Much of the lab's scholarship involves researching student understanding of essential concepts in biology and the development of activities and assessments based on that foundational work. For example, we spent many years studying student misconceptions about meiosis, proposed a framework to explain why it is so hard for students, and developed hands-on activities to demystify it.  Current projects include comparing expert and novice ideas about ATP hydrolysis, protein folding, and gene expression.

DNA is depicted in many different ways, which may or may not be clear to learners.  Visual literacy refers to a person's ability to "read" (interpret) and "write" (draw/create) scientific representations.  The image here is from a project involving a card-sorting task that investigates the differences between novices and experts in how they categorize images. As students gain experience they become more expert-like in their performance on the task.  The tool is available for use by instructors for teaching and/or assessment purposes. A current project is comparing how students draw and explain pictures of DNA, genes, and chromosomes.

The DNA Landscape is a teaching and research tool that describes figures of DNA in two dimensions: scale and abstractness. Undergraduate biology textbooks tend to focus on particular parts of the landscape, and certain subfields use particular nodes more than others.  We hypothesize that students may have difficulty moving between nodes or recognizing the same concept with a different type of image. A current project involves developing an online tool to allow students to explore connections between parts of the landscape. 

Math is essential to all science, and biology is no different. Genetics in particular requires students to utilize skills such as modeling complex systems, understanding probabilities, and using logic to solve problems. It is also highly reliant on computer programming and working with big datasets in the 21st century. We are interested in discovering where students need help in these areas and developing assessments and interventions to improve them. Current work is focusing on pedigree analysis and Punnett squares.

I am one of the leaders of the Undergraduate Genetics Education Network (UGEN), a nation-wide group of undergraduate educators who are all interested in improving genetics education for undergraduates. We hold a free online, interactive, 5-hour workshop every year in January that provides instructors with new ideas, materials and resources to bring to their courses.  I am also involved in researching instructor perceptions about and use of national recommendations about biology education and helping people to bring these ideas into their classrooms (PALM Vision & Change).