MacKenzie Stetzer
University of Maine, ME·Education Research
Biology departments have been urged to make their teaching more student-centered and to build core concepts and skills into every course. This call comes from a national report known as Vision and Change (V&C).
- Fields
Education Research
Biology
- Topics
biology education research
discipline-based education research
open educational resources
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Conduct a scoping review of published open educational resource (OER) articles to measure how well they cover Vision and Change core concepts and skills, use active learning, and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Survey OER authors on how they build lessons around Vision and Change principles and how their institutions reward OER work, and survey users on how they modify these lessons for their own courses.
- Determine how instructors' adaptations of selected Vision and Change-aligned lessons affect student learning across institution types, using shared lecture slides, classroom video recordings, and student assessment results.
- Bring instructors from varied institutions together in faculty mentoring networks to develop strategies for OER sharing, such as community calls for new lessons, campus workshops, and recommended departmental incentives.
More about the research
Redesigning a course is hard work for one instructor, so many biology educators now share free, peer-reviewed lessons as open educational resources (OERs). An OER here is a journal article that describes a ready-to-teach lesson. Yet no one has mapped what these lessons cover, how instructors adapt them, or whether they reliably help students learn.
Why it matters
Many biology instructors want to use active, student-centered lessons but lack the time to build them from scratch. Knowing which free, published lessons work, and which adaptations keep them effective in different classrooms, could help instructors choose and adjust lessons that improve student learning. The findings could also guide departments and professional communities toward incentives and supports that encourage more faculty to create and share high-quality lessons.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ann Russell
Iowa State University, IA·Education Research
Internationalize undergraduate biology teaching by supporting faculty in creating open educational resources (OERs), free online teaching modules, built on field and research data from tropical ecosystems.
Sumali Pandey
Minnesota State University Moorhead, MN·Education Research
Develop interdisciplinary immunology lesson plans that link immune concepts to microbiology, genetics, ecology, evolution, physiology and chemistry, using backward design and active learning strategies.
Andrea Beach
Western Michigan University, MI·Education Research
Synthesize research published from 2010 to 2021 on instructional interventions in undergraduate STEM and social science courses, using a framework synthesis approach to identify themes and advances in instructional change.
The school
University of Maine: 10 labs on PI Pages, $199M a year on research, 81 research doctorates a year.
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