Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education

Several recent regional and national research initiatives, reports and colloquies have provided the Undergraduate Biology Education (UBE) community the conversational framework and research questions that aim to scale improvement to the UBE enterprise. Nevertheless, significant advances in our ability to move to these evidence-driven practices into reality is being challenged by many economic, social, political and psychological barriers. Additionally, and in some cases, evidence-driven practice has been difficult to initiate, engender and measure. Despite these barriers, many communities of practice have managed to change and improve UBE while others have contributed research efforts to help address these challenges. The UBE community still needs novel ideas and research that addresses how change agents, communities of practice and educational researchers can best foster and actualize changes to improve UBE and student learning. This conference will bring together researchers, practitioners and leaders in the UBE field to confer and communally discuss recent research findings that should help attendees understand how change can be fostered and implemented to more effectively scale improvements to UBE. Based on need, some funding will be available to help defray costs of attending the GRC-UBE meeting.