Undergraduates' Experiences with Online and in-Person Courses Provide Opportunities for Improving Student-Centered Biology Laboratory Instruction

Nudge or not, university teachers have mixed feelings about online teaching

We designed and administered an online survey experiment to 444 educators in a large social sciences university in the United Kingdom to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of online teaching methods. We find that a nudge, designed to inform educators about the benefits of online teaching, does not improve the personal evaluations of educators in our sample (ntreat = 142, ncontrol = 142) about this new mode of teaching. Overall, most respondents in our sample report being comfortable with online teaching methods and think this form of teaching can continue to have some positive impact. Nonetheless, they do not favour any further online transition away from traditional modes of teaching. Online teaching is largely perceived by a majority of these educators to negatively affect student well-being and their overall university experience. We call for more experimental research in higher educational settings to evaluate the role of edunudges in improving the uptake of online teaching tools.

A Multistep Science Literacy Training Framework in an Introductory Biology Classroom: Teaching How to Find, Evaluate, Comprehend, and Cite Scientific Evidence

Today's undergraduates are tomorrow's decision makers. Many of these decisions in biological sciences can influence whether the vaccines for the next pandemic will be effective, whether the mitigation efforts will have any impact on climate change, or whether we can produce enough food for the rapidly increasing human population while fighting the next pest outbreak. These informed decisions will need to be made by scientifically literate humans, including health professionals, politicians, and media personalities, who are currently undergraduates in our courses. Students in introductory biology classes can build a strong science literacy foundation by learning how to find, evaluate, read, discuss, and cite scientific evidence. An interconnected, multistep framework that uses library guides, active learning methods, group discussions, and collaborative learning is being used for nearly a decade in Investigative Biology and has been shown to significantly improve students' perceived science literacy and science communication skills. In this article, we share basic guidelines about how to implement this framework in one long laboratory session or in consecutive lectures. The flow of the proposed exercises has been tested and adjusted based on students' feedback and the authors' experiences, and a wide variety of resources are being shared to help the successful implementation of this framework in courses that would like to train the next generation of science-literate biologists.