AIBS BioScience Editorials 3

After Amateur Hour

Researchers and resource managers must make ever more use of computer programs to handle data, modeling, and analysis. Nowhere is this truer than in ecosystem-based management (EBM), an approach advocated by many BioScience authors working in conservation, especially in coastal zones. Commercial software developers have not rushed to develop the tools needed, so it is fortunate that hundreds of graduate students and researchers funded to do other work have donated their time to "skunkworks" efforts to write suitable code and have then distributed it for free.

Not so much, say Corrie Curtice and her colleagues at Duke University's Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory and at NatureServe. They describe their investigation of EBM code development in their article that begins on p. 508. They heard, over the course of five years' work with users of EBM software, complaints that the tools "were often difficult to use, lacked documentation, contained numerous bugs, and were poorly supported and maintained." Interviews with tool developers (analyzed, incidentally, with the help of commercial software) confirmed the suspicion that they were motivated by the desire to see their work widely used rather than the desire to build revenues. The developers lacked the appetite to administer and promote a business (or if they were government employees, could not).

Accordingly, they mostly rejected charging substantial license fees. Some said they were conscious that their funder had not specifically authorized or requested the development of a software tool. The resulting lack of steady revenues deterred them from hiring experienced professional software developers or from researching the market. Many had not properly documented their product.

In consequence, promising concepts often failed when supporting them became too big a job. Some became obsolete after their originators moved on to other projects—a familiar story that explains why many research data are effectively lost to science.

Yet even in fields, such as EBM, that lack a large market, it is possible for a project to thrive, Curtice and her coauthors discovered. The success stories occurred when projects found dogged champions willing to involve influential advocates in boosting awareness of and growing the product. In particular, the champions searched for stable funding.

Curtice and her colleagues have important recommendations for both funders and developers of software—not just EBM software. Those recommendations probably apply to other specialized scientific applications as well. Ensuring the widespread availability and currency of a software tool is heavier lifting than the original writer might guess: A neat idea is not enough. And promotion and maintenance of a product demand skills that he or she may have no interest in learning. Funders as well as altruistic code writers will do well to reflect on these findings—and to adapt accordingly if they want to ride a wave into the future.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 62: 447
doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.5.1

Expanding the Integration and Application of Long-Term Ecological Research

In 1980, the National Science Foundation boldly funded six Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites to pursue sustained ecological studies. Although they were far sighted, the founders could not anticipate the critical role that their imaginative program would play in meeting twenty-first century demands posed by rapid environmental change. That message, and others, emerges from the six articles in the special section in this issue. The US LTER Network has become a globally important scientific asset; it provides critical site- to regional-scale science to promote continental understanding, and its scenario science, cross-site syntheses, and engagement with decisionmakers are valuable resources for meeting environmental grand challenges.

The first three articles highlight the breadth and application of LTER. Robertson and his colleagues meld historical perspective with vision to demonstrate that the LTER Network is uniquely positioned to leverage the capacity of other existing and emerging programs and observatories by adding biome-specific science, mechanistic understanding, experiments, and socioecological insights (p. 342). In their article beginning on page 354, Driscoll and colleagues show that the LTER Network is addressing environmental challenges by building decisionmaker relationships that engage science in local- to national-scale policy and management issues, integrate local knowledge in research, and promote adaptive management that generates new scientific discoveries. Likewise, Thompson and colleagues cite the contributions of LTER sites to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Northwest Forest Plan, and the city of Phoenix's water planning to highlight the LTER Network's engagement of regional stakeholders in scenario research that articulates and evaluates alternative socioecological futures (p. 367). The scenarios draw from LTER Network data, regional science, and forecasting to advance science synthesis while increasing the saliency of research.

The mechanistic understanding of ecological processes from LTER science provides key assets for forecasting and many national programs. Knapp and colleagues review the pioneering efforts of LTER scientists in advancing ecosystem manipulations and conclude that major results often emerge only after years of study promoting conclusions that are dramatically different from initial results; that like long-term measurements and well-managed data streams, ecosystem-scale experiments create research platforms for studies and disciplines not part of the original design; and that there is a pressing need for multisite, multifactor experiments across ecosystems (p. 377).

The power of cross-LTER-site integration to yield major insights is revealed by the two final articles. In the first, which begins on page 405, Fountain and colleagues examine the cryosphere—that portion of Earth's surface where water forms ice annually—to compare the impact of climate change on disparate ecosystems. Consistent responses include trophodynamic alterations that cause habitat loss and major shifts in biogeochemical cycles. Jones and colleagues present an integrated and powerful example of comparative long-term studies in which they use the information-management collaborative ClimDB/HydroDB (the Climate and Hydrology Database Projects) to investigate a half-century streamflow from small watersheds across North America (p. 390). Their synthesis confirms that hydrologic responses to climate change have been muted as a consequence of widespread and region-specific ecosystem processes.

Over three decades, the LTER Network of 26 sites has built the capacity across marine, coastal, polar, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems for multidecadal measurements; the world's largest collection of large-scale ecological experiments; and comprehensive information management. Guided by a new strategic implementation plan, it will advance basic science and build partnerships with decisionmakers at all levels of society to offer scientific insights and guidance into complex socioecological challenges.

DAVID R. FOSTER
Director, Harvard Forest, Harvard University

BioScience 62: 323
doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.4.1

A Route to Boundary Crossing?

Many thoughtful observers of the scientific scene have stressed the need to encourage more research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Although few argue against that proposition in the abstract, turning the aspiration into reality has often seemed difficult, largely because the traditional reward systems of academia and grant giving have tended to favor work that, instead, fits into well-known categories and so can be more easily assessed.

The article by Todd Crowl and his colleagues that appears on p. 282 of this issue should therefore be of interest to researchers and administrators who have contemplated this conundrum. The reported study provides some welcome information on the possible effects of a major effort to boost interdisciplinary research networks that was launched over a decade ago. The National Science Foundation's Research Coordination Networks in Biological Sciences (RCN) provided over $1 million per year, starting in 2001, to support the efforts of investigators to "communicate and coordinate their research efforts across disciplinary, organizational, institutional, and geographical boundaries." Crowl and his colleagues examined various indicators of research output and collaboration for 13 research groups that received five-year RCN awards in plant science, ecology, and environmental science and technology before, during, and after their awards. The authors also looked at similar indicators in a small sample of groups that had sought but failed to win RCN awards.

The limitations of the available data prevented the authors from making the ideal comparisons for examining RCN award effectiveness—which would have been between groups that were the same in all pertinent respects except for receiving an RCN award. In fact, the unfunded group scored lower by the assessed measures of research output before the awards were made. Further complications were that coauthorship, cross-institutional collaboration, international collaboration, and the "integration score" of publications increased in the unfunded group as well as in the funded group in comparisons of the periods before the awards were made and after they had ended. Still, the increase in collaboration seemed more robust in the RCN-funded group, as did an increase in the "integration score" on an article-by-article basis.

The level of cross-citation of researchers within a network also showed some evidence of having increased more in RCN-funded projects than in unfunded ones. And articles published with RCN support during the award period were clearly cited more than the others and were published in higher-impact-factor journals than the others. Yet the data also suggest that some of the increase in the interdisciplinarity of research output stimulated by an RCN award did not persist after the end of the award; interested readers should consult the article for details.

Despite the complications, the authors argue that their data support the conclusion that the provision of RCN funds between 2001 and 2005 did foster new problem-focused research networks; it clearly supported high-quality research. More definitive evidence must await further study, as must an evaluation of how this particular funding mechanism compares in effectiveness with other ways of encouraging interdisciplinary research, such as funding physical research centers where there is face-to-face collaboration.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 62: 215
doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.3.1

A Time for Unity

Although the US public remains for the most part favorably disposed to scientists, politically inspired efforts to discredit some kinds of science continue and could gain traction during what is likely to be an angry election year. Researchers, especially those working in fields that do not seem to offer the near-term promise of profitable products, have good reason to be apprehensive about their funding. Budget anxieties are driving up pressure on legislators to enact substantial cuts, and the brinksmanship on Capitol Hill suggests that ill-considered measures could be enacted through political grandstanding. Researchers worried about the future of the research enterprise should make efforts to stay informed and be ready to argue for its importance whenever the opportunity arises.

The United States remains the world's research and development leader, investing some $400 billion per year in public and private funds, yet the rate of growth of that investment is tiny compared with the rate in many other countries. Consequently, between 2002 and 2007, the US share of global R&D (research and development) funding fell by 2.5 percent to 32.6 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's Institute for Statistics Data Centre. The European share fell by 2.8 percent to 27.4 percent, and Asia's share increased by more than 5 percent during that interval. US civilian R&D fell as a proportion of the nation's gross domestic product between 2000 and 2009. US science is of high quality, according to citation metrics, but clearly, its continued dominance cannot be assured.

The demonstrated importance of research for economic competitiveness is probably the argument that will carry the most weight in the fights to come, given the economic pain being felt across much of the country. Improvements in health care and technology are universally popular and promise improvements in the standard of living for many. Yet there is another case for research that is just as important. Scientific discoveries strengthen humanity for the long term and globally. They offer the best hope for minimizing the strains already resulting from a growing global population, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Technological optimists and pessimists may hew to different projections about how the future will unfold, but on the importance of research they agree.

It will serve admirers of science in both of those camps to make common cause in support of research broadly, because otherwise, demagogues who distrust it will exploit the differences in pursuit of their own agendas. Opponents of climate change research, notably, are effectively using this divide-and-conquer strategy to discredit work that should be supported by people of (almost) any political opinion. But similar tactics are evident in other politically charged debates, too. The ethical case for health research is often seen but that for other types of R&D is typically overlooked.

Biologists should be heard loud and clear in the body politic—this year especially. They should be willing to put aside thoughtful differences of emphasis and opinion to support the endeavor they all believe in. The United States, with its strong research infrastructure and tradition of respect for science, has advantages that make it still well qualified to lead.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 62: 103
doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.2.1

The Journey Continues: AIBS Moves Forward

AIBS is at a defining moment. Although the organization's constitution, drafted in 1947, still declares that "the Institute will assist societies, other organizations, and biologists in such matters of common concern as can be dealt with more effectively by united action," 65 years later, the organizational and governance structure of AIBS is different. Those differences will enable AIBS to better adapt to the changing landscape for modern professional societies and to reinforce the vision of AIBS as a "forum for integrating the life sciences," a goal that is evinced by the new tagline above and on the cover of BioScience.

The single biggest adjustment is the realization that the primary constituency of AIBS is its member societies and organizations (MSOs). This conclusion was reached after three careful years of survey-data collection and analysis by our Long-Range Planning Committee, ably chaired by past president Joseph Travis (articles describing this work will be published in coming months). Our thoughts about reinventing AIBS follow directly from what we heard the MSOs tell us. Moreover, we have concluded that our society of societies will have enduring success if it can help its MSOs ensure that the public, legislators, funders, and the community of biologists have access to and use accurate information in making decisions about matters affected by biology. The institute will, of course, maintain an open line of communication with individual members and will continue to serve them through BioScience and other venues.

Past editorials by AIBS presidents suggest that they have been struggling with the same difficulties and ambitions for the organization for decades. With the survey data, we are able to listen more closely to our MSOs and the community than we have before. This has given us a better sense of what the community needs and where we can help. And help we must, because we need to restore the public's respect for science and research. We increasingly encounter skepticism about the value of our country's research portfolio. Questions are being asked about how it contributes to economic development and employment, even as other countries expand their scientific investments.

The new societal litmus test seems to be that if investments do not immediately yield jobs, they are of limited value. This view ignores our long history of successful support for basic science and scientific education, investments that produced not only targeted successes such as polio vaccines but also unexpected discoveries such as the blood thinner warfarin. Our research enterprise is not well understood. By focusing on our MSOs' common interests, principles, and values while increasing the breadth and depth of our community, we also plan to improve how biological science is used to inform decisionmaking and to halt the further erosion of federal support.

I look forward to working with you in the year ahead to implement the next stage of our strategic-planning process. Strategic action has begun and continues. The changes envisioned for AIBS are critical to enabling the institute to meet its goal of having biology support decisionmaking while shoring up the social compact supporting long-term investments in research.

SUSAN G. STAFFORD
President, AIBS

BioScience 62:3
doi:10.1525/bio.2012.62.1.1

A Forum for Integrating the Life Sciences

Scientific societies have long held an important place in the history of science. The first scientific academy, or what we would now call a scientific society, dates from Italy in the mid-1600s. Exciting, creative research was being done within the emerging societies of this period even more so than in many universities of the time.

Today's universities and scientific societies have only a passing resemblance to those of the late Renaissance; most notably, the locus of the process of discovery has traded positions between the two. Rather than serving as a place where research is conducted, the average scientific society today plays a supporting role by publishing journals; sponsoring meetings; acting as a center for professional networks; mentoring young scholars; and, in the United States, representing the interests of members in a policy arena that includes funding agencies and Congress. But scientific societies now confront a variety of challenges. For example, why join a society to receive a journal if that journal can be accessed electronically on any computer, often at no charge? What special features do scientific societies add to professional networking that cannot be accomplished through modern social media?

These new challenges acquire a special urgency in the biological sciences, in which diverse subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests create a highly fragmented professional landscape. All of these changes raise some big questions: What is the place of the scientific society in the twenty-first century? And how should societies adapt to the challenges they face?

As I wrote in a recent letter to all of our members, AIBS's leadership is in the midst of a review in which we are using the institute's original mission—to advance all of the biological sciences—for imagining what we should be in the twenty-first century. Our aim is to reinforce a vision of AIBS as "a forum for integrating the life sciences"; indeed, beginning in January 2012, that phrase will be the new tagline for BioScience. The change reflects the institute's commitment to representing the features of our science that unite us around a central set of methods, concepts, and theories in biology, informed by a context drawn from the history and philosophy of science. Emphasizing our common interests, principles, and values while increasing the breadth and depth of our community will also improve the likelihood that our science is used to inform decisionmaking in policy arenas.

The mission of scientific societies has changed since they emerged in the seventeenth century. Today's scholarly societies must continue changing in response to the fast-paced culture of science and the evolving needs of the professionals they serve. What are the features of a productive and creative transformation of scientific societies that will ensure the welfare of research and education in the life sciences far into the twenty-first century? To answer this question, AIBS is drawing on a rich history and a worthy mission to chart a creative course through the first decades of this century of biology.

During the next year, you will be hearing more about change at AIBS as we continue imagining our future. It has been a privilege to serve as president during this exciting time.

JAMES P. COLLINS
President, AIBS

BioScience 61: 935
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.12.1

Pulling at a Tangled Web

It will strike most readers of BioScience as obvious that the political debate surrounding environmental issues is often sadly misinformed about pertinent facts. On one hand, the disconnect might result from an innocent inability of the participants to learn about relevant information because it is hidden in technical journals or is undiscovered. On the other hand, particularly among nonprofessionals, it might be the result of deliberate misdirection by parties with an interest in the debate's outcome. In either case, a wider appreciation of the available facts seems likely to be beneficial.

Biologists and others concerned about the environment will therefore heartily endorse the National Science Foundation's funding of the new National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). The center, supported by the University of Maryland and based in Annapolis, aims to bring together natural and social scientists, as well as policymakers, to identify discipline-transcending research priorities, with an emphasis on actionable outcomes and educational outreach. Inspired by and modeled in part on the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and on other synthesis initiatives, the new center has received a $27.5-million, five-year award—an amount that may seem modest in light of the scale of the issues to be addressed.

Understanding of critical processes should benefit greatly from the inclusion of social scientists, although this is not a new idea. But building strong connections among them, natural scientists, and policymakers will entail more than just the synthesizers' learning each other's technical vocabularies and how to handle large amounts of data. It will necessarily mean that the participants grapple with philosophical questions.

Many natural scientists seem—consciously or not—to be guided by an uncritical utilitarian stance when contemplating policy and politics. Seeking the greatest good for the greatest number feels praiseworthy, yet social scientists know that people often object to policy aimed toward that goal, vague as it is, and much twentieth century philosophy provides reasons people might be right to do so. Utilitarianism notoriously promotes conflict between the values of a reflective elite and, for example, those of a mother with a hungry child or those apparent when a house is on fire. In a democracy, policy has to respond to people as they are, and their reasons have resilience. Sometimes, unearthing the facts will not have the expected effects on reasons. Educational outreach must recognize people's diversity and their opportunism.

Not that natural scientists will be the only ones who face some philosophical attitude readjustment. They will be able to point social scientists and policymakers to profound biological influences on people's choices and preferences, as well as to the physical constraints on societal change now becoming apparent. And policymakers can contribute inside knowledge of existing political institutions, for which some explanations may amount only to historical happenstance.

All the more reason the effort to achieve synthesis is important: Few would defend how environmental policy is made now. Good luck, SESYNC.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 61: 843
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.11.1

If Not You, Who?

As Americans witnessed this year, partisan bickering and deep ideological policy differences nearly shut down the federal government and forced the nation into default. Elements of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were shuttered over the summer as the House of Representatives and the Senate failed to reauthorize the agency. As a result, thousands of FAA employees and construction workers laboring on airport projects were furloughed, and the federal government ceased collecting millions of dollars a day in taxes. Amazingly, Congress was unable to resolve this issue at the same time it was struggling to identify billions of dollars in cuts to federal programs.

Why, you might ask, is AIBS's public policy director talking about this particular episode of political dysfunction? Because I fear that when many of you—individuals dedicated to using logic and reason to explain the world—read accounts of this kind of political gamesmanship, you become frustrated and begin dreaming of a research project that will allow you to spend a prolonged period in a remote location with limited access to the news. Although this sentiment is understandable, now is the wrong time for this response.

Although my FAA example illustrates the chaos and absurdity surrounding our current political environment, it is critical to note that President Obama and a majority in Congress do agree that the nation must reduce its deficit and that cuts to federal spending are required to achieve this goal. The arguments arise over how much should be cut, from what programs the cuts should come, and whether or how to address tax and entitlement reform. The impasse on those issues makes the risk of deep cuts to discretionary programs, such as scientific research, more likely and potentially damaging.

Under the terms of the debt ceiling and deficit reduction plan signed into law by the president last August, strict budget caps now limit federal spending on discretionary and defense programs. Therefore, there is little room to fund new programs or to restore funding that was cut earlier this year to agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency. The budget caps make it likely that new funding for one program will come at the expense of another. This environment becomes more treacherous if the bipartisan, bicameral congressional supercommittee charged with identifying $1.2 trillion or more in additional cuts, savings from entitlement programs, or new revenue does not produce a plan that is signed into law this year. If this fails to happen, automatic cuts to discretionary and security programs begin.

Now, more than ever, it is important that scientists communicate the importance of federal investments in research and education to lawmakers. You must remind them that research drives innovation and new markets, creates jobs, and saves the government and industry money by providing the information needed to make informed decisions. These are messages that AIBS routinely shares with lawmakers. Please visit us at www.aibs.org/public-policy to learn more about what we are doing and how you can work with us to promote science to policymakers.

ROBERT E. GROPP
Director of Public Policy, AIBS

BioScience 61: 739
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.10.1

How to Get Real about Biotechnology

A commentary paper from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) neatly puts a finger on a commonly ignored disconnect between law and science. This disconnect has stymied not only US government regulation of genetically modified animals proposed for use as food—the subject of the CAST paper—but also, in some European and African countries, regulation of genetically modified crops. Considering that malnutrition kills more people than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined and that the world population is still growing, this disconnect deserves to be more widely understood by scientists, policymakers, and the public.

The CAST paper (available from www.cast-science.org/publications), written by a group chaired by Alison L. Van Eenennaam of the University of California, Davis, and titled The Science and Regulation of Food from Genetically Engineered Animals, describes how applications to deregulate the sale of food animals created through genetic engineering are evaluated for their potential risks. The applications are handled by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In the case of the first proposal known to be under review, the AquAdvantage salmon developed by Aqua Bounty Technologies, the process has lasted for more than 15 years so far (it may be coming to a conclusion this year). FDA researchers have concluded that there is "reasonable certainty of no resulting harm" and no "significant impact on the quality of the human environment" from the fish. Nonetheless, the FDA must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, which judges have sometimes interpreted to require consideration of social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and historic concerns. Consequently, objectors may demand the evaluation of a proposal's possible harms on multiple large groups of people defined by their being vulnerable in principle.

The disconnect is that the regulatory process is unable to systematically balance ineliminable risk, which can be found for any technology if the net is cast widely enough, against the technology's estimated benefits to those same large groups. Many benefits are ignored. And as CAST notes, risks similar to those evaluated for genetically modified animals are commonly prominent in conventionally derived animals, which are subject to no regulatory approval. For example, any AquAdvantage salmon that managed to escape despite the planned physical barriers are far less likely to breed successfully with (and thus threaten populations of) wild salmon than are ordinary farmed salmon, which often escape. But this projected advantage is not credited to the hi-tech fish's account. CAST reports that regulatory uncertainties "have essentially halted commercial and public investment in the development of genetically engineered animals for agricultural applications in the United States." Similar complaints have been made recently in BioScience in regard to the approval process for genetically modified plants designed to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide (60: 729–741).

Caution is laudable, but in a world already vastly affected by humans, the risks of new technologies should be compared with the existing—and expected—risks of current technologies, not with those of an imaginary utopia. The law is, famously, an inadequate animal. Policy leaders might seek an opportunity to make it less so if they want to see biotechnology achieve its potential.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 61: 651
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.9.1

How to Change Professional Evaluation in Biology

A bold call for a new assessment system for professional productivity in biology appears on p. 619 of this issue. Lucinda A. McDade of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Claremont Graduate University, together with colleagues at eight other institutions, describes a plan to create evaluation systems that are more easily applied to nontraditional forms of scholarly creation than the timehonored evaluation measure, citation in peer-reviewed journals with high impact factors. The nontraditional creations that the authors consider include collecting; curatorial work on specimens; and contributions to online resources, such as knowledge compendia, images, software, and data sets. Such works are becoming increasingly important to science, the authors plausibly maintain.

Because such works are not generally formally peer reviewed, the authors informally polled their own institutions, and their results seem to confirm the common impression that tenure committees and officials are often reluctant to take nontraditional publications into account when assigning credit and making hiring and tenure decisions. The authors, plus a number of endorsing organizations, commit themselves to revising what they see as an antiquated and harmful assessment system—one that seems to have had a more baleful effect on systematic biology than on some other areas.

Their efforts might also improve the assignment of credit for traditional publications in systematics. Current journal impact factors vary greatly between subfields and are a very crude indication of an article's value. Because the number of specialists studying some taxa is small, the impact factors of relevant journals are likewise small, if the journals are indexed at all. McDade and her coauthors propose, first, the systematic tracking of all forms of productivity, with automated systems employing unique identifiers to record intellectual creations and link them to individual researchers. They then favor, for some types of work, interactive assessment by the community of contributors, rather than traditional prepublication peer review. Interactive assessment should be superior to existing impact factors and measures such as the number of times a work is downloaded (which reflects in part how useful it is to practitioners, teachers, and students—a value distinct from scholarly originality).

The authors express the hope that biologists in other subdisciplines will make common cause and that tenure committees and administrators will start to use more comprehensive assessments of productivity once these are routinely generated. The proposal will likely find favor with BioScience readers, because many of them are systematic biologists who have paid a price for the broad reliance in academia on the traditional tools for assigning credit. Conventional peer review is unarguably showing signs of age with advances in technology. Its core principle is still important. In the future, however, it might more often be applied separately in interactive forums in efforts first to gauge the merit of and subsequently to improve scholarly works.

McDade and colleagues' proposal ought to stimulate a more systematic appraisal of the defects in current practice as well as efforts to expand assessment and develop novel ways for peers' evaluations to be used. The case for change is already strong. BioScience looks forward to hearing how it can most effectively be managed.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 61: 579
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.8.1

Know Thyself

The inscription reputedly once engraved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi remains good advice, including for biology instructors. Programs designed to help biology faculty expand their use of inquiry-based, "learner-centered" teaching methods may be having less of an effect on classroom practice than the participating faculty believe, judging from the article by Diane Ebert-May and colleagues that starts on p. 550 of this issue. The universal human penchant for self-deception was fully engaged in two professional development programs' participating faculty, who later judged themselves to be providing more learner-centered teaching and less lecture-style instruction. Yet independent ratings of video recordings of their classes by trained assessors showed that most of the participating instructors did not actually teach this way after the programs. Dismayingly, the clearest signal in the data showed that faculty with more years of teaching experience were even less likely to provide learner-centered teaching after a professional development program than were faculty with fewer years' experience. A proverb about old dogs comes irresistibly to mind.

Ebert-May and her five coauthors examined data from two multi-day programs for introductory biology faculty, one of which occurred over several years and one of which was repeated annually. Both programs resulted in faculty knowing more about inquiry-based teaching, as would be expected, and most of the participating faculty reported in questionnaires completed afterward that they were using such practices. But 75 percent were not in fact doing so substantially, according to the video assessments, nor did they improve noticeably over the following two years.

Psychologists know that self-deception in such circumstances is almost to be expected: It is especially common in potentially unfavorable judgments about one's own performance. In that sense, the new findings are hardly surprising, although they should serve as a loud reminder to educational researchers of the dangers of relying on self-reports to assess programs' effects.

It is worth pointing out that Ebert-May and colleagues did not assess the instructors' teaching before the programs, so the study cannot rule out that they brought about some increase in inquiry-based teaching. But any such increase was clearly well short of the participants' self-assessments. The study also established, interestingly, that the instructors felt that having insufficient time was the main impediment to their teaching, not, as has been suggested, lack of support from colleagues.

The study's authors reasonably conclude that changes are needed in professional development programs if they are to bring about real improvements in teaching practice. They favor providing participating faculty with more opportunities for direct practice of what they have learned, which certainly seems as though it should be feasible, if logistically challenging. The recommendation supports the urgings of others for regular and timely feedback on teaching from experts, which seem in line with the Delphic view. "Instant replays of teaching, with expert commentary, may become our most powerful tool as we strive to improve the outcomes of professional development programs that could ultimately improve student learning," the BioScience authors conclude. We can hope that observations of teaching after such coaching might provide more cheerful reading. Cheerful or not, BioScience looks forward to publishing such results when they are available.

TIMOTHY M. BEARDSLEY
Editor in Chief

BioScience 61: 499
doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.7.1