HHMI Curricular Collaborations Meeting

On January 13–15, 2014, Laura Le, Laura Ziegler, and Andy Zieffler participated in the HHMI Curricular Collaborations meeting that took place at the Howard Hughes Medical Initiative center in Chevy Chase, MD. The meeting included HHMI grant awardees whose grant focus was on curricular innovation through multi-institution collaboration.

Laura and Laura "re-sample" poses from the Harmon Trophy which was awarded to Howard Hughes in 1936 and 1938 as the world's most outstanding aviator.

Our work is building and evaluating an assessment of quantitative skills and reasoning for biology students. This work started in June, 2013 when science educator/researchers from several liberal arts colleges—the grant includes Bryn Maar, Claremont McKenna, Emory, Harvey Mudd, Lewis & Clark, Macalester, Morehouse, Oberlin, and St. Olaf—gathered to brainstorm in Portland, OR. The conversations in Portland led to an initial version of an instrument that was piloted at many of these schools.

This meeting we spent several more hours refining both our vision/goal for the instrument. Pilot results were used to also help further flesh out the instrument. Next steps include making revisions and a second piloting.

We had several speakers and learned about many different projects throughout the meetings, including learning about the new MCAT, which will be administered starting in 2016.