Congratulations to the Boury lab on being awarded multiple National Science Foundation grants! Details on the grants are outlined below:

NSF Award # 2314597
Increasing Science Literacy in Microbiology through the Use of Open Education Resources (October 1, 2023)
 

This project aims to serve the national interest by engaging students in a novel way to improve their understanding of microbiology concepts. Understanding the scientific process and developing critical thinking are important skills for everyone, but especially for college students pursuing careers in STEM fields. However, students frequently struggle with learning how to effectively read, analyze, and write about science. Moreover, many students leave science because they feel unconnected and uninspired by traditional teaching methods. At the same time, teachers struggle to find teaching resources that are effective and innovative to engage their students in the scientific process. This project aims to address these issues using successful innovative methods such as having students practice science while working in teams on real problems and generating readily available teaching materials. Teams of teachers and students will create accessible and free learning materials based on popular science podcasts. The project is novel because it will use modern communication tools to engage students and teachers. The impact of these training and learning materials on student science literacy, identity, and motivation will be investigated. The project will also be evaluated to determine best practices for training faculty to implement these materials in the classroom.

NSF Research Coordination Network Undergraduate Biology Education (RCN:UBE) # 2316317 
Case-based Active Science Education (CASE) Mentoring Network (December 15, 2023)
 

Effective and inclusive science education benefits the country by supporting innovation, discovery, and economic stability. Despite the known benefits of a science career, many students, including those from historically underrepresented groups, identify biology coursework as a significant hurdle to remaining in science fields. Many biology teachers are working to adopt teaching practices that better support student learning and are inclusive of all students but may lack the proper support structures and resources to make this task achievable. To address this need, the CASE Mentoring Network project focuses on providing personalized teacher mentoring, training in using and writing effective and inclusive case studies, and freely sharing authored resources. This project will also provide insight into how to leverage the strengths of these teacher-mentoring approaches to support the development of students? science identities.