Students explore how climate is changing from the recent record. Produced by Project EDDIE.

Students link human behavior in various climate change scenarios to predicted temperature outcomes at both local (their assigned Latitude) and global (Latitudinal trends) scales. This adaptation is intended to be more accessible to non-majors.

The module was used in lab following lecture material on pairwise interactions in ecology (emphasizing consumption, competition, mutualism), and parallel to community ecology (emphasizing food web structure, succession, resistance and resilience).

Write-to-learn (WTL) assignments have been used in a variety of disciplines to encourage conceptual learning and critical thinking in undergraduate education. These assignments focus on facilitating rather than assessing learning. Conversely, write-to-communicate (WTC) assignments (e.g., lab reports and exams), often with the goal of assessing learning, are more commonly employed in foundation STEM courses. We developed a WTL assignment that focuses on promoting curiosity driven learning, critical thinking, and metacognition; skills that promote students’ scientific literacy through writing. We integrated theoretical frameworks for scientific literacy, that include the sub-constructs of third space, authenticity, and multiple discourse as well as science as a human endeavour, and metacognition and self-direction (1, 2) to develop this 3-part WTL assignment. In this assignment, students first select a topic of interest and write freely on their current understanding of the topic (Part 1). They then develop a research question based on their writing and seek answers to their question from published literature (Part 2). Finally, they reflect on their overall experience with the WTL process and propose further avenues of investigation for their research topic (Part 3). Student feedback suggests that they enjoyed the WTL process and their overall satisfaction with the structure of the assignment was high. As we continue to evolve the assignment based on student feedback, we are gratified that students reported high self-efficacy with regard to future writing as a result of participating in this assignment. We recommend use of this type of WTL assignment in large, introductory STEM courses, so as to facilitate rather than simply assess students’ learning.

Primary Image: Scientific literacy through writing. Schematic depicting a write-to-learn assignment format implemented in an introductory undergraduate biology course, along with corresponding science literacy constructs.

As biology becomes more data driven, teaching students data literacy skills has become central to biology curriculum. Despite a wealth of online resources that teach researchers how to use R, there are few that offer practical laboratory-based exercises, with teaching resources such as keys, learning objectives, and assessment materials. Here, we present a modular set of lessons and lab activities to help teach R through the platform of RStudio. Both software applications are free and open source making this curriculum highly accessible across various institutions. This curriculum was developed over several years of teaching a graduate level computational biology course. In response to the pandemic, the class was shifted to be completely online. These resources were then migrated to GitHub to make them broadly accessible to anyone wanting to learn R for the analysis of biological datasets. In the following year, these resources were used to teach the course in a flipped format, which is the lesson plan presented here. In general, students responded well to the flipped format, which used class time to conduct live coding demos and work through challenges with the instructor and teaching assistant. Overall, students were able to use these skills to practice analyzing and interpreting data, as well as producing publication quality graphics. While the modules presented range from very basic, doing simple summary statistics and plotting, to quite advanced, where R is integrated onto the command line, teachers should feel free to pick and choose which elements to incorporate into their own curriculum.

Primary Image: R‐Mini‐Course: An Introduction to R. The primary image was generated with BioRender to be a small representation of the applicability of R that we cover in our course.