Description

TuNE-BIO Website

The world needs more STEM graduates in order to meet escalating global challenges such as climate change and new infectious diseases. Attrition is high for all STEM fields, but clearly highest for members of underrepresented groups (Rask, 2010). One possible explanation is that undergraduate biology education (UBE) instructors continue to rely on high-stakes, objective assessments that students find aversive (Chen, 2013; Seymour, Hewitt, & Friend, 1997), and grading reform may be a productive avenue of intervention (Schinske & Tanner, 2014). Numerous possibilities for improving assessment, feedback, and grading have been proposed, but these have been little tested empirically and may not take into account the particular constraints of STEM education.

The TUnE BIO incubator network has embarked on a research investigation of the “current state of play” in terms of assessment, feedback, and grading in UBE by launching a faculty survey and faculty interviews. Several hundred (n = 297) introductory biology faculty completed a survey asking about their current practices of assessment, feedback, and grading; their awareness of alternative assessment and grading strategies; and their perceived barriers to and constraints on such practices. The TUnE BIO network offered a free, public webinar in May 2023 (attended by over 200 faculty and educational developers) that shared some of these survey findings and solicited feedback about what sorts of resources they felt would be most beneficial, and the network continues to analyze the survey data in addition to 27 one-on-one faculty interviews. The TUnE BIO network aims to analyze, share and discuss our findings. We plan to develop a full RCN-UBE proposal that offers teaching faculty resources to combat “weed-out” culture and inequities in STEM education with a special focus on assessment, grading, and feedback.

Ways to learn more:

• Watch the network introduction webinar (5/15/2023) on YouTube.
  • Animated PowerPoint slides presented
  • Written summary of webinar

Ways to get involved:

• Complete the Menti poll to share feedback for improving assessment, grading, and feedback.
• TUnE-Bio is considering starting a listserv or Slack/Discord server to keep the community informed of our work
  • Email Sarah Cavanagh or Michele Lemons if you might be interested in being added to such a listserv/online messaging group

If you are interested in learning more and participating please join this group or email Sarah Cavanagh or Michele Lemons.

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