Erin L Dolan

• Professor at University of Georgia

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are thought to enhance students’ motivation to continue in college, in science, and in research. Yet, how CUREs enhance student motivation is largely undefined. Theories of instructor immediacy, self-efficacy, and task values suggest that CURE instructors may talk in ways that influence studen...

We relied on change theory to design a 3-year intervention with STEM department heads to provide space for busy heads to focus on research-based change in teaching evaluation practices. The impact on departmental practices was variable and department head readiness for change mattered.

Science doctoral students can experience negative interactions with faculty mentors and internalize these experiences, potentially leading to self-blame and undermining their research self-efficacy. Helping students perceive these interactions adaptively may protect their research self-efficacy and maintain functional mentoring relationships. We co...

Deep level similarity and culturally aware mentoring, not sociodemographic similarity, predict quality doctoral student mentoring.

This study presents the development of a new measure of the mentoring that undergraduate researchers experience with evidence of seven distinct types of mentoring experience that are supportive or destructive in nature.

International students comprise over 50% of the graduate student population in the life sciences in the US, over 70% of whom are Asian. Research that aims to understand international students’ experiences has often treated Asian students as a monolith, discounting significant cultural and historical differences between regions in Asia that may affe...

Background Studying science identity has been useful for understanding students’ continuation in science-related education and career paths. Yet knowledge and theory related to science identity among students on the path to becoming a professional science researcher, such as students engaged in research at the undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and...

Students' beliefs about their abilities (called "lay theories") affect their motivations, behaviors, and academic success. Lay theories include beliefs about the potential to improve intelligence (mindset), who (i.e., everyone or only some people) has the potential to be excellent in a field (universality), and whether reaching excellence in a fiel...

This article describes a mentorship assessment structure designed to improve doctoral student‐research advisor mentoring relationships. We report the experiences of students and advisors as they completed the process to assess the feasibility, utility, and impact of engaging in mentorship assessment.

Adenylylsulfate reductase (Apr) is a flavoprotein with a dissimilatory sulfate reductase function. Its ability to catalyze the reverse reaction in sulfur oxidizers has propelled a complex phylogenetic history of transfers with sulfate reducers and made this enzyme an important protein in ocean sulfur cycling. As part of a graduate course, we analyz...

Here we present the development and initial validation of the Mentoring in Undergraduate Research Survey (MURS) as a measure of a range of mentoring experienced by undergraduate science researchers. We drafted items based on qualitative research and refined the items through cognitive interviews and expert sorting. We used national dataset to evalu...

In-person undergraduate research experiences (UREs) promote students’ integration into careers in life science research. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted institutions hosting summer URE programs to offer them remotely, raising questions about whether undergraduates who participate in remote research can experience scientific integration and...

Background. Studying science identity development has been useful for understanding students' continuation in science-related education and career paths. Yet, how science contexts shape students' science identity development, especially as students engage in research at the undergraduate and graduate level, is still largely unexplored. Here we inte...

Undergraduate research experiences are critical for the talent development of the STEM research workforce, and research mentors play an influential role in this process. Given the many life science majors seeking research experiences at universities, graduate and postdoctoral researchers (i.e., postgraduates) provide much of the daily mentoring of...

Most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments inadequately evaluate teaching, which means they are not equipped to recognize or reward effective teaching. As part of a project at one institution, we observed that departmental chairs needed help recognizing the decisions they would need to make to improve teaching evaluat...

Students’ beliefs about the nature of their abilities (collectively called “lay theories”) affect their motivations, behaviors, and academic success. Lay theories include beliefs about the potential to improve intelligence (mindset), who (i.e., everyone or only some people) has the potential to be excellent in a discipline (universality), and wheth...

In-person undergraduate research experiences (UREs) promote students' integration into careers in life science research. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted institutions hosting summer URE programs to offer them remotely, raising questions about whether undergraduates who participate in remote research can experience scientific integration. To...

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down undergraduate research programs across the United States. A group of 23 colleges, universities, and research institutes hosted remote undergraduate research programs in the life sciences during Summer 2020. Given the unprecedented offering of remote programs, we carried out a study to describe and evaluate them. Usin...

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Effective mentoring promotes the development and success of graduate students. Yet mentoring, like other relationships, can have negative elements. Little knowledge exists about the problematic mentoring that graduate students experience despite its potentially detrimental impacts. To begin to address this gap, we conducted an exploratory interview...

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down undergraduate research programs across the U.S. Twenty-three sites offered remote undergraduate research programs in the life sciences during summer 2020. Given the unprecedented offering of remote research experiences, we carried out a study to describe and evaluate these programs. Using structured templates, we doc...

Background The extent to which students view their intelligence as improvable (i.e., their “mindset”) influences students’ thoughts, behaviors, and ultimately their academic success. Thus, understanding the development of students’ mindsets is of great interest to education scholars working to understand and promote student success. Recent evidence...

The 2019 Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference (UBER GRC), titled "Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education," brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working to identify, promote, and understand widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching, learning, and success strategies...

Whether students view intelligence as a fixed or malleable trait (i.e., their "mindset") has significant implications for their responses to failure and academic outcomes. Despite a long history of research on mindset and its growing popularity, recent meta-analyses suggest that mindset does a poor job of predicting academic outcomes for undergradu...

Undergraduate research experiences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields are championed for promoting students' personal and professional development. Mentorship is an integral part of undergraduate research, as effective mentorship maximizes the benefits undergraduates realize from participating in research. Yet almost no res...

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is a community dedicated to helping prepare the next generation of scientists to advance our understanding of the cell to an unprecedented level of sophistication and detail. Its Education Committee fosters this process by creating educational and professional development opportunities around best practi...

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers (postgraduates) in the life sciences frequently mentor undergraduate researchers, especially at research universities. Yet there has been only modest investigation of this relationship from the postgraduate perspective. We conducted an exploratory study of the experiences of 32 postgraduate mentors fro...

Mentored research is critical for integrating undergraduates into the scientific community. Undergraduate researchers experience a variety of mentoring structures, including dyads (i.e., direct mentorship by faculty) and triads (i.e., mentorship by graduate or postdoctoral researchers [postgraduates] and faculty). Social capital theory suggests tha...

How did a moderately sized scientific society create what many consider to be the leading journal in biology education? As Editor-in-Chief of the education journal of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), CBE-Life Sciences Education ( LSE) and recipient of the 2018 Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education, I tell the story of...

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National calls to improve undergraduate STEM education have emphasized the importance of undergraduate research experiences. Course‐based Undergraduate Research Experiences, or CUREs, involve groups of students in addressing research problems or questions in the context of a class, and have been proposed as scalable ways of involving undergraduates...

The question has been asked, whether one should ever write a presubmission enquiry to an editor. This topic, “How to communicate with editors”, follows on from this question. Several important points regarding communication with the editors are: (1) Do your homework beforehand, (2) Read the instructions for authors carefully, (3) Consider whether t...

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) provide a promising avenue to attract a larger and more diverse group of students into research careers. CUREs are thought to be distinctive in offering students opportunities to make discoveries, collaborate, engage in iterative work, and develop a sense of ownership of their lab course work....

Institutions and administrators regularly have to make difficult choices about how best to invest resources to serve students. Yet economic evaluation, or the systematic analysis of the relationship between costs and outcomes of a program or policy, is relatively uncommon in higher education. This type of evaluation can be an important tool for dec...

Discipline-based education research (DBER) is an emergent, interdisciplinary field of scholarship aimed at understanding and improving discipline-specific teaching and learning. The number of DBER faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments has grown rapidly in recent years. Because the interdisciplinary...

Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field, and many computational biology research projects involve distributed teams of scientists. To accomplish their work, these teams must overcome both disciplinary and geographic barriers. Introducing new training paradigms is one way to facilitate research progress in computational biology. Here, we...

Includes student selection criteria, Rosetta Boot Camp learning objectives, selected responses from student surveys, and contact information for the program director and coordinator. (PDF)

Promoting the learning, development, and success of all biology students may be best accomplished by continuing our own work in biology education and by engaging in collaborative work that crosses disciplines.

This editorial discusses next steps toward sustaining the journal.

Undergraduate life science majors are reputed to have negative emotions toward mathematics, yet little empirical evidence supports this. We sought to compare emotions of majors in the life sciences versus other natural sciences and math. We adapted the Attitudes toward the Subject of Chemistry Inventory to create an Attitudes toward the Subject of...

Reprinted by permission of the American Society for Engineering Education. This article was originally published in the Journal of Engineering Education, Volume 106 Issue 3, Pages 349–355, July 2017, available in final form at http://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20168

To date, national interests, policies, and calls for transformation of undergraduate education have been the main drivers of research integration into the undergraduate curriculum, briefly described here. The New Horizons in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education conference at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) this fall presents an e...

Participating in undergraduate research with mentorship from faculty may be particularly important for ensuring the persistence of women and minority students in science. Yet, many life science undergraduates at research universities are mentored by graduate or postdoctoral researchers (i.e., postgraduates). We surveyed a national sample of undergr...

Nearly half of all undergraduates are enrolled at community colleges (CCs), including the majority of U.S. students who represent groups underserved in the sciences. Yet only a small minority of studies published in discipline-based education research journals address CC biology students, faculty, courses, or authors. This marked underrepresentatio...

Research on mentoring has typically focused on a one-to-one mentor-protégé model. In practice, undergraduate research teams involve many individuals operating at different levels. Here, we explore the prevalence and structure of multi-mentor undergraduate research projects. Through survey and preliminary interview data, we find that most students a...

National efforts to transform undergraduate biology education call for research experiences to be an integral component of learning for all students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, have been championed for engaging students in research at a scale that is not possible through apprenticeships in faculty research laboratori...

Relationships with colleagues have the potential to be a source of support for faculty to make meaningful change in how they teach, but the impact of these relationships is poorly understood. We used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the characteristics of faculty who provide colleagues with teaching resources and facilitate change in teachin...

Undergraduate researchers at research universities are often mentored by graduate students or postdoctoral researchers (referred to collectively as "postgraduates") and faculty, creating a mentoring triad structure. Triads differ based on whether the undergraduate, postgraduate, and faculty member interact with one another about the undergraduate's...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a convocation in 2015 to explore and elucidate opportunities, barriers, and realities of course-based undergraduate research experiences, known as CUREs, as a potentially integral component of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. This paper...

Biology education research (BER) 2.0 has arrived, and is moving the BER community beyond showing that active learning works to understanding the individual and contextual factors that explain and influence biology teaching and learning.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are increasingly being offered as scalable ways to involve undergraduates in research. Yet few if any design features that make CUREs effective have been identified. We developed a 17-item survey instrument, the Laboratory Course Assessment Survey (LCAS), that measures students’ perceptions of...

Anyone teaching a course at a university is likely to have a notion of what face-to-face teaching should look like through his or her experience as a student, as a teacher, and through depictions in media. Yet as Claire Howell Major points out in her book, Teaching Online , most of us do not have similar notions for online courses because we have l...

Research on how people learn shows that teaching using active learning is more effective than just lecturing. We outline four concrete ways instructors can begin to apply active learning in their teaching: backward instruction design; expecting students to learn more than facts; posing "messy" problems for students to solve; and expecting students...

Recent calls for reform in undergraduate biology education have emphasized integrating research experiences into the learning experiences of all undergraduates. Contemporary science research increasingly demands collaboration across disciplines and institutions to investigate complex research questions, providing new contexts and models for involvi...

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are being championed as scalable ways of involving undergraduates in science research. Studies of CUREs have shown that participating students achieve many of the same outcomes as students who complete research internships. However, CUREs vary widely in their design and implementation, and asp...

This editorial outlines how, and why, CBE—Life Sciences Education is becoming more widely read and recognized.

More than a decade has passed since the publication of BIO2010, calling for an increased emphasis on quantitative skills in the undergraduate biology curriculum. In that time, relatively few papers have been published that describe educational innovations in quantitative biology or provide evidence of their effects on students. Using a "backward de...

The Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Network (CUREnet) was initiated in 2012 with funding from the National Science Foundation program for Research Coordination Networks in Undergraduate Biology Education. CUREnet aims to address topics, problems, and opportunities inherent to integrating research experiences into undergraduate cours...

A growing body of research documents the positive outcomes of research experiences for undergraduates, including increased persistence in science. Study of undergraduate lab learning experiences has demonstrated that the design of the experience influences the extent to which students report ownership of the project and that project ownership is on...

Many science education programs involve scientists in K-12 education to support students’ engagement in scientific practices and learning science process skills and scientific epistemologies. Little research has studied the actions of scientists in classrooms or how scientists’ actions may (or may not) supplement or complement the actions of teache...

Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, are increasingly common because they engage undergraduates in research at schools lacking a research infrastructure or cannot accommodate large undergraduate populations in internship-style research. Course-based undergraduate research experiences are lauded for their scientific and inst...

This editorial recounts highlights from 2013 for CBE—Life Sciences Education and notes activities on the horizon for 2014.

An increasing number of resources are becoming available to support the professional development of scientists transitioning to studying science education. CBE-Life Sciences Education is adding to the available professional development resources by launching a new type of essay, titled Research Methods.

Science laboratory learning has been lauded for decades for its role in fostering positive student attitudes about science and developing students' interest in science and ability to use equipment. An expanding body of research has demonstrated the significant influence of laboratory environment on student learning. Further research has demonstrate...

As student-teacher-scientist partnerships become more widespread, there is a need for research to understand the roles assumed by scientists and teachers as they interact with students in general and in inquiry learning environments in particular. Although teacher roles during inquiry learning have been studied, there is a paucity of research about...

In this qualitative study, we describe and characterize the pedagogical decisions that three college instructors made to mitigate challenges they faced as they taught by inquiry, as well as the rationale for their decisions and their perceptions of the efficacy of their decisions. We found that instructors made a range of decisions, including reorg...

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the need to approach their teaching with the same expectations for evidence that they use in their science. They are coming to recognize that, just as in science research, research on undergraduate science education has a literature as well as standards for practice. I (M.L.L.) am a recent convert to th...

A partnership between scientists, high school teachers, and their students provides authentic research experiences to help students understand the nature and processes of science. The Partnership for Research and Education in Plants (PREP) engages students in a large-scale genomics research project using classroom-tested protocols that can help to...

Students' experiences with science integrated into agriscience courses contribute to their developing epistemologies of science. The purpose of this case study was to gain insight into the implementation of scientific inquiry in an agriscience classroom. Also of interest was how the tenets of the nature of science were reflected in the students' ex...

We present an exploratory study of how undergraduates' involvement in research influences postgraduates (i.e., graduate and postdoctoral researchers) and faculty. We used a qualitative approach to examine the relationships among undergraduates, postgraduates, and the faculty head in a research group. In this group, undergraduates viewed postgraduat...

Teaching by inquiry is touted for its potential to encourage students to reason scientifically. Yet, even when inquiry teaching is practiced, complexity of students' reasoning may be limited or unbalanced. We describe an analytic tool for recognizing when students are engaged in complex reasoning during inquiry teaching. Using classrooms that repre...

Involvement in research has become a fixture in undergraduate science education across the United States. Graduate and postdoctoral students are often called upon to mentor undergraduates at research universities, yet mentoring relationships in undergraduate—graduate/postdoctoral student dyads and undergraduate—graduate/postdoctoral student—faculty...