Peer‐Reviewed Embedded Pedagogy: A New Approach to Promote and Improve Active Learning in Science Education

Active learning increases student performance in STEM disciplines. Open educational resources (OERs) offered by the Ecological Society of America and other entities offer free, accessible, and peer-reviewed active learning exercises in ecology and other fields. Here, we propose a new method, which we call peer-reviewed embedded pedagogy (PREP), to improve the creation, implementation, and quality of OERs. Under PREP, a research laboratory publishes an OER before, instead of after, the research that it is predicated upon goes to press and then embeds a link to the OER in the scientific manuscript. We describe four ways that PREP might incentivize the creation and use of OERs by research scientists and three ways that it could improve the quality of OERs for students. Together, these benefits address eight AAAS benchmarks in science education and offer a win–win situation for both students and the scientists who instruct them.