The integration of postmodern thinking in the sciences, especially in biology, has been subject to harsh criticism. Contrary to Enlightenment ideals of objectivity and neutrality in the scientific method, the postmodern stance holds that truth is relative, not universal, and therefore progress is ambiguous. The effect of postmodern thought has ramifications that extend from the distrust of preexisting scientific conclusions to questions about the impact of progress in society. It also reflects skepticism about the scientific endeavor. Especially when postmodern ideas are considered to have gained traction, the anti-postmodern critique has become harsher. At stake is whether postmodern notions are indeed irrelevant, and-even more important-whether they compromise scientific progress. The conditional significance of universals in biology and the role of historicity in the evolutionary process makes biology different from the other natural sciences and subjects it to the postmodern critique. This article argues that rather than being viewed as a science that seeks universals, biology should be viewed as a construct, more relevant to a technology, aiming to attain functionalities. Such recognition may fuel progress and assist biology in attaining its ultimate goal, which is to address the most intricate questions about the living world.

Students with strong metacognitive skills are positioned to learn and achieve more than peers who are still developing their metacognition. Yet, many students come to college without well-developed metacognitive skills. As part of a longitudinal study on metacognitive development, we asked when, why, and how first-year life science majors use metacognitive skills of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Guided by the metacognition framework, we collected data from 52 undergraduates at three institutions using semi-structured interviews. We found that first-year students seek study recommendations from instructors, peers, and online resources when they plan their study strategies. First-year students struggle to accurately monitor their understanding and benefit when instructors help them confront what they do not yet know. First-year students evaluate the effectiveness of their study plans at two specific points: immediately after taking an exam and/or after receiving their grade on an exam. While first-year students may be particularly open to suggestions on how to learn, they may need help debunking myths about learning. First-year students acknowledge they are still learning to monitor and welcome formative assessments that help them improve the accuracy of their monitoring. First-year students may be primed to receive guidance on their metacognition at the points when they are most likely to evaluate the effectiveness of their study strategies and plans. Based on our results, we offer suggestions for instructors who want to support first-year students to further develop their metacognition.

Natural Killer (NK) cells play a crucial role as effector cells within the tumor immune microenvironment, capable of identifying and eliminating tumor cells through the expression of diverse activating and inhibitory receptors that recognize tumor-related ligands. Therefore, harnessing NK cells for therapeutic purposes represents a significant adjunct to T cell-based tumor immunotherapy strategies. Presently, NK cell-based tumor immunotherapy strategies encompass various approaches, including adoptive NK cell therapy, cytokine therapy, antibody-based NK cell therapy (enhancing ADCC mediated by NK cells, NK cell engagers, immune checkpoint blockade therapy) and the utilization of nanoparticles and small molecules to modulate NK cell anti-tumor functionality. This article presents a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in NK cell-based anti-tumor immunotherapy, with the aim of offering insights and methodologies for the clinical treatment of cancer patients.

Advancing equity and justice in undergraduate biology education requires research to address the experiences of disabled students. Scholars working in disability studies have developed models of disability that inform Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). To date, DBER literature has been predominantly informed by the medical and social models of disability. The medical model focuses on challenges that affect people with disabilities on an individual basis, while the social model focuses on how one\'s surrounding environment contributes to the construction of disability. In this essay, we discuss past DBER research and opportunities for future research using each of these models. We will also discuss a third, less commonly used model that offers exciting opportunities to drive future research: complex embodiment. Complex embodiment positions disability as a social location that reflects a greater societal value structure. Further examining this value structure reveals how ability itself is constructed and conventionally understood to be hierarchical. Additionally, we explain epistemic injustice as it affects disabled people, and how future education research can both address and counteract this injustice. We discuss how expanding the frameworks that serve as lenses for DBER scholarship on disability will offer new research directions.

Biology education researchers seek to improve biology education, particularly at the introductory level, yet there is little documentation about what is actually happening in introductory biology. To characterize the landscape of learning expectations for introductory biology, we analyzed course-level learning objectives (n = 1108) and course schedules from 188 nonmajor, mixed major, and major introductory biology syllabi. We analyzed syllabi collected from a diverse range of U.S. institution types to uncover insights about instructional design decisions for introductory biology. Our analysis revealed two distinct nonmajor course types: content and issues-based courses. We found syllabi tend to focus on low-cognitive skills and factual content that is essentially a march in step with a typical textbook table of contents, rarely including core competencies or socioscientific issues (SSIs) other than in nonscience major issues-based courses. Our work contributes more evidence that faculty struggle to write course-level learning objectives. Our findings suggest that there is much work to do if Vision and Change are to become more than simply a vision-to be actualized as change-including developing CLOs for introductory biology as a first step toward creating actionable instructional change.

Causal mechanistic reasoning is a thinking strategy that can help students explain complex phenomena using core ideas commonly emphasized in separate undergraduate courses, as it requires students to identify underlying entities, unpack their relevant properties and interactions, and link them to construct mechanistic explanations. As a crossdisciplinary group of biologists, chemists, and teacher educators, we designed a scaffolded set of tasks that require content knowledge from biology and chemistry to construct nested hierarchical mechanistic explanations that span three scales (molecular, macromolecular, and cellular). We examined student explanations across seven introductory and upper-level biology and chemistry courses to determine how the construction of mechanistic explanations varied across courses and the relationship between the construction of mechanistic explanations at different scales. We found non-, partial, and complete mechanistic explanations in all courses and at each scale. Complete mechanistic explanation construction was lowest in introductory chemistry, about the same across biology and organic chemistry, and highest in biochemistry. Across tasks, the construction of a mechanistic explanation at a smaller scale was associated with constructing a mechanistic explanation for larger scales; however, the use of molecular scale disciplinary resources was only associated with complete mechanistic explanations at the macromolecular, not cellular scale.

Biology education research provides important guidance for educators aiming to ensure access for disabled students. However, there is still work to be done in developing similar guidelines for research settings. By using critical frameworks that amplify the voices of people facing multiple forms of marginalization, there is potential to transform current biology education research practices. Many biology education researchers are still in the early stages of understanding critical disability frameworks, such as Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), which consists of seven tenets designed to explore the intersecting experiences of ableism and racism. Our Research Methods Essay uses DisCrit as a model framework and pulls from other related critical disability frameworks to empower disabled voices in biology education research. Drawing from existing scholarship, we discuss how biology education researchers can design, conduct, and share research findings. Additionally, we highlight strategies that biology education scholars can use in their research to support access for participants. We propose the creation and sharing of Access and Equity Maps to help plan-and make public-the steps researchers take to foster access in their research. We close by discussing frequently asked questions researchers may encounter in taking on critical frameworks, such as DisCrit.

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Introductory biology for majors is one of the most consequential courses in STEM, with annual enrollments of several hundred thousand students in the United States alone. To support increased student success and meet current and projected needs for qualified STEM professionals, it will be crucial to redesign majors biology by using explicit learning objectives (LOs) that can be aligned with assessments and active learning exercises. When a course is designed in this way, students have opportunities for the practice and support they need to learn, and instructors can collect the evidence they need to evaluate whether students have mastered key concepts and skills. Following an iterative process of review, revision, and evaluation, which included input from over 800 biology instructors around the country, we produced a nationally endorsed set of lesson-level LOs for a year-long introductory biology for major\'s course. These LOs are granular enough to support individual class sessions and provide instructors with a framework for course design that is directly connected to the broad themes in Vision and Change and the general statements in the BioCore and BioSkills Guides. Instructors can implement backward course design by aligning these community endorsed LOs with daily and weekly learning activities and with formative and summative assessments.

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