Abstract
With a primary objective to engage students in the process of science online, we transformed a long-standing laboratory course for first-year science students into a more accessible, immersive experience of current biological research using a narrow and focused set of primary literature and the CREATE pedagogy. The efficacy of the CREATE approach has been demonstrated in a diversity of higher education settings and courses. It is, however, not yet known if CREATE can be successfully implemented online with a large, diverse team of faculty untrained in the CREATE pedagogy. Here, we present the transformation of a large-enrollment, multi-section, multi-instructor course for first-year students in which instructors follow different biological research questions but work together to reach shared goals and outcomes. We assessed students’: (1) science self-efficacy and (2) epistemological beliefs about science throughout an academic year of instruction fully administered online as a result of ongoing threats posed by COVID-19. Our findings demonstrate that novice CREATE instructors with varying levels of teaching experience and ranks can achieve comparable outcomes and improvements in students’ science efficacy in the virtual classroom as a teaching team. This study extends the use of the CREATE strategy to large, team-taught, multi-section courses and shows its utility in the online teaching and learning environment.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We rewrote the text slightly and adjusted the figures.
