Enhancing Disciplinary Learning to Diversify Biology Degree Pathways and Career Pursuits in the Ecological and Evolutionary Sciences

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, this Track 2 project aims to diversify Ecology and Evolutionary Biology degree participation and career pursuits by integrating evidence-based reforms at the course, departmental, and institutional levels. This project is grounded in the perspective that disciplinary learning, which is a central component to a student’s declared major, their advancement to upper-division coursework, degree attainment and career participation, is a critical yet understudied and underutilized equity indicator. As such, disciplinary learning is a potentially foundational strategy for diversifying STEM disciplines. Therefore, monitoring learning is essential for instructors, departments, and institutions to empirically determine whether undergraduate coursework is fostering disciplinary inclusion or exclusion. Using a novel equity framework, this project integrates measures that capture critical facets of learning and allow stakeholders to generate meaningful indicators of progress towards equity goals. This new indicator has the potential to fill a gap in evidence-based decision making at undergraduate institutions. At the classroom scale, the project will begin reform efforts in gateway biology courses by (i) expanding a recently published active-learning and misconception-focused instructional approach through the interweaving of culturally-relevant curricula, (ii) integrating an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program into biology classes to maximize student engagement and inclusion, and (iii) developing Ecology and Evolution-related career modules to link disciplinary concepts to real-world applications. Because gateway biology is only the beginning of a student’s academic journey, this project extends to the departmental scale by establishing a faculty learning community among faculty who teach the next level of ecology and evolution courses. This step will lay the groundwork to expand reforms into the next sequence of courses in the degree pathway. At the institutional scale, the project strengthens nascent partnerships with key institutional centers to develop and deploy modules about ecology and evolution careers directly into the classroom early in a student’s college experience. The approaches, materials, and results emerging from this work will be published and shared broadly with other Hispanic and Minority Serving Institutions. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs are supported by this program. 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.