Environmental influences and individual characteristics that affect learner-centered teaching practices.

Research-based teaching practices can improve student learning outcomes in a variety of complex educational environments. The implementation of learner-centered teaching practices in STEM can both benefit from or be constrained by different factors related to individual instructors and the teaching environment. Additionally, we know little of how the instructional climate varies across institutions and how this climate affects teaching practices.

Early-career faculty practice learner-centered teaching up to 9 years after postdoctoral professional development.

The goal of STEM professional development for teaching is that participants continue to practice what they learn in the long term. However, we do not know if the outcomes are achieved and ultimately persist. We tracked postdoctoral participants from the Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST) IV program into their current positions as early-career biology faculty.

A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester.

Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable.

Assessing faculty professional development in STEM higher education: Sustainability of outcomes.

We tested the effectiveness of Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching IV (FIRST), a professional development program for postdoctoral scholars, by conducting a study of program alumni. Faculty professional development programs are critical components of efforts to improve teaching and learning in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, but reliable evidence of the sustained impacts of these programs is lacking. We used a paired design in which we matched a FIRST alumnus employed in a tenure-track position with a non-FIRST faculty member at the same institution.

Breaking the cycle: future faculty begin teaching with learner-centered strategies after professional development.

The availability of reliable evidence for teaching practices after professional development is limited across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, making the identification of professional development "best practices" and effective models for change difficult. We aimed to determine the extent to which postdoctoral fellows (i.e.

The other half of the story: effect size analysis in quantitative research.

Statistical significance testing is the cornerstone of quantitative research, but studies that fail to report measures of effect size are potentially missing a robust part of the analysis. We provide a rationale for why effect size measures should be included in quantitative discipline-based education research. Examples from both biological and educational research demonstrate the utility of effect size for evaluating practical significance.

Stress hormones mediate predator-induced phenotypic plasticity in amphibian tadpoles.

Amphibian tadpoles display extensive anti-predator phenotypic plasticity, reducing locomotory activity and, with chronic predator exposure, developing relatively smaller trunks and larger tails. In many vertebrates, predator exposure alters activity of the neuroendocrine stress axis. We investigated predator-induced effects on stress hormone production and the mechanistic link to anti-predator defences in Rana sylvatica tadpoles.

Consequences of intraspecific niche variation: phenotypic similarity increases competition among recently metamorphosed frogs.

Phenotype is often correlated with resource use, which suggests that as phenotypic variation in a population increases, intraspecific competition will decrease. However, few studies have experimentally tested the prediction that increased intraspecific phenotypic variation leads to reduced competitive effects (e.g.