by Ben Roberts, CEO of Codon Learning
Recently, I had the chance to sit down with education researcher and textbook author Scott Freeman about his new project Introducing the Life Sciences with Codon Learning. I kept the conversation focused on five key questions that kept coming up with introductory biology instructors.
Every element in this project is backed by evidence in the literature on student learning. In a textbook, essentially nothing is.
What makes this project different from traditional textbooks and online homework systems?
A couple things come to mind:
Textbooks are organized around comprehensive content coverage; this project is organized around learning objectives that were endorsed by over 700 instructors. Textbooks include anything that could possibly be mentioned by any instructor in any intro course for any reason; this project is stripping unnecessary content by focusing on the stuff that the teaching community has said students really need to learn well.
This project’s online assessments are aligned with learning objectives, scaffolded by cognitive challenge, and focused on building metacognitive skills. They help students learn how to study. Traditional homework systems and test banks provide lots of low-level questions but no structure for novice students to follow so they can get better, and almost no assessment on the analytical and scientific process skills that we all want to teach.
Every element in this project is backed by evidence in the literature on student learning. In a textbook, essentially nothing is.
The LOs, assessments, and classroom activities in this project are all aligned—meaning that they implement backward design. No textbook has ever attempted this.
(2) What’s your motivation to work on this project?
For years I’ve been saying that someone needed to produce a low-cost curriculum that implemented everything the literature is telling us about how to maximize student learning—and especially about how to support success by groups that have been minoritized in STEM. I finally decided I had to put up or shut up.
(3) What’s the story behind the NSF effort to create a common set of LOs?
I was at least peripherally involved in the Vision and Change report, the BioCore Guide, the BioSkills Guide, and the BioMAPS assessments. The next step was to produce lesson-level LOs that aligned with all that previous work, so I helped organize an NSF-sponsored team that is doing just that. We’ve completed the work on the LOs for majors intro and have a paper in prep. It should be submitted in a few months and published late this year (2023) or early next (2024).
(4) Why did you choose to work with Codon?
Let me count the ways:
Before Codon, no one had ever designed ground-up curriculum materials that implemented backward course design and high structure course design, much less insights from the cognitive science literature on metacognition and self-regulated learning. They are working at an entirely different level of sophistication than any company I’ve run across.
They are committed to making a comprehensive curriculum for intro bio available at about a third of the cost of a traditional textbook-and-website package.
Their people are fun. Just as important, they are not the type of technologists that staff EdTech companies or the type of sales people that staff textbook companies. They can do technology and they know how to get their product out there, but they are teachers above all else.
(5) What else would you like the community to know about your work in improving biology education?
The literature shows that high structure courses—with pre-class preparation, intensive active learning in class, and well-designed exam practice—can reduce or even eliminate historic gaps in student performance based on sex or race or family income. Codon’s Introduction to the Life Sciences gives you everything you need to implement a high structure course. So if you are really committed to supporting DEI, you should give this project a close look.
If you’re curious to learn more about Scott Freeman’s work in education—as a researcher, textbook author, and teacher—there’s a more detailed interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Beckie Supiano, which was abbreviated and published in this University of Washington report. Also, Scott recently published a commentary in Inside Higher Education with Elli Theobald, also at the University of Washington and a research collaborator, entitled Is Lecturing Racist?