Consumer confidence and trust, as it relates to the food system, is one of the most sensitive areas within consumers' understanding of food. Surveys have shown that a large majority of people would like to learn more about agriculture and food manufacturing, with young people being among those most eager for more information about where their food comes from.Food-focused educational resources often go unused due to teachers' lack of familiarity with the subject area, the pressures of standardized testing, and lack of alignment to state content standards. Building on the success of the Hands On Classrooms platform that developed and validated curricula with high adoption rates by teachers and a demonstrated impact on student knowledge and self-efficacy, a new curriculum on food system and food processing was developed and pilot tested. Two teachers from rural Virginia and Tennessee participated in the study. Both teachers received online professional development prior to implementation. Students were given pretests and posttests to measure (a) what impact does the curriculum have on students' knowledge of food systems and processing and (b) to what extent does the curriculum have an impact on student's self-reported skills related to these topics? A total of 87 students completed the assessments and showed significant improvements from pretest to posttest on both knowledge (p < .001) and skills (p < .001) related specifically to where food comes from and how it is processed, content that is typically not covered in middle school curriculum. Further research can be undertaken to measure the impact on others in different geographic and socioeconomic areas to provide additional data to validate the program.

Through a grant from the NSF, the ASBMB Implementing Vision and Change: developing concept driven teaching strategies in biochemistry and molecular biology project has held 14 regional workshops around the country and at 4 national meetings starting in 2011.The workshops focused on identifying foundational concepts and assessment tools for biochemistry and molecular biology educators. These were highlighted in the September/October 2013 edition of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. In the next phase of this project, the ASBMB is developing an online repository of teaching resources for the scientific community; the BMB Online Instructional Resources. These will include test questions, laboratory exercises, and syllabi of entire courses submitted by biochemistry and molecular biology educators. These artifacts will be mapped back to broader principles, concepts, skills, and learning objectives proposed earlier in the project, curated and peer reviewed. Resources will also be open to the community for comments and reviews. We anticipate a beta version of this site launching in the early summer of 2014. This work was supported by NSF‐ 0957205 RCN‐UBE to EB. Grant Funding Source: Supported by NSF‐ 0957205 RCN‐UBE