Best Practices for Designing Educational Modules using Collections Data: A Suggested Workflow

Natural history collections data can be used to teach many of the core concepts of biology through active and inquiry-based investigations. This type of student-centered pedagogy is one of the key recommendations of Vision and Change, based on evidence arising from undergraduate biology education research that has identified a suite of student-centered pedagogical techniques shown to be effective in promoting student learning. The natural history collections community has an exciting opportunity to partner with educators and education researchers to explore how biodiversity data can be incorporated into the development and evaluation of educational materials that engage students in investigations of authentic, complex, global, and interdisciplinary questions. Such questions are the topic of current collections-based biodiversity research and are ripe for incorporating collaborative learning activities, community participation, and use of societally-relevant case studies and science in action. Students can generate their own hypotheses about a variety of evolutionary, ecological, and environmental questions and test them using the biodiversity data available from digitized natural history collections. BLUE (Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education) is an interdisciplinary group of biodiversity scientists, collections professionals, and biology education specialists focused on integrating these types of biodiversity data into undergraduate biology curricula. In this session, we will present a suggested workflow, developed by BLUE based on the principles of backwards design and scientific teaching, for the development of educational materials using biodiversity data.