Today’s world is ever-changing, full of new challenges and new opportunities. Nowhere is this more true than in the Biological Sciences! Through our research, we hope to support the next generation of creative, resilient, and community-engaged biologists and citizens.
Our world is facing grand ecological challenges, including climate change, global health, and ecosystem degradation. We need a science workforce equipped to tackle these challenges and persevere when things get tough. Our lab has identified three critical areas of development that we, as educators, must focus on if we are to assist in the development of a resilient science workforce:
Encouraging civic engagement
We study how students develop the skills and confidence to improve life for people in their communities, using science. Our goal is to increase students' motivation to engaged with their and other communities to solve socio-scientific problems.
Fostering creativity for problem solving
We study how students develop creative and tractable solutions to biological problems. We want to help students use both divergent and convergent thinking in biological contexts, to improve the innovation and quality of solutions.
Building scientific resillience
We explore how students develop the ability to confront challenges and cope with scientific setbacks and failures. Our goals is to contribute to the development of the next generation of resilient citizens and scientists.
Investigating how community-engaged, course-based undergraduate research enhances opportunities for scientific civic engagement.
Our lab is working to understand the mechanisms through which students in CUREs, who do research that specifically aims to serve a community outside of the classroom, develop different aspects of scientific civic engagement. We are looking at whether these experiences change students’ value for engaging with their community using science skills, in addition to their self-efficacy, motivation, and knowledge of how to do so. We are also investigating if engaging in community-serving CUREs helps instructors to develop confidence in their ability to teach research-focused field courses. This work is led by graduate students Irfanul Alam and Amy Dunbar-Wallis.
Understanding students’ experiences with research failure:
When do students view failure as epistemological?
This study draws upon prior work in our lab that explored how to measure fear of failure and challenge-engaging vs. challenge-avoiding styles of coping. Drawing upon interviews, we are studying how students approach challenges, what they do when they encounter failures, and whether they see these failures as opportunities to learn more about how to do biology (i.e., epistemological). We are curious whether encounters with failure increase their fear of failure and how viewing failure as an opportunity to learn might change this. This study is led by Postdoc Sandhya Krishan and is a collaboration with Jen Heemtra (Emory University), Lou Charkoudian (Haverford College), Meredith Henry (Georgia State University), and Joe Harsh (James Madison University).
Community College Biology Instructor Network to Support Inquiry into Teaching and Education Scholarship (CC Bio INSITES)
CC Bio INSITES is a network dedicated to helping community college biology faculty develop as biology education researchers. Since 2017, the network has held annual meetings and hosted remote professional development events that help CC faculty define research questions, develop quantitative and qualitative analysis skills, successfully communicate about their work via professional meetings and publications, and most importantly, connect with each other and the broader biology education research community. Participants have engaged in over twenty biology education research projects supported by CC Bio INSITES and have been able to access leadership positions.
Henry MA, Shorter S, Charkoudian LK, Heemstra JM, Le B, Corwin LA. (2021). Quantifying fear of failure in STEM. Modifying and evaluating the performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (PFAI) for use with STEM undergraduates. International Journal of STEM Education 8. Download the paper →
Fried E, Martin A, Esler A, Tran A, Corwin LA. (2020) Design-based learning for a sustainable future: Student outcomes resulting from a biomimicry curriculum in an evolution course. Evolution Education and Outreach. Download the paper →
Gin LE, Rowland AA, Steinwand B, Bruno J, Corwin LA. (2018) Students who fail to achieve predefined research goals may still experience many positive outcomes as a result of CURE participation. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 17, ar57. Download the paper →
Corwin LA, Runyon C, Robinson A, Dolan EL. 2015. The Lab Course Assessment Survey: A tool to measure three dimensions of research-course design. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14, ar37 1-11. Download the paper →
Corwin LA, Graham MJ, and Dolan EL. 2015. Modeling Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences: An agenda for future research and evaluation. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14, es1 1-13.
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Corwin Auchincloss L, Laursen SL, Branchaw JL, Eagan K, Graham M, Hanauer DI, Lawrie G, McLinn C, Palaez N, Rowland S, Towns M, Trautmann NM, Varma-Nelson P, Weston TJ, and Dolan EL. 2014. Assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences: A meeting report. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13, 29-40.
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Our work directly impacts biology instruction at the undergraduate and graduate level. Changing how we, as instructors within higher education, approach supporting the development of our students is paramount in achieving our goals. We aim to help instructors implement practices that will increase opportunities for students to:
engage in creative problem solving,
tackle challenges and troubleshoot to find solutions, and
work directly with communities to address socio-scientific issues
