What do 21st century biology students need to know and be able to do? The view from biology education research

Many STEM undergraduate students take biology and physics courses, so it is important for both disciplines to understand what is happening in the other classrooms. When people picture undergraduate biology classrooms, they often think about students memorizing disconnected bits of information and repeating classic findings in cookbook labs. However, biology education is undergoing a revolution and today’s classrooms look different from this stereotypical view. Transformed biology classes are emphasizing core concepts and skills that are described in reports supported by the major funding agencies and biological professional societies. Concepts are being integrated across subfields of biology and instructors are encouraged to explore them along a continuum from a single cell to a whole ecosystem. Laboratory courses have also changed; undergraduate students are exploring novel research questions and contributing data to advance the field. New assessment instruments that span multiple time points, including across the entire duration of the undergraduate program, are being used to motivate faculty to discuss and come to agreement on the essential learning outcomes of their program and consider how students will achieve these outcomes regardless of the specific courses they take. Notably, instructors are publishing their innovative lessons in peer-reviewed journals such as CourseSource and contributing to broader discipline-based education research questions. In this talk, I will explore what transformed biology education looks like and discuss connections with the skills learned in undergraduate physics classrooms. I will also explore how research on critical thinking conducted in undergraduate physics classrooms is directly affecting how we are studying the student experience in undergraduate biology field courses.