The College hosted its annual Inclusive Excellence Symposium earlier this month, bringing together members of the CBS community with a shared interest in enhancing student success. The symposium is the culmination of a year-long program designed to give participating instructors the opportunity to consider the range of factors that impact the student experience in mentoring and classroom settings. They meet throughout the year and undertake research projects focused on factors impacting student success.
This year, the event featured a keynote and a poster session where CBS Inclusive Excellence Fellows from 2025’s cohort and others shared their projects. CBS Inclusive Excellence Fellows Emily Flynn, Sarah Hammerlund, Kelly Lane, Sarah Malmquist, Pu Wang and Sasha Wright presented projects on a range of topics from increasing content comprehension in an asynchronous learning environment to patterns in persistence in STEM.
A focus on continuous improvement
Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Professor Emilie Snell-Rood, a 2016-17 program alumna, gave the keynote, in which she described how she put in-class data collection into practice in her bio-inspired design course. She explained how gathering data on learning outcomes in the class helped her identify which interventions help students explore a more biologically diverse range of species when considering design challenges. She incorporated changes based on the outcome of her project, which made the course more accessible and engaging for students.
Reflecting on her time as a fellow, Snell-Rood notes that she was originally drawn to the program for a "new perspective" on her teaching after she was promoted to associate professor. "As a CBS Inclusive Excellence fellow, I learned about the power of data collection and assessment with my own classes," Snell-Rood says.
Gauging engagement
Wang, a teaching assistant professor in the Departments of Biology Teaching and Learning and Genetics, Cell Biology and Development investigated how asynchronous video design impacts learning with an eye to establishing evidence-based guidelines for educational media that supports diverse learning styles. To do this, she tried embedding ungraded quizzes and content (e.g., emojis, gifs and social media elements) to increase interactivity and relatability. Her work indicated that increased engagement with asynchronous resources was a primary driver of improved student success.
Like other Inclusive Excellence fellows, Wang enlisted the help of undergraduate research assistants. Maria Makarova, a genetics, cell biology and development major, helped write quiz questions and integrate them into the videos. The result: videos with quizzes kept students engaged with the content longer. In addition to helping with the research question, Makarova contributed to the design of the assessments. "I found her perspective on quiz design to be quite different from my own, which was refreshing and eye-opening," says Wang. "Her ideas have been very effective — the quizzes she developed worked well in our initial trials."
Wang saw the program as a chance to conduct biology education research. “Through this experience, I was excited to discover that I could apply the same scientific approach I used to study microbial ecology and evolution to study how students learn,” she says. “It was a powerful realization that the skills I developed during my Ph.D. are transferable to a much wider range of questions.” –Stephanie Xenos