Biology Education Research 2.0

and that it works especially well for students who have been traditionally underserved (e.g., Eddy and Hogan, 2014). Imagine for a moment that teaching using active learning is a construction project, and the goal is to construct student learning. The construction tools (e.g., screwdriver, hammer) are the instructional materials (e.g., assignments, clicker questions, exams), and how the tools are used is the instructional strategy. At this point in understanding teaching and learning, we know how to design the screwdriver and the hammer. We also know how a screwdriver and a hammer should be used, and that some aspects of construction will require a screwdriver, while others will require a hammer. A person who is new to construction may not know that the hammer, rather than the handle of the screwdriver, is a better tool to drive in a nail. He or she may not know that a particular screw requires the use of a Phillips-head instead of a flathead screwdriver. This does not mean we need to redemonstrate that a screwdriver or hammer works. Rather, we need to figure out ways to help all involved in construction to learn how useful the tools are, how to select the right tools for the job, how to use the tools, and what latitude there is for using a range of tools. This is the direction in which we need to head with the study of biology education. We need to know what is happening during active learning that makes it work—at the levels of the student, instructor, discipline, department, and institution. We need to understand what working means, for whom, and in what contexts (Tanner, 2011). This will require a different kind of research—what some are calling the next generation of biology education research (BER), or BER 2.0. Excitingly, the LSE community is already making progress in this direction. Several recent articles in the journal have aimed at demonstrating what makes “flipped instruction” work (Gross et al., 2015; Jensen et al., 2015) and what “working” means (van Vliet et al., 2015). To continue to make progress in this direction, we need to look to other fields for theory and methods, including cognitive science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, while keeping in mind our important role in translating the work in these fields, so it is comprehensible to a much broader audience. We need to think creatively about how to bring life sciences research methods—such as those used to study physiological systems, to model ecological processes across scales, and to analyze metabolic networks—to bear on the study of teaching and learning. We need to examine research from such diverse environments as K–12 education and corporate settings and to envision how it might help us understand biology education at other levels and in other settings. Vol. 14, 1–2, Winter 2015