The nation's powerhouse research universities are still getting failing marks in teaching undergraduate biology, concluded attendees at a workshop held August 16–19 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UWM). The 37 workshop participants came primarily from those very Research I universities (national leaders in federal support for science research), including University of North Carolina, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State, Penn State, Cornell, and the University of Michigan.

"One of the concerns is we're not teaching conceptual thinking. We, as a profession, tend to emphasize the individual facts and factoids and not the overriding concepts that bridge ideas in science," said speaker Jo Handelsman, a UWM professor of plant pathology. Handelsman is one of 20 recipients of $1-million Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grants for improving undergraduate classroom instruction. Recipients were picked for both their research prowess and their ability to develop innovative ways of teaching.

Discussions about improving undergraduate instruction at major research universities are a hardy perennial, with a lineage stretching from educational philosopher John Dewey to the 1998 Boyer Commission report. The UWM workshop also had roots in the BIO2010 report first published in 2002 by the National Research Council's Board on Life Sciences (BLS).

"As the BIO2010 committee was doing their research and gathering information, they kept coming across all sorts of innovative approaches at liberal arts colleges, and they didn't come across as many at Research I universities," said Kerry Brenner, a BLS staff officer and an organizer of the workshop. "Most of the members of the BIO2010 committee are faculty members at Research I universities, and a lot of them, as they were hearing these presentations said, 'Why aren't we doing that at Yale, or something along those lines,'" Brenner said.

The workshop, intended to be the first of several aimed at improving undergraduate biology education, was organized into a number of small group sessions in which participants discussed a variety of teaching approaches aimed at engaging students in the subject matter by "making it more like real science," with exercises in which the outcomes of experiments are unknown. Another emphasis was developing curricula to teach undergraduates to communicate their results.

A major concern of the workshop was also helping to raise awareness among participants of the literature on pedagogy. University teachers in biology typically pay little attention to that literature, said Handelsman, and there is little interaction among faculty members on how best to teach.

"Fully engaging" the research community in education is another priority, said Peter J. Bruns, now an HHMI vice president of grants and special programs and for decades prior a faculty member at Cornell University. Yet, participants noted, the discipline-structured university does not offer incentives for such efforts. For instance, while the BIO2010 report emphasized the need for bringing chemistry, physics, and math into biology, universities typically don't credit faculty for interdisciplinary teaching efforts.

With such concerns in mind, some participants spoke of inviting department chairs and other university administrators to future workshops on improving teaching.