Thanks to five-year funding through a Post-Katrina Support Fund Initiative Primarily Education Subprogram award, Xavier University of Louisiana has restructured, streamlined, and improved the curricula for its General Biology courses. In the first three years of the project, student performance has shown dramatic improvement. General biology courses have seen steadily trending decreases in the percentage of failing and near-failing grades and corresponding increases in class grade point averages and course pass rates. During a 2010 project assessment, the Xavier curriculum development project was praised by a team of external evaluators as a model for other biological sciences programs in need of redesign or restructuring.
