RCN-UBE: Case-based Active Science Education (CASE) Mentoring Network

Effective and inclusive science education benefits the country by supporting innovation, discovery, and economic stability. Despite the known benefits of a science career, many students, including those from historically underrepresented groups, identify biology coursework as a significant hurdle to remaining in science fields. Many biology teachers are working to adopt teaching practices that better support student learning and are inclusive of all students but may lack the proper support structures and resources to make this task achievable. To address this need, the CASE Mentoring Network project focuses on providing personalized teacher mentoring, training in using and writing effective and inclusive case studies, and freely sharing authored resources. This project will also provide insight into how to leverage the strengths of these teacher-mentoring approaches to support the development of students’ science identities. A guiding principle of both the National Science Foundation and Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action is to support training a diverse, scientifically capable, and resilient workforce. First, this project will bring together individuals with diverse training and backgrounds to support personalized mentoring and train teachers in a highly effective teaching method, known as case-based learning. Second, the project will produce a broad range of freely accessible teaching resources in the form of compelling, timely, and relevant narrative case studies. These case studies will be carefully designed by integrating biology, social science, and justice in a way that is authentic to our modern world. Finally, the project will study ways to enhance connections among teachers, as well as adoption and effectiveness of these teaching methods. Products for this project include a strong personalized network to support teachers, 126 diverse case-study authors, and 60 case studies based on societally relevant scientific topics. Furthermore, the project will evaluate potential barriers to case study adoption and network effectiveness, as well as how case-based learning impacts students’ identity as early-career members of the scientific community in addition to content mastery. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for STEM Education, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/ ). 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.