Biology Education

About Us

The Biology Education Area is a group for people who are interested in teaching and in teaching-related research.  Our common goal is to promote high quality instruction and enhance learning by applying educational research to course and curricular design.  This area transcends sub-disciplinary boundaries by working with other research areas to help answer discipline-specific questions related to teaching and learning methodology.

Faculty and students who affiliate with other research areas may affiliate secondarily with Biology Education (and vice-versa) if their teaching-related work or research may be supported by interactions within the Biology Education Area.  Therefore, members and affiliates of our area include:

1. research-active faculty who complement their discipline-specific research with educational innovation

2. faculty whose primary role is now teaching

3. faculty members who primarily affiliate with the Purdue International Biology Education Research Group (PIBERG), and 

4. non tenure-track instructors.

In the Biology Education Area, we focus on improving the quality of biology education at Purdue and around the world. Members of our area participate in a range of interdisciplinary activities that attempt to promote student success in biology by improving study and teaching methods.  Scholarship in the Biology Education research area focuses on:

• developing Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
• innovating classroom and laboratory instruction to improve teaching and learning effectiveness
• promoting retention and graduation of graduate and undergraduate students in Biology
• faculty development
• education of and outreach to High School Biology teachers

Download a letter from our Convener (PDF: 334KB) about opportunities for graduate students. By highlighting what our faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and other affiliates have been doing to promote student success in biology, the Biology Education Area is mobilizing the department, the university, and professional societies to educate the next generation to develop the advanced reasoning and problem-solving abilities that are so critical to new discoveries in the life sciences. Note: these projects are externally funded.

Biology Education News

• The road not taken: host infection status influences parasite host-choice
• Pelaez elected Fellow of American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science
• A CURE for learning about experimentation
• Pelaez, Gardner and Anderson Presented Advancing Competencies in Experimentation - Biology (ACE-Bio) at SABER
• A community-building framework for collaborative research coordination across the education and biology research disciplines
• Of mice and worms: are co-infections with unrelated parasite strains more damaging to definitive hosts?