Welcome to QB@CC! We are a growing body of math and biology faculty from community colleges across the United States, working together to enhance students' quantitative skills. Small interdisciplinary teams work together to create or adapt OER materials at the interface of math and biology. Covid has challenged all of us to innovate and QB@CC has continued to thrive through online platforms.

We imagine you may have many questions and we're excited to be here to answer them! BUT, as faculty, we're in the business of learning just as much as we're in the business of teaching, so we want to hear from you! Check out our questions below! (But don't stop there! Share your impressions, questions, and recommendations, too!)

General: How can you use interdisciplinary collaboration to support your work? What kinds of concerns do you have about working with faculty in other fields? How can we support you as you embark on that journey?

Math Faculty: How could you incorporate biology applications into your lessons to help motivate the mathematics? 

Bio Faculty: What is a bio concept that your students struggle with that could be supported by mathematics?

We look forward to chatting with you!

As a participant, I cannot speak highly enough of this network! It is great to work with biology faculty to help me understand the biology I need to be able to teach biology applications in my math classroom.

What a wonderful merging of two fields to help students in both disciplines. This connects well with the STEM CURE work that we are doing our community colleges. For example, we have a math class that is incorporating local air pollution data and public health data into their assignments. They are learning about these biology concerns and weaving them into math projects. The students are really benefiting.

I love this project! It can be transformative for the faculty to learn about each other's discipline and how quantitative reasoning is used in each. And it's a total benefit to the student. I wonder how your project used an equity lens overall or what other frameworks guided this project. I'm curious to know. The video testimonials were powerful. Great work! 

Thank you for posting this video and allowing viewers to learn about QB@CC. Many years ago I was on the biology faculty at a small liberal arts college and the students there would often express their frustrations with the kinds of issues that this program is designed to address. Many biology and prospective biology majors would ask me questions such as why we required them to take calculus since the could see no connection between that subject and the intro course in which they had enrolled. Other students would say things such as "I decided to become a biology major because I love science but hate math. So, why are you making me take math again?" And, they were right. Our team of instructors rarely expressed any biological concepts in quantitative terms and rarely worked with faculty in the math department to see how we might coordinate our efforts. Thus, this initiative is critically important and timely, even after all these years!

I also resonate with Jillian Miller's comment that people in different disciplines use different terms to describe the same phenomenon (and vice versa), but we somehow expect that students will magically be able to see the connections, when education research tells us that people rarely can cross these kinds of interdisciplinary boundaries without specific coaching. 

I have a couple of questions and suggestions:

- To what extent is the QB@CC approach being used to help all students overcome both math and science anxiety? Does the program focus primarily on biology majors, or can its lessons also be applied and extended to the broader student population at CCs?

- Is this program building off of earlier efforts to improve mathematics learning at CCs, such as StatWay or Quantway? The video on Racial Equity in the STEM Math Pathways at Community Colleges and the resulting discussion also addresses this question.

- Has this program to date on biology and math courses, or have any participants extended the approach to undergraduate research opportunities, and especially course-based undergraduate research experiences? If you’re not familiar with the Undergraduate Research at Community Colleges Initiative, it also could be a way to show students how the integration of math and biology can be directly applied to real world problems.

Thank you again for posting this video!

Hi Jay,

To add to what my colleagues have already said,  I think the modules that have been created so far are largely applicable to a broad student audience, not just biology majors. For example, one module deals with COVID-19 case count data and fitting trend curves to the data and displaying the data with charts and graphs. Health science data is particularly relevant to health science students but everyone benefits from a better understanding of the math behind disease spread as it helps them understand and evaluate what they are seeing in the news and how they respond to it.

Hi all great project!  Thanks for posting such elaborate responses,  I have a few more questions/thoughts.  I wonder if including diverse scientists and graphs or figures from their papers might not be have an important impact especially of BIPOC students.  One could employ   aspects of the  Scientist Spotlights project or interviews with diverse faculty or even graduate students and postdocs?Have you considered incorporating social justice issues like health disparities? or even aspects of redlining on biodiversity, water quality etc to grab student interest?

I am so excited to hear more about your work and its impact.

I love these ideas! They not only foster a sense of belonging but also challenge the widely held notion that math and science are somehow immune to bias. The incubators that create the modules are given free rein to make whatever they want for their project but we could certainly encourage and support them in incorporating these equity-focused ideas in the future

This is a very helpful project. Conversations about connecting biology (to improve) and mathematics (for context) have been going on for decades (see, for example, https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/CUP...) and it seems you all have a great approach for integrating the two. I wondered if you had worked at all with the Mathematical Association of America and looked at their resources?

I love the cross-disciplinary aspect of your project and that it not only focuses on improving math skills for biology students, but also increases curiosity about biology among math students!

Such an unmet need -- thank you all! I teach an intro anat/phys course which doesn't typically involve much math. But I also teach an intro nutrition class which attracts many non-STEM majors, and there is a lot of math involved in interpreting nutrition labels. At least once a quarter, one of my students struggles with calculating the percentage of calories from fat in a given food, when given the grams of each macronutrient. Percentages in general appear to be a struggle for some of my nutrition students.

Thank you!