm ET

Zoom Information

Forum Discussion

Thursday, July 29

Analysis of QB@CC FMN in the implementation of OER Modules

Bird watching: An easy way to get students collecting real biological data

Students Authoring Molecular Case Studies

Examining Medical and Scientific Racism in a Science Ethics Course