Equitable Group Work in Undergraduate Biology Courses: Leveraging a Complex Instruction Framework to Identify Pedagogical Strategies

Group work is a common and effective strategy for promoting student learning while bridging opportunity gaps in undergraduate science classrooms. Despite documented positive impacts of group work in promoting student success, its efficacy in undergraduate biology classrooms can be enhanced through thoughtful implementation. We suggest that the successful implementation of equitable group work can be achieved by considering the Complex Instruction framework, a pedagogical approach developed specifically to foster equitable learning experiences. In this essay, we address common pedagogical challenges associated with group work and use this framework to discuss strategies for mitigating these challenges in the undergraduate biology classroom. Our hope is the proposed pedagogical approaches outlined in this work can extend to other STEM contexts, thus increasing the positive impact of group work across the undergraduate student population.