Collaborative Research: BIO IUSE Ideas Lab: Supporting Faculty in Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES)

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, this project addresses the Nation's growing need to better prepare undergraduate biologists with the quantitative and computational skills needed to be successful in the workplace or in graduate school. The full integration of mathematical reasoning skills into undergraduate biology classrooms has been challenging, in part, because of the rapid pace of change in many biological disciplines and an academic reward system that often overlooks pedagogical development and research.

The Supporting Faculty in Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project involves five interdependent initiatives that promote the integration of quantitative and computational skills across the biological sciences curriculum. The project is building on the investments of existing communities by coordinating the efforts and resources of diverse groups that are already involved in quantitative biology education reform. This approach allows QUBES to amplify the strengths of organizations like professional societies and specialized curriculum projects while streamlining the communications and coordination required to grow broader community of reform-minded faculty educators in quantitative biology (QB). Mentoring networks will be used to support faculty understanding and classroom implementation of specific quantitative biology concepts and teaching strategies. These mentoring networks will be led by teams containing both quantitative and pedagogical expertise and will serve spatially distributed groups of instructors who share a common interest in reforming their current teaching practices. Participating instructors will disseminate resources within their own institutions, organize new mentoring networks, and take leadership roles in their professional societies. The products from these collaborations will be captured as part of the QUBES Hub, a virtual environment providing professional support activities and access to curriculum resources for all QB educators. In order to address the challenges of documenting teaching scholarship, the QUBES project is also piloting a system for describing and tracking faculty contributions to the QB education community. This high-risk, but potentially transformative, initiative to develop meaningful metrics of teaching scholarship could have a long term impact on academic reward systems across diverse institution types. By strengthening QB research and development tools, the project is enriching the discipline and catalyzing long-term academic cultural change across STEM education. Finally, the collaborative is studying and disseminating what they learn about the effectiveness of this educational reform effort. This research will take a systems approach to characterize effective interventions and barriers to change within the complex landscape of factors influencing the success of educational reform.

The efficient execution and management of a project with this level of complexity requires thorough and ongoing evaluation. The project team is embedding data collection systems throughout project activities as a means to track progress in near real time, manage resources effectively, and maintain clear communication across connected project components. The QUBES approach to implementation, research, and development promises to have a significant impact on QB education across the nation and, more generally, to inform systemic STEM education reform efforts.

This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/