Factors Influencing the Use of Evidence-based Instructional Practices by Community College Biology Instructors.

Evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) have been shown to benefit students in undergraduate biology, but little is known about the degree to which community college (CC) biology instructors use EBIPs or the barriers they encounter. We surveyed CC biology instructors to characterize how they use EBIPs, their capacity to use EBIPs, and perceived barriers to their use, and to explore which factors are associated with EBIP use. CC biology instructors report using EBIPs to a similar degree as other populations of undergraduate biology faculty; they generally believe EBIPs to be effective and are motivated to use EBIPs.

Exploring Two-Year College Biology Instructors' Preferences around Teaching Strategies and Professional Development.

Nearly half of all college students and the majority of college students of color begin their studies at 2-year colleges. The educational quality that these students experience will affect future success, but little research to date has focused on the professional development (PD) of their instructors. We offer an exploratory study on PD needs and preferences of ten 2-year college biology instructors who have experience with evidence-based instructional practices.

Group Random Call Can Positively Affect Student In-Class Clicker Discussions.

Understanding how instructional techniques and classroom norms influence in-class student interactions has the potential to positively impact student learning. Many previous studies have shown that students benefit from discussing their ideas with one another in class. In this study of introductory biology students, we explored how using an in-class accountability system might affect the nature of clicker-question discussions.

Cues Matter: Learning Assistants Influence Introductory Biology Student Interactions during Clicker-Question Discussions.

The cues undergraduate biology instructors provide to students before discussions of clicker questions have previously been shown to influence student discussion. We further explored how student discussions were influenced by interactions with learning assistants (LAs, or peer coaches). We recorded and transcribed 140 clicker-question discussions in an introductory molecular biology course and coded them for features such as the use of reasoning and types of questions asked.

Understanding clicker discussions: student reasoning and the impact of instructional cues.

Previous research has shown that undergraduate science students learn from peer discussions of in-class clicker questions. However, the features that characterize such discussions are largely unknown, as are the instructional factors that may lead students into productive discussions. To explore these questions, we recorded and transcribed 83 discussions among groups of students discussing 34 different clicker questions in an upper-level developmental biology class.

bmp2b and bmp4 are dispensable for zebrafish tooth development.

Bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) signaling has been shown to play important roles in tooth development at virtually all stages from initiation to hard tissue formation. The specific ligands involved in these processes have not been directly tested by loss-of-function experiments, however. We used morpholino antisense oligonucleotides and mutant analysis in the zebrafish to reduce or eliminate the function of bmp2b and bmp4, two ligands known to be expressed in zebrafish teeth and whose mammalian orthologs are thought to play important roles in tooth development.

Conservation and divergence of Bmp2a, Bmp2b, and Bmp4 expression patterns within and between dentitions of teleost fishes.

The diversity of tooth location in teleost fishes provides an excellent system for comparing genetic divergence between teeth in different species (phylogenetic homologs) with divergence between teeth within one species (iterative homologs). We have chosen to examine the expression of three members of the bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) family because they are known to play multiple roles in tooth development and evolution in tetrapod vertebrates. We characterized expression of Bmp2a, Bmp2b, and Bmp4 during the development of oral and pharyngeal dentitions in three species of teleost fishes, the zebrafish (Danio rerio), Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus), and Japanese medaka (Oryzias latipes).