At a time when all course instruction had been moved online, it seemed wishful thinking for a group of undergraduate students to begin authentic, independent research. With curious, creative, and motivated mindsets; however, we learned not only that such research was possible during a global pandemic, but that it could provide vital learning opportunities in our careers as students and scientists. Guided by mentors of UW-Madison's honors biology Biocore program, we worked as a team of three undergraduate scientists and were given significant autonomy over all aspects of our research project. We planned, conducted, and communicated our science and here we provide a commentary of our learning throughout the process, as well as recommendations for instructors of other undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math programs based on the factors that best facilitated our learning.

To reduce the cost of educational materials needed by students, we generated a no-cost open educational resources (OER) textbook for an undergraduate level cell biology course. Cell biology is part of the curriculum in various undergraduate degrees for science, technology, engineering, and math majors, therefore generation of OER targets a large population of students. In addition to cost reduction, we unified the textbook content with course learning outcomes to ensure that the students have a clear understanding of course goals. To assess student perceptions of OER materials and their experiences related to learning outcomes, surveys were administered to students enrolled in sections of cell biology using a traditional textbook and those enrolled in sections using the OER. Data showed positive student attitudes about learning, accessibility, and cost of OER, supporting the use of no-cost OER in undergraduate classrooms and beyond.

Many high school students learn about nutrient cycling during biology, environmental science, and agriculture classes. These lessons often focus on soil and plants, and nutrient cycling is usually taught independently from climate change. Scientists know that animals, including fish, can have strong effects on nutrient cycling (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus) in ecosystems. Additionally, research has shown that nitrogen and phosphorus excretion rates of animals increase with water temperatures. We worked with high school students to design and conduct nutrient excretion experiments using common fish (zebrafish) to explore the impact of climate change on nutrient cycling. This allowed students to have hands-on laboratory experience. In 2021, we worked with students participating in a residential summer program in Georgia. Meanwhile, in 2022, students enrolled in the local high school visited the university campus on two occasions to participate in the experiments, and we once again worked with students in Georgia. Students from all three groups showed an increased understanding of the role of animals in nutrient cycling and ways climate change may impact these processes, despite variable results from the excretion experiments. Students also showed increased understanding of science processes and were more likely to feel like part of the science community. We believe that these experiments can be done in high school classrooms to expand students' understanding of the scientific process, nutrient cycling, and climate change.

This research shows that improved scientific reasoning and application of concepts occurred when creating and viewing student-crafted digital storytelling projects. By utilizing digital storytelling projects to showcase course competencies in an undergraduate biology course, students were able to apply subject matter outside the classroom. In this post hoc analysis of pretest and posttest scores from a two-year Florida college, significant results with medium effect sizes were shown for classes engaged in digital storytelling projects. It was determined that age was not a significant factor.

Designing classroom assessment tasks that can gather meaningful assessment information is a complex undertaking. This is especially the case when it comes to developing assessment tasks to evaluate students' abilities to plan scientific investigations. Such assessment tasks should adequately elicit students' cognitive understandings related to designing valid and reliable experiments, not just their hands-on manipulative skills. This article proposes a set of guidelines for developing written assessment tasks that can surface students' cognitive understandings related to planning scientific investigations. We show how the checklist created based on the design guidelines can be used to analyze two classroom assessment tasks. The guidelines will be useful for teachers as they develop new or modify existing classroom assessment tasks to meaningfully evaluate students' abilities to plan scientific investigations.

This article presents a modified version of a “cookbook” laboratory activity that uses colored corn kernels to address the fundamental ideas in classical genetics. The purposeful sequencing of concrete experiences with corn plant structures along with teacher questioning promotes mental engagement and scaffolds students to a deeper and more robust understanding of inheritance, zygosity, genotype and phenotype, and calculating probabilities of inherited alleles using the Punnett Square.

On December 18, 2021, “hemorrhagic fever” appeared in the news, and it was thought to be related to eating strawberries. In this practice, based on the epidemic, we instructed students to conduct self-investigation on hemorrhagic fever and Hantavirus, and guided students to perform an objective analysis of “hemorrhagic fever.” This increases students' motivation for active learning and interest in the course, and also improves students' ability to obtain information and scientifically analyze the occurrence of epidemics.