Join Us for a Webinar on Transforming Assessment, Feedback, and Grading (Especially in Biology)
You are Invited!
Pardon the break in newsletter format, but I have another exciting event to announce and to invite you to join.
Over the last year, I’ve been working with a tremendous network of educators, biologists, and faculty developers on a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network in Undergraduate Biology Education (NSF RCN-UBE) incubator project.
Our ultimate goal is to combat attrition and weed-out culture (and associated inequities) in undergraduate biology education by transforming current methods of assessment, feedback, and grading.
Leaders in the field of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) have proposed innovative new approaches to assessment and grading, but these innovations are often more easily suited for humanities classrooms than STEM ones. Biology instructors report multiple constraints to innovation, such as pressure to cover a high degree of content before students move on to other courses, and the specific demands of articulation agreements moving from two- to four-year programs.
Our TUnE-Bio Network intentionally combines the expertise of scholars in undergraduate biology education, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and research design in order to brainstorm and test paths to progress. The incubator year involved a national survey (n = 300 introductory biology faculty) and a series of qualitative interviews aimed at understanding the current state of play in UBE—practices, challenges, and barriers to innovation, as well as a meeting of the network to consider insights and brainstorm a path forward. The full proposal will devise and test new solutions.
We invite you to come hear the results of our survey and some initial thinking from our network meetings in a Zoom webinar format on May 15th, 2023 at 10am EST. The format will be a series of lightning-style talks from several of our Steering Committee members, followed by (optional) breakout rooms where we’d like to solicit ideas from the audience about what a full version of the network could best provide to the teaching and learning community.
You can register for the Zoom link here.
And here is a pretty flyer should you like to spread the word:
While our insights may especially appeal to biology educators, we believe that many of the survey results and insights hold true for college educators of many disciplines.
Hope to see you there!
~ Sarah
(psst while you are on EventBrite, there is still time to register for the Mind Over Monsters book launch talk - with snacks for Boston-area folks, but also on Zoom!)