Joe Dauer

Contact Information

My Story

Hello, my name is Joe Dauer and I am an associate professor of life science education in the School of Natural Resources. As a life sciences education researcher, I focus on how undergraduate students learn biology.

My life sciences research broadly rests at the intersection of biology (genetics, ecology, and evolution), education, and cognitive psychology. At UNL, my work focuses on how students learn to organize biological concepts using systems thinking. I focus on how students organize and store knowledge because this will determine how they are able to access that knowledge when asked to apply it in novel scenarios. When students store knowledge in discrete units (like knowing a definition of a word), they are limited in the ways they can apply that knowledge compared to another student that has a network of concepts. This is the core of 'chunking'. Experts in an area, create larger and larger 'chunks' of knowledge such that they have multiple access points to a concept. Novices, like many undergraduate students new to learning life sciences, have much smaller 'chunks' and I study how they strategically add and connect the knowledge pieces together.

Currently I have two major projects that I lead.

• In one project, I am collaborating with colleagues in educational neuroscience to investigate learning at the intersection of cognitive psychology and neurobiology. We are study the fundamental executive functions of error detection and inhibition during modeling. We look at student neural activation while students determine whether errors exist in models of biological systems. As we follow these students, we are examining if this activation is indicative of long-term knowledge retention.
• In the other project, I am collaborating with math and biology researchers to investigate how biology instructors integrate quantitative reasoning into their teaching. We have developed a classroom observation protocol to look at this type of interdisciplinary teaching. We are also using an assessment we developed that examines the quantitative modeling abilities of undergraduate biology students to determine the student learning in these classrooms.

While I focus my research on student learning, I am constantly connected to teaching and putting into practice evidence-based and theoretical practices that improve learning in my classroom. I find joy in teaching and connecting with students where they are. I invest heavily in improving my teaching and seek to make my classes inclusive and engaging for all students.

Feature Stories

• Dauer using brain scans to develop better teaching strategies (5/21/2024)

Selected Publications

Background

Affiliations

• Science Literacy, UNL

Awards

Professional Organizations

Websites

• Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER)
• UNL Discipline-Based Education Research

SNR Program Areas

• Applied Ecology

Areas of Interest/Expertise

• Science Literacy
• Undergraduate Learning in Biology
• Visualizations
• Cognition
• Pedagogy

Grants

Currently this page only displays grants that were awarded on 1/1/ 2009 to the present. If a grant was awarded prior to 1/1/ 2009 and is still active, it will not be displayed on this page.

Advising

Courses Taught