WISCIENCE
Wisconsin Institute for Science Education and Community Engagement

WISCIENCE and Collaborators Bring Educators from 23 US Colleges Together to Advance Biology Education

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A group of about 25 biology educators from across the US sit and stand together outdoors in front of a building.

This August, WISCIENCE and collaborators brought twenty-five biology educators from colleges and universities across the United States together for three days in Madison to develop Core Concept Teaching Tools (CCTT) for college biology classes. The CCTTs are designed to help students break down complex biological phenomena by guiding students to transfer and apply their knowledge of the core concepts across biological scales and subdisciplines to decipher new and complex biological phenomena.

Five biology educators sit around a table with laptops, and behind them are several other tables with other educators.
Clockwise from left: Pamela Freeman (The College of St. Scholastica), Andrea Huntoon (Fox Valley Technical College), Anna Zelaya (California State University, San Bernardino), Heidi Horn (UW–Madison), Brittany Wu (University of Colorado Boulder).

The NSF funded project is rooted in the Vision and Change in undergraduate biology education report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2010) and the Conceptual Elements Framework developed and published by Cary and Branchaw in 2017. 

“This project translates work we began over 10 years ago at WISCIENCE to deconstruct the biology core concepts from the AAAS Vision and Change report into resources that instructors can use in their classrooms,” says Branchaw.

One biology educator, stands and gestures with her hands as she talks to another educator, who is seated and smiling.
Left: Andrey Chen Lew (University of California, Irvine). Right: Laramie Lemon (University of Georgia).

 

Sitting at a table with laptops, one biology educator listens as another talks.
Left: Fernando Tenjo-Fernández (Virginia Commonwealth University). Right: Abner Fernandez (Lakeshore Technical College).

The CCTT project is led by three Principal Investigators: WISCIENCE Director and Associate Professor Janet Branchaw, Assistant Professor Andrey Chen Lew from University of California, Irvine, and Professor Jennifer Knight from University of Colorado Boulder. Additional project team members include WISCIENCE staff members Sarah Sweger, Project Manager, and Amanda Butz, Evaluator. 

The CCTT project team, including several WISCIENCE staff members, sits around a table with laptops.
Clockwise from left: Amanda Butz (WISCIENCE), Sarah Sweger (WISCIENCE), Andrey Chen Lew (University of California, Irvine), Jennifer Knight (University of Colorado Boulder), and Janet Branchaw (WISCIENCE).

The project brings together college biology educators with expertise across biological subdisciplines for a year-long professional development experience. Each educator develops a CCTT and participates in pilot testing the collection of CCTTs in classrooms across the country throughout the academic year. Next summer, the educators will meet again in Madison for a three-day writing workshop to finalize and submit their CCTTs for publication to CourseSource, a peer-reviewed journal that serves as an open educational resource (OER) repository. A new cohort of twenty-five educators will begin the program in summer of 2025.

At the conclusion of the project, 50 Core Concept Teaching Tools will be published in CourseSource, contributing resources for instructors across the nation to prepare biology students for careers in the 21st century.

Learn more about the Biology Core Concept Teaching Tool project.

See a list of all participating educators in this cohort.