Research Initiation Award: Investigating Instructional Conditions for Robust Learning in Biology

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) through Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness and improve research and teaching at the home institution. This award to Bethune-Cookman University aims to evaluate the impact of pedagogical interventions on student success utilizing educational software in STEM Education, specifically in the biological sciences. This project aims to modernize the undergraduate biology curriculum by integrating active learning and computational thinking in an intelligent online tutor, using a “pathway algebra” approach commonly applied to fields like systems biology and genomics. The focus will be on developing and refining educational software to teach this formal logical language for describing biological pathways and problem-solving skills. The project aims to improve students' ability to integrate reasoning skills and conceptual knowledge, promoting deeper learning and transfer to new topics by learning to specify summaries of new content and describe their own theories using this language. The impact of this innovation will be empirically evaluated, and the resulting software will be widely disseminated, impacting biology education at other institutions, and serving as a model for best practices in STEM fields, including economics and social sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.