Transforming Learning and Equity in UBE by Cultivating an Ecosystem of Feedback (TUnE-Bio)

Welcome. Our research coordination network is called TUnE-Bio: Transforming Undergraduate Education in Biology. We aim to build and share tools that cultivate a thriving ecosystem of feedback to improve effectiveness and equity in undergraduate biology education (and education more broadly). Please join us!

Our goal to enhance feedback in the undergraduate classroom was born of our earlier NSF grant (Research Coordination Network Incubator: Transforming Assessment, Feedback, and Grading in Undergraduate Biology Education). Before we could transform education, we realized we must first understand the current state of play in those undergraduate classrooms: existing practices, perceived barriers and constraints, and necessary resources for innovation. To this aim, we surveyed nearly 300 introductory biology educators at 2 and 4 year college institutions across the U.S. to learn about their assessment, feedback, and grading practices, and conducted hour-long interviews of 27 of these instructors. The data suggest that college instructors are less satisfied with their feedback practices compared to their grading or assessment practices. 

Therefore, this group strategically focuses its current efforts on enhancing an ecosystem of supportive and informative feedback, with intentional efforts to provide a supportive academic environment, a strong predictor of increased student success and retention, particularly for marginalized students.

We intend to grow and expand our incubator network, which includes biology instructors, psychologists, scholars of pedagogy, and educational specialists from across the country. This network will collaboratively develop a freely accessible, online toolkit and repository of resources aimed to enhance feedback in the undergraduate classroom. In addition, this proposal will help form and support regional hubs across the country that will develop free events to instructors in close geographic proximity, to further motivate and inform instructors of these feedback-enhancing resources.

We hope you will join us and learn about upcoming events and posting of freely available materials/tools to enhance feedback.