Navigating Transitions in Undergraduate Biology Education

Research in undergraduate biology education indicates that learners, educators, and scholars must successfully transition across learning environments, institutions, programming, and types of work. For instance, learners transition from pre-college to college education, from two-year to four-year colleges, from learning about discoveries in classrooms to producing discoveries in the lab and the field, and from being students to becoming professionals in their desired careers. Educators transition from doctoral and postdoctoral training that emphasizes development of biological expertise to careers that require expertise in curriculum, instruction, and student development. Furthermore, biology education researchers transition from training in education or in biological research to studying teaching and learning in biology per se. Finally, learners, educators, and scholars in undergraduate biology education can experience transitions that may align with their identities, support their development of professional identities, or clash with or undermine their identities. The 2021 UBER GRC will feature cutting-edge, unpublished research from high-profile and emerging scholars studying these and other transition points in the undergraduate biology education space.