CREATE a Revolution in - Specialized Research AI at MIT

CREATE a Revolution in
Undergraduates’ Understanding
of Science: Teach through Close
Analysis of Scientific Literature

Sally G. Hoskins

The teaching of science to undergraduates aligns poorly with the practice of sci-
ence, leading many students to conclude that research is boring and researchers
themselves are antisocial geniuses. Creativity, a key driver of scientific progress,
is underemphasized or ignored altogether in many classrooms, as teaching fo-
cuses on the complex integrated concepts and voluminous amounts of informa-
tion typical of STEM curricula. Faculty, largely untrained in science education
per se, teach largely as they were taught, through lectures based in textbooks.
This situation could change, and students’ understanding of research practice
could be fostered relatively easily, if faculty began teaching classes focused on
the journal articles they read in their professional lives. In this essay, I outline a
novel scaffolded approach to guiding students in a) deciphering the complexi-
ties of scientific literature and b) the process of gaining new understanding of
who scientists are, what they do, how they do it, and why.

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“Activity without understanding seems to be a regular feature of
classroom life for science students in American schools.”1

“Argument and debate are common in science, yet they are
virtually absent from science education.”2

“All too often biology education appears to be defined by trivia–
an impression that can alienate students from what is an inherently
highly personal and intellectually fascinating subject.”3

S cience professors want students to learn how to think deeply and criti-

cally about key concepts; retain understanding developed in class; and
sharpen analytical abilities that can be applied in novel situations. Yet

138

© 2019 by Sally G. Hoskins
Published under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01764

what many science courses actually require from students–mere recall–does
not promote the development of these skills. An undergraduate can complete
multiple science courses by passing exams, yet have only a fragmented under-
standing of science. As a result, too many students lack the ability to apply cre-
atively what was learned; for example, to relate physical and chemical prin-
ciples to biological systems.4 In upper-level electives, which should build on
foundational knowledge acquired in prerequisite classes, teachers find them-
selves reteaching fundamentals that students previously “learned” in prereq-
uisite courses, but did not understand or retain. Current approaches to under-
graduate STEM education are failing many students, and have been for years.
The National Research Council compendium How People Learn proposed at
the dawn of the twenty-first century that “to develop competence in an area
of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge,
(b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and
(c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.”5
Multiple lines of evidence support the argument that college science teach-
ing errs by overemphasizing factual knowledge (via extreme content cover-
age) while neglecting the more complex issues of building conceptual frame-
works. Students need to spend more time focused on synthesizing, extending,
and applying what they have learned. Further, current teaching practices vir-
tually ignore scientific creativity, a key driver of scientific advancement.

The nature of science is similarly neglected. Faculty members’ deep
knowledge of how scientific research is done is rarely communicated in the
classroom, and opportunities for developing students’ reasoning and argu-
mentation skills are largely missed, as instructors and students alike confront
the ballooning quantities of information. Despite years of efforts at reform
supported by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, the typical science course is still a lecture, and though
faculty members may recognize the importance of higher-order cognitive
skills, many test primarily for recall of details.6

Multiple attempts to reform college science teaching are in progress, with
many focused on increasing student engagement.7 These are often conveyed
through publications, workshops for college professors, instructors, or post-
doctoral fellows, and, in some cases, the addition of pedagogical training to
graduate curricula. Ideally, changes in faculty members’ (and future facul-
ty members’) understanding of best practices for teaching and learning will
trickle down to the benefit of college students. This process, however, will
be slow. Even faculty members who are motivated to hone their skills by at-
tending teaching workshops find it difficult to shift their classroom practices

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148 (4) Fall 2019Sally G. Hoskins

substantially.8 When this training technique has been analyzed, only limited
data support its efficacy.9

Many reform proposals seek more engaging ways for professors to convey
material from college textbooks. We need a revolution in undergraduate sci-
ence education: with teaching primarily based not on textbooks but on pri-
mary literature, and classroom focus on depth rather than breadth. Of course,
core factual content is necessary, but it should not dominate what students
learn. Just as one does not need native fluency in Spanish in order to travel
successfully in Madrid, students do not need encyclopedic knowledge of sci-
entific facts in order to engage in scientific discourse.

In this model, “fundamentals” courses will be present, but streamlined.
Broad-coverage textbooks will serve as references rather than as the back-
bones of syllabi, and students will learn to read, analyze, and understand pri-
mary literature, and go on to review, intelligently criticize, and propose follow-
up studies for published research reports. In this process, they will be able to
define for themselves what they “need to know” and look up key content to
fill in gaps, without losing focus on the broader picture of the logic of a study.
They will see how the experiments or descriptive studies reported in a giv-
en paper led to interpretable evidence. In an unconventional but immensely
valuable step, students will gain insight into issues not reflected in published
success stories through an email Q&A encounter with authors. Class sessions
will resemble lab meetings that range over the nature of science, scientific cre-
ativity, the logic of study design, and the motivations of researchers, in addi-
tion to the findings and conclusions of individual papers. Such activities will
help students develop a deeper understanding of the subject at hand, coupled
with transferable analytical skills.

T here are many ways to teach using scientific literature. These include

methods for using individual data panels from a paper as the focus of
class discussion and providing closely annotated online versions of
papers with prompts and suggested activities for teachers and students.10 Pri-
mary literature–focused approaches have been adapted for large-enrollment
undergraduate and graduate courses.11 My focus here is primary literature
analysis through the CREATE strategy (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses
or questions, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next research study, En-
gage with the authors), which I began developing in collaboration with ge-
neticist Leslie Stevens in 2003.12 We felt that focusing on primary literature
would: 1) leverage professors’ deep understanding of the research process;
2) reveal to students how knowledge develops in science while consolidat-
ing their conceptual understanding of, in the initial iterations, biology; and

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesCREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science

3) provide insight into the nature of research careers and the people who
choose them.

In the past fifteen years, we and collaborators have evaluated the effective-
ness of this teaching and learning strategy using an array of cognitive and af-
fective assessments of a variety of student populations, across courses taught
by faculty at diverse two- and four-year institutions. The original CREATE
course was designed as an elective for upper-level students. Based on student
feedback, we developed an additional CREATE course for first-year students;
this freshman population included both future STEM and non-STEM majors.
The core tenets of the CREATE strategy are the same in both courses and both
use primary literature, although the readings differ. In the upper-level “Analy-
sis of Scientific Literature” CREATE course, papers (such as from Science, Neu-
ron, or Developmental Biology) are chosen to capitalize on upper-level students’
(theoretical) core understanding of STEM topics from previous courses. The
first-year “Introduction to Scientific Thinking” CREATE course uses literature
on topics (such as animal behavior, infant cognition, or distracted driving)
that do not require a foundational physics or chemistry background. Here, a
newspaper or Internet report is often used to introduce the subject before div-
ing into the primary literature. The first-year version of CREATE thus builds
on the foundation of students’ high school backgrounds. While many of
these students have not yet chosen their major field of study, like upper-level
CREATE students, they make significant gains, for example in critical think-
ing, self-efficacy, and expert-like scientific thinking, as well as in epistemolog-
ical maturation.13 Thus, for students who take a single general education sci-
ence course in college purely to fulfill a requirement, a CREATE course would
be substantially more beneficial than a mile-wide, inch-deep overview of gen-
eral biological topics, much like the high school biology courses that likely in-
spired some students to avoid STEM in college.14

CREATE courses are built using modules: sets of papers that were either
written in sequence by one lab or by multiple labs attacking the same chal-
lenge. CREATE instructors typically choose module topics that are within
their own expertise, and the CREATE website provides sample modules and
“road maps” for how to teach them.15 CREATE instructors do not teach by tell-
ing students about the papers, but coach the class to discover why and how a
given study was done and to think deeply about how (and sometimes if ) the
data drive particular conclusions. Classes are run much like lab meetings: stu-
dents are guided in a stepwise process of decoding and deconstructing/recon-
structing research studies (see Table 1). Substantial amounts of class time are
spent on discussion and interpretation of data, with students challenged to
analyze the data as if it were from their own research. For this constructivist

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148 (4) Fall 2019Sally G. Hoskins

Table 1
Steps of the CREATE Process

Step

Consider

Read

Elucidate
hypotheses
or research
questions

Analyze
and inter-
pret data

Think
of the next
experiment

Engage
with
authors or
experts

Activities
• Concept map introduction
• Review main concepts
• Relate old and new knowledge
• Define knowledge gaps for review
• Look up vocabulary, paraphrase key sentences
• Annotate figures
• Represent table data in graphical form
• Sketch “what went on in the lab or field” for each

experiment

• Retitle each figure in your own words
• Use the sketch of the study to derive question being

asked or hypothesis being addressed

• Use templates as a framework for interpreting data
• Learn to cope with jargon of scientific writing
• Determine the organization/logic of each experiment
• Discuss data in class
• Write bullet points for your own discussion
• Write your own title for the paper
• Design and sketch two different follow-up studies for a

given paper

• Pitch your experiment to a student grant panel
• Compare/debate/defend various proposed experiments
• Students brainstorm questions to ask
• Faculty member edits list, sends single survey once to

each author or expert

• Students annotate, reflect on, and discuss responses

Source: Adapted from Sally G. Hoskins and Leslie M. Stevens, “Learning our L.I.M.I.T.S.:
Less Is More In Teaching Science,” Advances in Physiology Education 33 (1) (2009).

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesCREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science

process to succeed, students must be very well prepared for each class session.
Passivity is not an option. We recognized that students were unaccustomed
to prepping intensely for class and devised methods to address this challenge.
Before class, students complete a variety of homework assignments that
require employing a combination of pedagogical tools, including concept
mapping, sketching, and paraphrasing key sentences (see Table 2). Students
build their own textbooks throughout the term by compiling homework ma-
terial and annotated research papers along with background information they
sought out to fill self-discovered gaps in their knowledge. These portfolios are
brought to every class and may be consulted during open-book exams. While
upper-level CREATE classes have foundational prerequisites, we find that stu-
dents have difficulty retrieving and applying knowledge from such courses;
thus, it is key for them to begin to assess what they do and do not know and
fill in where needed. In class, the instructor leads a discussion of each figure
and table of the paper, examining what was done in the lab or field to gener-
ate these data. This is an important step often skipped in traditionally taught
courses; many students are accustomed to analyzing results without consid-
ering how they were generated. This process is time-consuming but valuable.
After completing the data analysis of a given paper, students propose and de-
bate potential follow-up studies, experiencing the creativity and open-ended
nature of scientific exploration.

Important for their potential to evoke revolutionary change in science
pedagogy, CREATE teaching strategies can be easily learned and applied, since
they capitalize on skills that college faculty members already possess though
rarely employ in the classroom. As one faculty colleague noted, “I used to
spend the 48 hours before any class running around making PowerPoints.
Now my prep is my last ten years’ research experience in this field.” CREATE
faculty need not be active researchers; those who have engaged in research
for their graduate degrees also have deep knowledge of this art, which is rare-
ly brought to class. The CREATE website provides guidance for those whose
research experience is limited.

CREATE pedagogical approaches align well with advice from science edu-
cators, though the strategy was developed without strong influence from ed-
ucation literature. Like most college faculty members, Dr. Stevens and I were
largely unaware of that literature when we began crafting an approach that
could take students beyond a paper’s abstract when they “read” primary liter-
ature in science. Our subsequent research, including collaborations with sci-
entists Kristy Kenyon, Alison Krufka, David Lopatto, and Stanley Lo, has doc-
umented that students in CREATE courses make significant gains in critical
thinking, experimental design ability, content integration ability, self-efficacy,

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148 (4) Fall 2019Sally G. Hoskins

Table 2
The CREATE Strategy Fosters Creativity, Synthesis, and
Analytical Thinking

Pedagogical Tool

Concept mapping

Value for Students
• Explicitly relate old and new knowledge
• Build metacognitive skills
• Learn to visualize how data were generated in

Cartooning

the lab or in the field

Annotating figures
and transforming
tables

• Create a context for the data analysis
• Write identifiers and clarifying notes directly

onto figures

• Represent data from tables graphically
• Rewrite key sentences of the paper in your own

Paraphrasing

words

Analyzing data using
templates

Grant panel activity

Surveying paper
authors by email

• Learn to cope with jargon of scientific writing
• Determine the organization/logic of each

experiment

• Engage closely with data by triangulating

•

between figures, tables, methods, and results
Interpret results critically; evaluate the roles
of controls

• Practice creativity and synthetic thinking
• Hone critical skills of analysis
• Develop communication skills through
deliberation and debate of the proposed
experiments

• Gain insight into the people behind the papers
• Recognize that scientists are diverse, much like

the students themselves

• Change negative preconceptions of scientists

and research careers

Source: Adapted from Sally G. Hoskins, Leslie M. Stevens, and Kristy L. Kenyon, The
CREATE Teaching Handbook, unpublished.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesCREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science

and attitudes toward science.16 Students also undergo significant epistemolog-
ical maturation and show more sophisticated (scientist-like rather than nov-
ice-like) thinking after a single CREATE course.17 These courses are straightfor-
ward to develop and inexpensive to offer (there is no wet-lab component).

I n principle, CREATE courses could be easily added to college science cur-

ricula, but in practice, changing how college faculty members teach is a
tall order.18 Fifteen years of research on the CREATE strategy have pro-
duced substantial data supporting its efficacy, but faculty members do not
typically design courses or classroom approaches with reference to science
education literature.19 Many are constrained by long-standing tradition; for
example, around the “content” question. Professors may feel a responsibil-
ity to cover all the material of the voluminous textbooks typically assigned
for college courses. Yet covering is not teaching. At CREATE faculty devel-
opment workshops, it has been typical for participants from a wide range of
two- and four-year colleges and universities to note with frustration that their
upper-level students seem not to have a working understanding of key infor-
mation covered in course prerequisites, and that first-year students do not re-
member the material covered in their high school science classes.

Given the explosive growth of science since the mid-twentieth century,
even if students were to remember 100 percent of the facts from their founda-
tional STEM courses, they would not be prepared adequately for future scien-
tific, teaching, or biomedical careers, or to vote intelligently on science-based
issues of public policy. As knowledge expands and new techniques are devel-
oped, professors teach material that was not discovered until well after their
own college years, and those engaged in research use methods that did not
exist when they were working on their Ph.D.s.20 Remembering how to clone
1990s-style does not prepare one for CRISPR technology, but knowing how
to read and understand primary literature arguably does. Remembering all
the steps of mitosis (covered in middle school, high school, and virtually ev-
ery undergraduate general education biology textbook) does not prepare stu-
dents to take a stand on the question of vaccines. Whether or not students in
CREATE courses continue in science, they will benefit from having the ability
to evaluate scientific claims.

It is the nature of science to grow and change continually, yet traditional
educational approaches imply that if students master a finite amount of con-
tent, they will be prepared to go forward. Scientists constantly push into the
unknown, often developing new studies by brainstorming with colleagues
and working to interpret and understand unexpected data. Students, in con-
trast, often perform teacher-designed experiments with predictable results,

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148 (4) Fall 2019Sally G. Hoskins

and fail to engage fully in the scientific process. That is, science as presented in
typical classrooms only rarely reflects the practice of science. Many students
taught in traditional ways 1) do not remember or understand deeply key con-
tent; 2) do not gain insight into the research process, the nature of science, or
scientific creativity; 3) retain views of science and scientists based on nega-
tive stereotypes; 4) if STEM majors, change to a non-STEM field; or 5) if non-
STEM majors, do not gain a real understanding of how research relates to so-
cietal goals.21

H ow did we reach this impasse between what we know science to be

and how we teach it? Indisputably, faculty members play a key role
in students’ understanding of science. Yet unlike K–12 teachers, the
vast majority of college instructors have limited–or no–training in the fun-
damentals of teaching and learning. Neither how people learn nor current re-
search-based best classroom practices are a standard part of graduate or post-
graduate curricula in science, much less in the lives of newly hired assistant
professors. Lacking such guidance, many teach as they themselves were taught,
modeling the behaviors of their own favorite college teachers, usually lecturers.
Teaching higher-order thinking skills has proven particularly challenging.
Despite exhortations of decades of science education reform advocates, for
example in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s sci-
ence education reform report Vision and Change, the majority of college sci-
ence courses are still taught in lecture format.22 Regarding the consequences
of lecture, biologist Philip Camill notes,

Students exposed only to lecture information . . . are ill-prepared for graduate or
professional school where they will be required to think independently, develop
research programs, or react to novelty or uncertainty. More importantly, lectures
and cookbook labs squelch student curiosity because they leave no room for stu-
dents to take charge of their own learning.23

Today’s science students are constantly exposed to PowerPoint versions of
scientific processes that encourage a simplistic, linear, stepwise view, mask-
ing the often intriguingly tangled paths within research–plus the occasion-
al serendipity–that lead to discoveries. As noted by higher education schol-
ar Ian Kinchin, by the time a PowerPoint lecture has been prepared, the in-
tellectual work of disentangling and making sense of the complexity of the
topic at hand has all been done for the student before class, by the professor.24
The student receives (and may simply memorize) a distortedly vectorial view
of scientific discovery. Kinchin quotes John Dewey (definitely not discuss-
ing a PowerPoint in 1910): “Just because the order [of a lecture] is logical, it

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represents the survey of subject matter made by one who already understands
it, not the path of progress followed by a mind that is learning. . . . The latter
must be a series of tacks, zig-zag movements back and forth.”25

Putting this cognitive gap aside for a moment, one might expect that ex-
periencing the hands-on activities of physics, chemistry, and biology in se-
mester-long introductory courses that include labs would naturally lead stu-
dents to begin to think more like physicists, chemists, and biologists. In fact,
there is evidence that student thinking becomes significantly less expert, thus
more naive, over a semester in such courses.26 This finding is a clear signal
that there is a need to modify introductory STEM courses to introduce more
cognitive challenges.

D ata collected over decades indicate that many STEM-interested stu-

dents leave these majors due to disappointing experiences in intro-
ductory courses.27 Intriguingly, the attrition is apparently not be-
cause students doubt their intellectual abilities, but rather largely because
they are bored or overwhelmed by the material and the competitive atmo-
sphere. Students who persist have a hard time gaining and retaining an inte-
grated understanding of course material or a real understanding of how re-
search is done, or how science advances. Thus, traditional teaching of science,
a route often followed by faculty members because they survived it and/or be-
cause other job pressures mean they don’t have time to experiment with any-
thing that might be better, can have far-reaching negative consequences.

Participation in undergraduate research experiences can be pivotal for col-
lege students, inspiring some to choose research careers.28 However, if pre-
vious coursework has reinforced a distorted idea about science (such as “sci-
ence is boring”; “everything is known already”; or “it’s all in my textbook
waiting to be memorized”), students may avoid research opportunities. Stu-
dents who must work to support themselves may not have time for extracur-
ricular research. Distortions about “who” becomes a scientist are also rele-
vant. Popular culture conveys an image of scientists as loner geeks/geniuses,
potentially alienating anyone who is gregarious and does not have a straight-A
transcript from even considering hands-on research.

Editorials in science journals urge reform, yet the encyclopedic nature of
many twenty-first-century textbooks makes it difficult for students to under-
stand what science “is,” much less that biology, for example, has a primary lit-
erature of its own. By significantly underrepresenting scientific processes in
their illustrations, traditional textbooks for introductory biology have made it
difficult for students to recognize that the books’ facts and concepts were de-
rived from carefully designed research studies.29 Some textbooks, however,

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are grounded firmly in literature, for example, citing some four thousand au-
thors over twenty chapters.30 These help students recognize that there are
researchers behind the conclusions, but still, individual research studies are
compressed drastically, making it difficult for students to reconstruct the sci-
entific thinking underlying the conclusions presented. The development of
new textbooks focused in part on published data is a promising step, but there
are still large aspects of the research process missing from textbooks: for ex-
ample, the reality that scientists learn a great deal from experiments that fail
as well as from those that succeed, and that they constantly revise their work-
ing models in the face of unexpected results.31

As scientists, we should look at the data and draw the obvious conclusion.
Major change in STEM education at the college level is needed, and the soon-
er the better. Given the emphasis on grants and publications in tenure packag-
es, however, the current situation is unlikely to change in a top-down, admin-
istration-driven way. The post hoc efforts of including teaching workshops
in graduate training or using teaching assistantships (such as lab instructor-
ships) as opportunities for pedagogical development, while positive, do lit-
tle to prepare graduate students for the real rigors of designing and teaching
classes. What this implies about how universities value teaching and learning
compared with the many other activities in which their faculties are expected
to engage is an issue for a different essay.

Refocusing science pedagogy largely on primary literature would leverage
preexisting skills of faculty members and has the potential to benefit students
and teachers alike, but this will require a major shift in teaching and learning
methodologies. Primary literature is a key medium of science research that is
usually ignored altogether in the undergraduate STEM classroom. When liter-
ature is used, it is often approached superficially, as when a student “presents”
a twenty-five-page paper in five minutes, recapping the abstract and conclud-
ing paragraph, and tacitly accepting all the findings, then sitting down to
watch classmates perform the same ritual. In literature and history, among
other subjects, primary sources form the skeleton of many course syllabi. This
can be equally powerful in undergraduate science classes, as learning to de-
cipher primary scientific literature can help build sophisticated reading and
critical analysis skills while simultaneously illustrating how new knowledge
is generated, evaluated, and built upon. To gain perspective on how biologi-
cal research is done, in order to really understand where the textbook infor-
mation comes from, students need fluency and experience in the language of
the field, as well as some sense of what it is like to be a working scientist. To
gain critical thinking skills, students must engage in, and practice with, ac-
tivities involving analysis, synthesis, and higher-order reasoning.32 To learn

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to evaluate societal issues influenced by science, students must read beyond
content-rich introductory science textbooks focused on “science basics,” and
learn to decode the studies whose outcomes lead to new understanding in sci-
ence. Higher-order thinking can be promoted in a cost-effective way through
the close analysis of primary literature.

A n important aspect of the CREATE process involves challenging stu-

dents to tackle the question of how to follow up a given study. After
fully analyzing a given paper, students individually design their own
“next experiments” or follow-up research studies (recognizing that not all re-
search involves experimentation), and then vet each other’s proposals in an
anonymous grant-review exercise (no one knows who designed which study).
In our experience, this is the first time in a science course, whether in middle
school, high school, or college, that students have been asked to exercise cre-
ativity and design a research study based on their own original idea. In the pro-
cess, students recognize that research is rarely “finished,” even though papers
come to definite conclusions. The process also illustrates that a given published
paper could be followed up in multiple ways and that choices are made based
on the most recent data and not predestined from the start of a research study.
Depending on class size, there may be four to six student panels that delib-
erate by looking at the logic of the designs proposed by their peers, considering
how a study flows from the work just analyzed, and factoring in the original-
ity of the proposal and the potential impact of the work proposed. Logic- and
evidence-based thinking can be done by students at any level, because it is not
dependent on any particular body of background information beyond what
was studied in class. The fact that the CREATE approach successfully builds
both upper-level and first-year students’ critical thinking skills and self-effica-
cy argues that the traditional approach–that the “first years of a STEM major
are for the basics; then we’ll get to the higher-order thinking in later years”–
is needlessly limiting.33 Students at all levels enjoy the freedom to create fol-
low-up studies and to argue collegially about which are best, using evidence to
back up their claims and thereby hone critical analytic skills. The faculty mem-
ber may guide individual panels’ discussions with prompts, and research-ac-
tive faculty may also provide insight from personal experiences on such panels.
Experience has shown that these grant panels–all weighing the same con-
tenders–often rank proposals differently. This situation surprises the student
participants (“Experiment 6 was obviously the best! WHY did your panel pick
experiment 12?!”), underscoring how peer reviewers bring their own prefer-
ences and opinions to the table and the reality that more than one excellent
follow-up option exists. Education research supports the idea that projects

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like this, which lack a single “correct” answer, stimulate creativity.34 After the
grant panel, students are highly interested in the follow-up the authors actu-
ally carried out, newly aware that the choice was one of a number of viable op-
tions. The process of analyzing a full paper, designing follow-ups, and evaluat-
ing them repeats with each paper in a set of two-to-four articles. This strategy
allows students to build their skills and illustrates both the conceptual flow of
a given project over a two- to ten-year period and shows research itself to be a
creative and open-ended process. Most of our data are derived from CREATE
courses in biology; findings in other disciplines, including chemistry and psy-
chology, while less extensive, are consistent with the biology findings.

T he intensive focus on research design and data analysis in the

CREATE classroom is complemented by a look at the people behind
the papers. Late in the term, students generate a set of questions for
authors of the papers they have analyzed. These are compiled by the instruc-
tor into a single survey that is emailed to each author, including principal in-
vestigators, postdocs, and graduate students. Responses reveal insider infor-
mation about the studies along with insights into the researchers’ lives and
motivations. These more personal reflections help dispel negative percep-
tions held by many students regarding research life (that it is lonely, boring,
and open only to straight-A geniuses, for example). In a given semester, all au-
thors are sent the same set of questions. Researchers seem to enjoy the oppor-
tunity to respond to students’ questions, and a response rate of more than 50
percent is typical. The spectrum of responses is broad, underscoring for stu-
dents that “scientists” are a widely diverse group of individuals with unique
ideas and backgrounds. These replies can provide revelatory insights to ques-
tions such as:

•

In your opinion, is it necessary to be “a brilliant person” to be a re-
search biologist?

• How do you balance career and family? (if applicable)
• Do you ever get bored? Or frustrated when experiments don’t work?

How do you deal with it?

• What would be your “dream discovery”?
• Have you encountered any ethical dilemmas along the way? How were

they resolved?

• What happens when there are differences of opinion within the lab?

Who decides?

• Are there any clinical applications of your work, and if so, what are

they?

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• How do you choose the next step in your research program? That is,
out of all the potential “research directions” to choose next, how do
you decide which to do?

Students annotate authors’ responses, noting comments that particular-
ly surprised or inspired them. Class discussion of the authors’ comments il-
luminates a number of rarely discussed aspects of science, including how the
“next step” is in fact chosen for a given project, how researchers respond to
setbacks, and that many successful scientists were not, in fact straight-A stu-
dents. Further, passion and persistence are more important than genius. Nu-
merous aspects of the nature of science also are highlighted: that knowledge
changes over time; that science is creative; and that rejected hypotheses are
critically important on the road to achieving understanding.

After the first three upper-level CREATE classes, we conducted postcourse
interviews of students to complement other cognitive and affective assess-
ments. We learned that even after three years of college science, students
(mostly graduating seniors) came into the class harboring quite negative
opinions about science and scientists. Such misapprehensions can deter stu-
dents from considering research careers. CREATE courses can refute such fal-
lacies, and the email survey likely contributes substantially to this by empha-
sizing the highly personal aspects of biological research.35

What follows is a series of student comments made during post-CREATE
course interviews. Their reflections illustrate four conclusions about the effi-
cacy of the model.36

CREATE changes students’ ideas about research:

“As far as research, I learned that one answer can lead to so many different things,
and every person has their own ideas about where the ideas will lead. And I
thought that was like the coolest thing, because I had always thought everybody
would go in the same direction.”

“I think the biggest, kind of like enlightenment for me is that you can have your
own ideas . . . and you can come up with your own interpretation of things and not
necessarily be ‘wrong.’ I think there is a lot more creativity behind science than
most people are aware of.”

“I always thought . . . that people do research and they spend all their lives on this
one topic, and then it doesn’t go right, and then, Oh, their whole life’s work is, you
know, screwed up. . . . But that’s not really the way it works. You keep changing,
and moving, and stopping/starting, 180-degree turn, stopping/starting, maybe go

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back to where you were originally and then move in a completely new direction,
so it’s just a process of discovery.”

CREATE changes students’ ideas about scientists:

“I thought [precourse] they were close-minded. They just had one specific thing
in mind and then bam-bam-bam they proved it and that was it. ‘This is my evi-
dence: a, b, c, d, e, f, g. Forget it; can’t refute it.’ That’s it. [Now] I think scientists,
they are always asking questions, they always want to know more. They have an
angle in mind, and hopefully they strive toward that point. But they may be devi-
ated from that by new discoveries along the way. Then they may have to reshape.
So I think that . . . they have to be open-minded in a way.”

“I learned how scientists think. Before, I thought scientists were like, you know,
‘machinery kind of people.’ . . . Somehow now they are more human. . . . It’s kind of
cool. . . . I feel like they are more relatable.”

“[Before, I thought] yeah, just geniuses. Straight As, 4.0s, they were like just
knockin’ it away. . . . Before, I thought they didn’t have any families; like ‘This Was
Their Life.’ But now I’m like, no, they have families, they have careers, they have
doctor’s appointments; they have everything going on. . . . You realize they’re peo-
ple, trying to balance life, family, career, everything, just like a normal person;
and anybody in the world . . . you know, like they are not just geniuses, that every-
thing comes simple to them. . . . They just have a better understanding of a partic-
ular subject. But they are people.”

CREATE changes students’ ideas about who can be a scientist:

“Who can be involved in scientific work? It’s not ‘very rich people’; it’s not the
professors alone, it’s not the students who are getting the As. But I think every-
body is capable of being involved in scientific work, provided he gets the correct
guidance. That’s what I found out.”

“I myself could be a scientist now. Before I was like, only ‘some kinds of people’
can be scientists and it has to be like these geniuses, who were, you know, like
eight times smarter–I learned that it can be anybody. Anyone can be a scien-
tist; it has to do with having a passion to do research, and just a drive, and not to
get bogged down by failed experiments and things not going right, but just to go
through a process, because there’s a thinking process you have to go through, of
elimination, and trying, and experimenting.”

“Research, I thought, was just like, ‘certain people’ can do it; not everyone can be
a scientist. Now I feel like if you train, if you get the right training and the right

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background knowledge . . . I could be a scientist if I wanted to. I could be a scien-
tist. . . . Before I was like: I wasn’t one of ‘those people’ that could do science, but
now, reading the papers . . . I realized that I can be a scientist if I wanted to. If I re-
ally worked hard towards it.”

Students perceive their gains in CREATE courses to be transferable:

“I walked away with skills that are going to help me in every single class I take
again, and even in life, really. I feel like I can take on my own taxes this year! Just
being able to sit down and focus and not get bogged down.”

“I think for any future class I take or even for my own personal interests, looking
for information and really understanding what’s out there is going to be a lot easi-
er for me. And I’m not going to be as afraid to read a twenty-page paper.”

“I’m not as intimidated when I’m learning something new, because I feel like this
whole semester we’ve been learning new things. So, it helped a lot. . . . Pretty much
in other biology classes they just give you information and ask you to spit it back
out . . . and this class was really neat because . . . it allows you to think of things on
your own and use your own creativity, so that was good.”

The CREATE strategy helps students develop a deep understanding of a
module’s papers, which provide insight into how knowledge in a research
area deepens over time. Moreover, the method works on multiple levels. In
upper-level CREATE courses, learning the specifics of methods (such as fluo-
rescence-activated cell sorting, confocal microscopy, CRISPR/Cas9 technol-
ogy, or immunoprecipitation) helps students see key principles of biology,
chemistry, and physics put to use, and emphasizes the multidisciplinary na-
ture of scientific research. In both the introductory and upper-level courses,
dissecting the logic of the experiments and closely analyzing the data help stu-
dents think like scientists. Class discussions, personal experiences related by
the professor, the repeated experimental design and grant panel activity, and
the author emails provide additional layers of insight into the nature of sci-
ence and of scientists. The components of CREATE likely work synergistically
to evoke the cognitive and affective outcomes documented to date.

Published papers are of course not transcripts of lab activities. Textbooks
largely omit the research process, and primary literature arguably sanitizes it,
presenting only the successful efforts. Experiments that led nowhere are (un-
derstandably) left out of published papers, and rejected hypotheses are not
discussed (unless the point of the paper is to upend a previously held idea).
The thought processes behind the studies are thus implied rather than stat-
ed. These important aspects of research projects are issues for the CREATE

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instructor to bring up in class. They are often also illuminated in the email
surveys. In response to the question, “If your experiment does not turn out as
expected, is this a problem? What do you do?” one author wrote, “I personal-
ly love it, because it means that it is time to check my premises and I thus may
be getting closer to making a truly new discovery.” A different author point-
ed out:

This happens all the time–especially early in a project while exploring ideas–but
is typically not a problem as long as things are working technically. One wants to
always be open to different models and seek answers with exploratory hypotheses
but an open mind. Something different than expected can in fact be exciting, be-
cause it can lead to deeper understanding. . . . Something was incomplete or wrong
about a prior held view.

Students reported expecting a different answer: that researchers would be
depressed or consider themselves failures. Instead, rejected hypotheses and
confusing results were recast as unsurprising aspects of scientific investiga-
tion, and often a stimulus leading to development of better ideas. To a student
question on whether the researcher had experienced “ethical dilemmas,” the
first respondent simply said “No.” The second responded, “Yes, and if any-
one tells you ‘no,’ they’re lying!” Overall, the email interview activity pro-
vides abundant insight into both the research process and researchers them-
selves–insight difficult or impossible to achieve in traditionally taught sci-
ence courses.

T he topics of scientific creativity and science as understood by the gen-

eral public deserve more comprehensive treatment than is possible
here, but teaching and learning with the CREATE strategy has impli-
cations for both. Because traditional science courses overemphasize content
at the expense of scientific reasoning, argumentation, and design, they render
scientific creativity virtually invisible.37 Unfortunately, creativity itself has
proven problematic in education: work at the K–12 level has suggested that
teachers may suppress student creativity rather than nurturing it; thus, a cre-
ative spark may end up being more of a burden than an asset for students.38
In CREATE classrooms, students find that designing creative follow-up stud-
ies can lead to success in the friendly competition of the grant panel process,
and they become increasingly aware of the creativity underlying scientific re-
search in general.

While every paper is, in principle, creative, papers also provide opportu-
nities for professors to emphasize the everyday smaller-scale creativity inher-
ent to research science. For example, one paper read in an upper-level CREATE

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biology elective examines how growth cones, the amoeba-like tips of grow-
ing nerve fibers, find their way in embryos. The paper opens with the au-
thors growing pieces of retina in sterile dishes and discovering that the reti-
nal growth cones collapse in response to treatment with a particular growth
factor. The investigators next carry out an integrated set of substudies of this
phenomenon defining dosages, time-courses, and specificities of the in vitro
assay. The bulk of the paper’s experiments then use the collapse assay to study
the molecular basis of this aspect of axon guidance in the visual system.

Students had never considered the fact that if you discover a phenomenon
like growth cone collapse, you need to characterize it experimentally before
moving forward. The investigators had no handbook to check for methodolo-
gy; proper dosages and timing needed to be determined empirically. Mulling
over issues like this helps students develop a richer understanding of research
design. In every CREATE course, students comment on their realization that
science is creative, or “more creative than I thought.” Data from multiple it-
erations of City College of New York CREATE classes on a Likert-style sur-
vey of student attitudes and beliefs show significant gains on a statement sug-
gesting that science is creative–gains not seen in a comparison non-CREATE
course.39 Thus, even in the absence of wet-lab activities, CREATE students
come to recognize that designing, carrying out, interpreting, troubleshoot-
ing, and extending research studies is an inherently creative process.

One of our anonymous assessment surveys included open-ended prompts
asking students to write three to five words that they associated with “scien-
tists” or with “research careers” (see Figure 1). In one study, the surveys were ad-
ministered pre- and postcourse in a set of ten upper-level CREATE classes taught
by faculty members in R1 institutions, public universities, and elite liberal arts
colleges, all of whom had learned CREATE methods in National Science Foun-
dation–sponsored workshops taught by Kristy Kenyon and myself. In pooled
data from the ten CREATE courses, before the course, “creative” did not appear
among the top ten words describing “research careers.” After the course, how-
ever, “creative” appeared in the top ten for research careers (along with “fun”
and “collaborative”), suggesting that the experience of a CREATE course shifts
viewpoints to a more faithful reflection of reality, even in the absence of hands-
on lab work. With regard to words associated with “scientists,” “passionate”
and “patient” were top-ten responses postcourse, but not precourse, and the
frequency of mentions of “creative” increased postcourse, with “innovative”
appearing as a new category (see Figure 2). These results suggest that over a
CREATE term, students achieve a more nuanced (and accurate) understanding
of and positive attitude toward researchers themselves. The no-cost email com-
ponent can bring about significant changes in student perception and insight.40

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Figure 1
Top Ten Words Associated with “Research Careers” in CREATE
Courses at Ten Four-Year Campuses, Pre- and Postcourse

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Lab

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Intense

Source (Figures 1 & 2): Sally G. Hoskins, unpublished data.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesCREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science

Figure 2
Top Ten Words Associated with “Scientists” in CREATE Courses at
Ten Four-Year Campuses, Pre- and Postcourse

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148 (4) Fall 2019Sally G. Hoskins

The first-year CREATE course could be adapted for general education sci-
ence students, whose single biology course may be their only college science
class. Teaching the nonmajors how scientists think, design research studies,
evaluate data, and come up with new ideas, and guiding them in an email sur-
vey of selected scientists, could be a positive way to help them prepare to vote
intelligently on science-related issues of public importance. As noted in The
Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America: “Many of the coun-
try’s founders . . . believed that the democratic experience had to be safeguard-
ed and maintained and that the enduring success of a democratic government
depended upon an educated citizenry.”41

If biology students harbor negative preconceptions about science, one
must assume that the nonscientifically educated public does as well. The sit-
uation is not helped by popular culture stereotypes of scientists as loner weir-
dos. Helping more students teach themselves to analyze data, creatively de-
sign follow-ups, and see their own questions answered by working scientists
could help clarify the realities of science. Ideally all students will recognize
that science does and should change; that new knowledge continuously chal-
lenges old; that scientists passionately pursue a quest for understanding; and
that every time some “fact” is overturned by new data, it does not mean sci-
entists “made a mistake.” As our world becomes increasingly subject to bi-
ological challenges, for example those resulting from climate change, it is
more important than ever that all citizens are science-literate. As a faculty-
friendly approach with established cognitive and affective benefits for a wide
range of students, CREATE courses could contribute significantly to this
effort.

S ome would use the evidence above to support the idea of adding single

CREATE courses to traditional college curricula. The fact that both first-
year and upper-level CREATE students make a variety of gains in a single-
semester course suggests that this could be beneficial. But that may be only
half of the revolution proposed in the title of this essay, and it would be insuf-
ficient. Imagine a STEM curriculum in which students delve deeply into the
primary literature of not only one STEM discipline, but many, and in which
students spend significant time thinking like geologists, astronomers, bio-
chemists, or physicists, as well as biologists. CREATE courses immerse stu-
dents in the language and logic of a particular discipline; physicists and bio-
chemists encounter quite different challenges. Biochemists can do three dif-
ferent experiments in a week; in contrast, physicists working with the Large
Hadron Collider may plan for years to carry out one study, and astronomers
and paleontologists do not do classical-model experiments at all.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesCREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates’ Understanding of Science

As projects become increasingly cross-disciplinary, we may eventual-
ly build a “fusion STEM” curriculum, but for now, colleges and universities
design their programs around the departmental structure. I believe students
could benefit substantially from reading deeply and closely in the language of
each STEM discipline, and all STEM faculty could benefit from being able to
bring their insider understanding of knowledge generation in that discipline
to the classroom. Every STEM discipline is characterized by critical think-
ing, evidence-based analysis, and creativity; it would be very interesting to
see how students might benefit from exposure to deep study in multiple ar-
eas of STEM through diverse CREATE courses. With regard to non-STEM stu-
dents, it is essential to modify general education science courses so that they
are not mere retreads of broad-coverage high school courses. The public must
be able to read and evaluate scientific claims as they make critical decisions
about their personal health and around issues of public policy. The present
negative stereotypes about science and scientists can be dispelled and science
literacy increased. While CREATE was originally developed for biology ma-
jors, development of a broad-based general education CREATE course based
on the first-year “Introduction to Scientific Thinking” CREATE course and its
widespread use in the United States could be the most important benefit of
this evidence-based strategy.42

author’s note

I would like to thank the National Science Foundation for support of the CREATE
project, Alan Gottesman for comments on this manuscript, and all CREATE col-
leagues and students for their collaboration, creativity, and enthusiasm.

about the author

Sally G. Hoskins is Professor Emeritus of Biology at the City College of New
York. She is the recipient of the 2017 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence
in Education from the Genetics Society of America, the 2013 Pearson Four-Year
College & University Section Research in Biology Education Award from the Na-
tional Association of Biology Teachers, and the 2007 and 2011 John Doctor Educa-
tion Prizes from the Society for Developmental Biology. Her work on the CREATE
strategy appears in Genetics, CBE–Life Sciences Education, The Journal of Microbiology
and Biology Education, The American Biology Teacher, Journal of Undergraduate Neuro-
science Education, and Science.

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endnotes

1 Mark Windschitl, Jessica Thompson, and Melissa Braaten, “Beyond the Scientific
Method: Model-Based Inquiry as a New Paradigm of Preference for School Sci-
ence Investigations,” Science Education 92 (5) (2008): 941.

2 Jonathan Osborne, “Arguing to Learn in Science: The Role of Collaborative, Critical

Discourse,” Science 328 (463) (2010): 463.

3 Michael J. Klymkowsky, “Thinking about the Conceptual Foundations of the Biolog-

ical Sciences,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 9 (4) (2010): 379.

4 Jia Shi, Joy M. Power, and Michael J. Klymkowsky, “Revealing Student Thinking
about Experimental Design and the Roles of Control Experiments,” International
Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 5 (2) (2011): 1–16.

5 National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, ex-
panded ed. (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2000), 16, https://
doi.org/10.17226/9853.

6 Jennifer L. Momsen, Tammy M. Long, Sara A. Wyse, and Diane Ebert-May, “Just
the Facts? Introductory Undergraduate Biology Courses Focus on Low-Level Cog-
nitive Skills,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 9 (4) (2010): 435–440.

7 Raina Khatri, Charles Henderson, Renee Cole, et al., “Designing for Sustained Adop-
tion: A Model of Developing Educational Innovations for Successful Propaga-
tion,” Physical Review Physics Education Research 12 (1) (2016): 1–22; Thomas Eberlein,
Jack Kampmeier, Vicky Minderhout, et al., “Pedagogies of Engagement in Science,
a Comparison of PBL, POGIL and PLTL,” Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Educa-
tion 36 (4) (2008): 262–273; and Christine Pfund, Sarah Miller, Kerry Brenner, et
al., “Summer Institute to Improve University Science Teaching,” Science 324 (5296)
(2009): 470–471.

8 Diane Ebert-May, Terry L. Derting, Janet Hodder, et al., “What We Say Is Not What
We Do: Effective Evaluation of Faculty Professional Development Programs,” Bio-
Science 61 (7) (2011): 550–558.

9 Khatri et al., “Designing for Sustained Adoption”; Leslie M. Stevens and Sally G.
Hoskins, “The CREATE Strategy for Intensive Analysis of Primary Literature Can
Be Used Effectively by Newly Trained Faculty to Produce Multiple Shifts in Di-
verse Students,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 13 (2) (2014): 224–242; Jill S. McCourt,
Tessa C. Andrews, Jennifer K. Knight, et al., “What Motivates Biology Instructors
to Engage and Persist in Teaching Professional Development?” CBE–Life Sciences
Education 16 (3) (2017): ar54, https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-08-0241; and Kristy L.
Kenyon, Bradley J. Cosentino, Alan J. Gottesman, et al., “From CREATE Workshop
to Course Implementation: Examining Downstream Impacts on Teaching Practic-
es and Student Learning at 4-Year Institutions,” BioScience 69 (1) (2019): 47–58.
10 Jennifer E. Round and A. Malcolm Campbell, “Figure Facts: Encouraging Under-
graduates to Take a Data-Centered Approach to Reading Primary Literature,”
CBE–Life Sciences Education 12 (1) (2013): 39–46; and Melissa McCartney, Chazman
Childers, Rachael R. Baiduc, and Kitch Barnicle, “Annotated Primary Literature: A
Professional Development Opportunity in Science Communication for Graduate

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Students and Postdocs,” Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education 19 (1) (2018),
https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v19i1.1439.

11 Brian K. Sato, Pavan Kadandale, Wenliang He, et al., “Practice Makes Pretty Good:
Assessment of Primary Literature Reading Abilities across Multiple Large-Enroll-
ment Biology Laboratory Courses,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 13 (4) (2014): 677–
686; and Richard Lie, Christopher Abdullah, Wenliang He, and Ella Tour, “Per-
ceived Challenges in Primary Literature in a Master’s Class: Effects of Experience
and Instruction,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 15 (4) (2017), https://doi.org/10.1187/
cbe.15-09-0198.

12 Sally G. Hoskins, Leslie M. Stevens, and Ross H. Nehm, “Selective Use of the Prima-
ry Literature Transforms the Classroom into a Virtual Laboratory,” Genetics 176 (3)
(2007): 1381–1389.

13 Alan J. Gottesman and Sally G. Hoskins, “CREATE Cornerstone: Introduction to Sci-
entific Thinking, a New Course for STEM-Interested Freshmen, Demystifies Scien-
tific Thinking through Analysis of Scientific Literature,” CBE–Life Sciences Education
12 (1) (2013): 159–172; and Sally G. Hoskins and Alan J. Gottesman, “Investigat-
ing Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Science in Courses Taught Using the CREATE
Strategy,” Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education 19 (1) (2018): 1–16.

14 Hoskins et al., “Selective Use of the Primary Literature Transforms the Classroom
into a Virtual Laboratory”; and Gottesman and Hoskins, “CREATE Cornerstone.”

15 CREATE, www.teachcreate.org.
16 Stevens and Hoskins, “The CREATE Strategy for Intensive Analysis of Primary Lit-
erature Can Be Used Effectively”; Hoskins et al., “Selective Use of the Primary
Literature Transforms the Classroom into a Virtual Laboratory”; Gottesman and
Hoskins, “CREATE Cornerstone”; Hoskins and Gottesman, “Investigating Under-
graduates’ Perceptions of Science in Courses Taught Using the CREATE Strategy”;
and Sally G. Hoskins, David Lopatto, and Leslie M. Stevens, “The CREATE Ap-
proach to Primary Literature Shifts Undergraduates’ Self-Assessed Ability to Read
and Analyze Journal Articles, Attitudes about Science, and Epistemological Be-
liefs,” CBE–Life Sciences Education 10 (4) (2011): 368–378.

17 Hoskins and Gottesman, “Investigating Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Science in

Courses Taught Using the CREATE Strategy.”

18 Khatri et al., “Designing for Sustained Adoption”; Ebert-May et al., “What We Say
Is Not What We Do”; and McCourt et al., “What Motivates Biology Instructors to
Engage and Persist in Teaching Professional Development?”

19 Tessa C. Andrews and Paula P. Lemons, “It’s Personal: Biology Instructors Prioritize
Personal Evidence over Empirical Evidence in Teaching Decisions,” CBE–Life Sci-
ences Education 14 (1) (2015), https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-05-0084.

20 Sally G. Hoskins and Leslie M. Stevens, “Learning our L.I.M.I.T.S.: Less Is More In

Teaching Science,” Advances in Physiology Education 33 (1) (2009): 17–20.

21 Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewett, Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the

Sciences (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997).

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22 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vision and Change in Under-
graduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (Washington, D.C.: American Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science, 2011); and Marilyne Stains, Jordan Harsh-
man, Megan K. Barker, et al., “Anatomy of STEM Teaching in American Universi-
ties: A Snapshot from a Large-Scale Observation Study,” Science 359 (6383) (2018):
1468–1470.

23 Philip Camill, “Using Journal Articles in an Environmental Biology Course,” Jour-
nal of College Science Teaching 30 (1) (2000): 38–43. Here he is discussing Richard M.
Felder, “On Creating Creative Engineers,” Engineering Education 87 (1987): 222–227.
24 Ian Kinchin, “A Knowledge Structures Perspective on the Scholarship of Teach-
ing and Learning,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3 (2)
(2009).

25 John Dewey, How We Think (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1910).
26 Wendy K. Adams, Katharine K. Perkins, Noah S. Podolefsky, et al., “New Instrument
for Measuring Student Beliefs about Physics and Learning Physics: The Colorado
Learning Attitudes about Science Survey,” Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Edu-
cation Research 2 (1) (2006), https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.2.010101; Jack
Barbera, Wendy K. Adams, Carl E. Wieman, and Katharine K. Perkins, “Modify-
ing and Validating the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Use
in Chemistry,” Journal of Chemical Education 85 (10) (2008): 1435–1439; and Kather-
ine Semsar, Jennifer K. Knight, Gülnur Birol, and Michelle K. Smith, “The Colora-
do Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) for Use in Biology,” CBE–Life
Sciences Education 10 (3) (2011): 268–278.
27 Seymour and Hewett, Talking about Leaving.
28 Marcia C. Linn, Erin Palmer, Anne Baranger, et al., “Undergraduate Research Expe-
riences: Impacts and Opportunities,” Science 347 (6222) (2015): https://doi.org/
10.1126/science.126175706.

29 Dara Duncan, Alexandra Lubman, and Sally G. Hoskins, “Introductory Biology
Textbooks Under-Represent Scientific Process,” Journal of Microbiology and Biology
Education 12 (2) (2001): 143–151.

30 Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, 10th ed. (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Press,

2013).

31 Mark J. Barsoum, Patrick J. Sellers, A. Malcolm Campbell, et al., “Implementing Rec-
ommendations for Introductory Biology by Writing a New Textbook,” CBE–Life
Sciences Education 12 (1) (2013): 106–116.

32 Philip Bell and Marcia C. Linn, “Beliefs about Science: How Does Science Instruc-
tion Contribute?” in Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs about Knowledge and
Knowing, ed. Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich (New York: Routledge, 2002),
321–346; Benjamin S. Bloom, Max D. Englehart, Edward J. Furst, et al., Taxono-
my of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook 1: Cognitive
Domain (New York: David McKay Company, 1956); National Academies of Sci-
ences, Engineering, and Medicine, How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures
(Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2018); and Robin Millar, John

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Leach, and Jonathan Osborne, eds., Improving Science Education: The Contribution of
Research (Buckingham, United Kingdom: Open University Press, 2000).

33 Hoskins et al., “Selective Use of the Primary Literature Transforms the Classroom
into a Virtual Laboratory”; Hoskins et al., “The CREATE Approach to Primary
Literature Shifts Undergraduates’ Self-Assessed Ability”; Hoskins and Stevens,
“Learning our L.I.M.I.T.S.”; and Seymour and Hewett, Talking about Leaving.

34 Robert L. DeHaan, “Teaching Creativity and Inventive Problem Solving in Science,”

CBE–Life Sciences Education 8 (3) (2009): 172–181.

35 Klymkowsky, “Thinking about the Conceptual Foundations of the Biological

Sciences.”

36 Pfund et al., “Summer Institute to Improve University Science Teaching.”
37 Semsar et al., “The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) for

Use in Biology.”

38 Annika Springub, Luzie Semmler, Shingo Uchinokura, and Verena Pietzner, “Chem-
istry Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes towards Creativity in Chemistry Class,”
in Cognitive and Affective Aspects in Science Education Research, Contributions from Science
Education Research, vol. 3, ed. Kaisa Hahl, Kalle Juuti, Jarkko Lampiselkä, et al. (New
York: Springer, 2017), 41–54; and Erik L. Westby and V. L. Dawson, “Creativity:
Asset or Burden in the Classroom?” Creativity Research Journal 8 (1) (1995): 1–10.
39 Hoskins et al., “The CREATE Approach to Primary Literature Shifts Undergraduates’

Self-Assessed Ability.”

40 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vision and Change in Under-

graduate Biology Education.

41 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of Undergraduate
Education, The Future of America (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 2017).

42 Gottesman and Hoskins, “CREATE Cornerstone.”

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