2024 ASM Conference for Undergraduate Educators

Evolution is listed as one of the core concepts in the national call to reform undergraduate biology education (AAAS, 2010). However, teaching evolution in the context of immunology has not been widely documented. To enable this discussion, we wrote a conceptual statement and invited educators to weigh in on this statement through surveys and semi-structured interviews. This qualitative study addressed the following three research questions with regards to the fundamental statement “Immune defenses vary based on organismal complexity” 1) How important and scientifically accurate is the statement?; 2) How well aligned is this statement with the concept of evolution?; 3) What are the concerns of immunology educators with regards to this statement? In total, we gathered 34 data points. The data showed that 82% of educators considered the statement to be scientifically accurate, and 73% considered that the statement is important for an immunology student to remember. In terms of alignment with the concept evolution, 69% of educators considered it to be well aligned. Upon thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, 40% of the educators considered the statement to be fine as is. Concerns from the remaining 60% of educators could be captured with these three codes: a) Not clear, i.e.; the fundamental statement does not clearly convey the thought process or intent behind it, or the word choice is vague; b) Missing content, i.e.; words or phrases are missing from the fundamental statement.; c) Not suitable, i.e., The fundamental statement is not suitable to their course, either because of the course level or structure. These comments led to an extensive discussion amongst the co-investigators of this study, and informed the final revisions. The data and accompanying discussion will help researchers and educators adopt a backward design based pedagogical approach, to address the concept of evolution in the context of immunology education.