IAS News

IAS faculty member Becca Price, along with colleagues Erin Dolan (UGA) and Clark Coffman (Iowa State) have launched a new feature in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education called “Anatomy of an Education Study.” The feature annotates influential papers that the journal has published to introduce scholars to biology education research. The annotations are framed through five lenses: background, definitions, applications for instruction, research design, and tips for writing papers to submit to the journal. The first series of annotations is about ...

IAS faculty member Becca Price published a co-authored paper “Many Paths Toward Discovery: A Module for Teaching How Science Works.”  The paper emphasizes that college students enter science classrooms with a sophisticated understanding of the way scientists test hypotheses.  However...

IAS faculty member Becca Price published two co-authored papers about measuring what students know about different biological concepts. The first paper describes the Homeostasis Concept Inventory, a tool for assessing undergraduate students’ understanding of a process that is critical to physiology. Briefly, the concept of homeostasis describes the way the body maintains equilibrium, for example regulating a steady blood pressure. The Homeostasis Concept Inventory advances ...

A recent article on the UW Bothell blog features IAS faculty member Rebecca Price.  In addition to teaching in IAS, Price directs the Science Teaching Experience for Postdocs (STEP) program. STEP gives biomedical postdocs the opportunity to design and deliver their own seminar courses under the guidance of faculty mentors. The postdocs work in teams of three, with each teaching three classes solo within a 10-week quarter. Price has ...

IAS faculty member Becca Price wrote a guest blog for the SimBio website that talks to biology teachers about the challenges of teaching an evolutionary process called genetic drift. Drawing on a series of recently published studies, she shows that an easy-to-complete, fun, two-hour computer lab developed by SimBio called “The Genetic Drift and Bottlenecked Ferrets” does an excellent job of teaching genetic drift.  She argues that ...