A. Malcolm Campbell
The chemistry and physics disciplines have long been more cohesive than biology in their approach to education, with clear standards and expectations. Unfortunately, biology educators have been more like a herd of cats and have been reluctant to coalesce around common curricula. Out of this chaos has arisen the landmark publication of national guidelines for undergraduate biology education to prepare students for the 21st century called Vision and Change (V&C; http://visionandchange.org). V&C set out five core concepts and six core competencies, spanning the breadth of biology, that every life science student should master regardless of career trajectory.
When V&C was published, faculty and departments around the country modified their curricula to try to align with the guidelines set forth by over 500 biology faculty from diverse subdisciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. The problem was that there was no one organization poised to coordinate or to provide feedback on these grassroots efforts in educational reform. Once again, V&C stepped into the vacuum and provided a structure—the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE; www.pulsecommunity.org). Forty PULSE Fellows were selected from a national pool of faculty. The PULSE Fellows developed rubrics that departments could use to evaluate their educational reforms. For the first time, a national body developed standards of progress toward the widely accepted goals described in V&C.
In 2015, PULSE Fellows organized the first departmental evaluation program. They collected 70 applications and selected eight departments to serve as the pilot cohort for evaluation. (Full disclosure: The Davidson College Biology department, in which I teach, was one of the eight chosen departments.) The process required a lot of effort from the entire department and a site visit by two PULSE Fellows. After all eight departments were assessed, the PULSE Fellows collectively deliberated how to evaluate and rate the departments. In the end, one department was rated as “beginning,” six were rated “developing,” and one was certified as “accomplished.” None of these programs received the lowest rating of “baseline” or the highest of five categorical ratings, “exemplar.” (The full report is available on the PULSE website at http://bit.ly/1RFaoHc.)
The pilot project was a very good effort to jump start a process that was missing in biology education. However, the first iteration required departments to submit excessive information. As you would expect, the PULSE community learned from its first effort and has produced streamlined rubrics and reporting requirements (http://bit.ly/1q9AVDB). Now departments will be able to submit the needed materials with less effort than in the pilot project.
At this point, most readers are probably wondering if they should participate in the recognition process. The answer is yes. Why? There are two main reasons. First, any department can become insulated from what others are doing and begin to suffer from “group think” to the point that it becomes difficult to know objectively if your plans are accomplishing what you wanted. So the first reason to participate is to help guide your department to recognize what it is doing well and where it has room for further improvements. The second reason is one of leverage. Imagine you have a site visit from neutral observers who note a lack of resources (people, equipment, facilities, etc.). With the PULSE recognition outcomes, you can communicate to the administration that outside parties have identified a need and your request for resources is not being made only out of self-interest. You can use the PULSE outcomes as a realistic national standard by which your department can be measured. If you are doing well, celebrate and share the information widely at your institution. If you are not doing as well as you would like, then leverage the results to request specific resources to patch the weakest area in your curriculum. The PULSE recognition program, with its leaner process, is a win–win proposition for all life science departments nationwide, including those in community colleges.
In research, you can tell if your publications are having an impact when other groups cite your work and when your grant proposals are funded. In education, it is much more difficult to know if you are doing a good job training the biologists of tomorrow. Students deserve the best possible education, which is the goal of V&C. I have been assured that the PULSE Fellows will be running another round of evaluations. Isn’t it time for your department to find out how your educational program measures up to a national standard?
About the Author:
A. Malcolm Campbell is the Herman Brown Professor of Biology at Davidson College.
