Project Grant 2514310

This federal Project Grant award of $307,527 from the National Science Foundation's STEM Education program (CFDA 47.076) supports research to define the latent and social characteristics of active learning environments in biology classrooms across the country. The research project, conducted by Drexel University, aims to identify instructor and student behaviors and interactions that contribute to the effectiveness of active learning in improving students' understanding of core biology concepts. The 2-year project will use video, survey, and interview data from a national sample of biology classrooms to achieve three key goals: 1) identifying latent profiles of instructor and student behaviors in active learning environments, 2) describing the structure of classroom social networks across the identified behavioral profiles, and 3) using structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between the observed classroom characteristics and students' mastery of biology content knowledge. The findings from this research could provide practical guidance for instructors on supporting active learning in their classrooms.