BIORETS: Research Experiences for Teachers in the Biology of Plants, Animals, Microorganisms, and their Environments

The overall goal of this BIORETS program at Western Michigan University is to provide middle and high school science teachers in Southwest Michigan with authentic research experience and transformative curricular improvement and professional development opportunities. This BIORETS site offers an intensive seven-week summer experience for 12 teachers per year in June to August.

Teachers will conduct authentic research revolving around a unifying theme: how biological organisms interact with other organisms and their environments. The summer research experience will be complemented with faculty research seminars, professional development workshops, demonstrations of hands-on laboratory teaching modules, lunch time discussions on research and curricular development, written curricular materials, poster presentations on research and curricular development, and after-summer classroom visits.

An external evaluation team will assess program progress, determine program impacts on teacher participants and their students, and provide feedback for improvement. The broader impacts of this BIORETS program include: (1) Broaden participation of under-represented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); (2) Advance discovery and understanding in the biology of plants, animals, microorganisms and their environments; (3) Enhance infrastructure for research and education; (4) Disseminate curricular materials created during the BIORETS session to a wide audience.

This BIORETS program will provide a supportive atmosphere for teacher participants to perform captivating, authentic, and independent summer research. The hands-on research experience and complementary faculty research seminars are expected to deepen teachers’ research literacy and their knowledge in biological sciences. In addition, teachers will experience teamwork and experiments that lead to the generation of new research ideas and approaches.

Teachers’ summer research projects are organized into six topics: (1) plant-environment interactions, (2) animal-environment interactions, (3) microbe-environment interactions, (4) plant-microbe interactions, (5) animal-microbe interactions, and (6) plant-animal interactions. Such projects are designed to help teachers to gain a holistic understanding of the multifaceted interactions among living organisms and their environments, and to identify their own contributions to the overall research theme.

Components of these projects have been found to be implementable in college laboratory classrooms; therefore, the teachers will not only leave with deeper understanding of the research topic and the scientific method but also with a set of practical teaching modules to transfer to their own classrooms. Faculty mentors, graduate students, and lab coordinators at Western Michigan University will work closely with teacher participants to translate their research experiences into curricular changes.

Such changes are expected to enrich teachers’ classroom teaching practices, inspire a larger number of middle and high school students, including under-represented minority students, to consider higher education and careers in STEM, especially in biological sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.