Students need support to learn the core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts that make up the field of biology so that they can both be successful as biologists and make informed decisions that require biological understanding. One way instructors can support students in these endeavors is to provide students with specific scaffolds the instructors design to structure students' performance on a task or engagement in a behavior. With the focus on both scientific concepts and practices, instructors may also need support to be able to develop scaffolds that align with suggested best practices. I offer a framework, referred to as FRAMER, and suggestions for instructors interested in developing scaffolds for biology courses, and provide an example of a successful scaffold implementation in an undergraduate biology course.

Engaging and gauging (engauging) first-generation, under-represented minority undergraduate general biology students through processes of inquiry, critical thinking, and affective learning is vital as they develop their scientific identity. An important challenge is how we can establish communities of practice and instill in our first-generation students self-awareness and reflection as they apply, analyze, and evaluate data on biological principles. In my article, I describe an innovative weekly assignment for my first generation Hispanic and Native Indigenous students called Quizfolio: quiz and mini-portfolios on biological principles and themes outlined in Vision and Change. Within a SOAR framework that will be introduced in my article, quizfolios provide an active learning space for students to integrate inclusive student-centered, in-class discussions and longitudinal lab inquiries in a first-year undergraduate biology course through metacognition and reflection-in-action. This transformative, culturally responsive mentoring approach encourages first-generation undergraduates to bring self-awareness to unclear or confusing topics that are clarified at the start of class or lab settings, and provides future framework for long-term retention of biological concepts.

Biology teachers inevitably struggle with how best to teach evolution. Students arrive in their classrooms with preconceptions, many of which are overwhelmingly skeptical, and science teachers are increasingly being pressured to adhere to an arbitrary degree of objectivity that makes discussing scientific worldviews challenging. These challenges have resulted in evolution being taught largely as a series of explanations for questions arising from observations of the living world. In so doing, students may not have a chance to grapple with the worldview that produced those explanations, or develop a more mechanistic intuition for inheritance and change in the world they see around themselves. Here we put forth all the tools necessary for a class to build a simulation of an evolving population experiencing natural selection from scratch in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Not only will this activity help students experiment with the natural world more mechanistically, but it will also allow them to learn as actual evolutionary biologists do.