TABLE 2.
Summary of findings
| Instructors’ perceptions | Evidence from quotes |
|---|---|
| Instructors valued social interactions that promoted camaraderie and diverse ideas. | “I guess there’s the departmental camaraderie that’s developed from the FLC meetings, and it becomes a lot easier to talk about problems that we’re having in classes because we can focus in on particular issues that are common to all of our courses. Regardless of the level or what not. It’s not just a session where we complain about students who don’t know anything or whatever. We can actually have a reasonable conversation about—It’s clear that none of our students at any of our classes get this one particular thing.”—Wallace, Institution D“Basically, having different perspectives on, for example, teaching evolution is helpful because we got a guy in the FLC that does evolution and teaches an upper-level evolution course. He’s like a different kind of biology guy than we are. That’s really, really helpful.”—Evelyn, Institution A |
| Instructors internalized new insights into student thinking. | “Students were still struggling with the concept of the stop codon not causing transcription to stop, but they got that it caused translation to stop. The other thing that the AACR questions revealed to me is that students didn’t know where to start transcription and start translation. Even though it said, ‘Here, it’s the plus one start site for transcription,’ some of them still started in the untranslated region. Another thing was that a lot of them forgot about the idea that translation starts somewhere else other than the beginning of the transcript. Those were the things that I saw in their responses, so then I would go back and talk to my students about them.”—Stephanie, Institution B |
| Instructors internalized questions and plans for improving teaching. | “[AACR questions and reports] give you some snapshot of student thinking before and after you did something in class. I can ask an AACR question before and after and use it as a particular tool to get an idea of whatever it’s measuring. Then, the report tells me, ‘Did we move the needle at all?’ I think it’s useful in that way so I can adjust my teaching. Because if it didn’t change at all, then you’ll have to ask yourself, ‘Is what I did in class really having an impact?’”—Kenneth, Institution B“I think it gives you a good idea of what the misconceptions are, what they don’t know and what you can focus on. Like when I teach the genetic code next year, … I’ll make sure to cover the misconceptions that came out from the AACR questions and the answers.”—Annalisa, Institution C |