Student stress and anxiety often negatively impact students’ academic performance. This Essay provides summaries of different evidence-based strategies, ranging from changes in instructional strategies to specific classroom interventions, that instructors can employ to address and ameliorate student stress and anxiety.

Multiple approaches exist for teaching primary scientific literature (PSL) in undergraduate STEM courses. This article compiles and reviews such approaches by proposing an easily accessible framework for instructors. In addition, it highlights recommendations for both instructors and the STEM education research community based on the work presented.

Office hours are one of the most common support mechanisms found in STEM courses. Despite their prevalence, little work has examined student motivations and barriers toward attending office hours. This article explores these student perceptions at a primarily undergraduate institution and also compares student and instructor views of office hours.

Program learning outcomes (PLOs) play a critical role, informing curricula, teaching, and assessment. Undergraduate biology PLOs were collected and analyzed to provide insight into how institutions may be using PLOs and uncover what skills and competencies are most frequently listed. Implications for biology programs and instructors are discussed.

Marked reductions in population size can trigger corresponding declines in genetic variation. Understanding the precise genetic consequences of such reductions, however, is often challenging due to the absence of robust pre- and post-reduction datasets. Here, we use heterochronous genomic data from samples obtained before and immediately after the 2011 eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic complex in Patagonia to explore the genetic impacts of this event on two parapatric species of rodents, the colonial tuco-tuco (Ctenomys sociabilis) and the Patagonian tuco-tuco (C. haigi). Previous analyses using microsatellites revealed no post-eruption changes in genetic variation in C. haigi, but an unexpected increase in variation in C. sociabilis. To explore this outcome further, we used targeted gene capture to sequence over 2,000 putatively neutral regions for both species. Our data revealed that, contrary to the microsatellite analyses, the eruption was associated with a small but significant decrease in genetic variation in both species. We suggest that genome-level analyses provide greater power than traditional molecular markers to detect the genetic consequences of population size changes, particularly changes that are recent, short-term, or modest in size. Consequently, genomic analyses promise to generate important new insights into the effects of specific environmental events on demography and genetic variation.