Enhancing Education from Carnegie Mellon

This site is so lovely.  It is from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon, which sounds very posh, and looks posh too (maybe it's because of the money).  Anyway, it's something of an eligible bachelor, because it not only has looks and money, but substance too.  For instance, if you're feeling panicky because you have a problem with your class, try their Solve a Teaching Problem section - identify your problem from a long list (let's say, the perennially popular 'Students can't write'), and they give you some suggestions on possible underlying reasons:

Students lack critical background skills.

Students lack discipline-specific writing skills.

Students have misconceptions about what writing involves.

Students are encountering linguistic and cultural obstacles to writing.

Students may be intimidated by writing and lack confidence in their abilities.

Students are unclear about certain parameters of the assignment or do not know how to meet them.

Each then links to a short explanation and several strategies for addressing the problem, such as

Make your expectations clear.
Create “scaffolded” writing assignments.
Model how you approach writing tasks.
Require drafts.
Use performance rubrics.
Emphasize purpose-focused writing.

Sigh.

More on genetics curricular revision - Down with Dominance

On a similar topic, some bloke called Douglas Allchin advocates for biology educators to do away with that nasty old concept of dominance (see, for instance, this old American Biology Teacher article).  I think he has some good points, if you ignore his worries about reinforcing 'dualities' and inflexbility in the arenas of conflict (I'm pretty sure there would still be wars and conflict even if we taught with co-dominant genetics examples instead of dominant ones - just saying.)

For instance, Allchin reminds us that many of the most prevalent misconceptions about genetics are actually misconceptions of dominance relationships:

"...some traits are inherently more likely to be inherited than
others; dominant traits are more prevalent in the population; adaptive traits eventually
become dominant through natural selection; mutations or "abnormal" genes are recessive;
dominant alleles subdue or control recessive ones...I trust these sound all too painfully
familiar"

If these don't sound painfully familiar, I suggest you immediately find the nearest Freshperson and grill them on what they know about trait dominance (don't worry, you don't have much to lose, they already think you're crazy).

Part of the problem is that the concept of dominance doesn't have much to do with inheritance, even though that is the context in which it is invariably taught.  Dominance relationships describe phenotypic expression and as such are as complex as the physiology and development of the organism they are applied to.  They cannot be neatly explained by any kind of 'universal genetic mechanism', in the way that Mendel's laws (of segregation and independent assortment) now can.  This problem is self-evident to anyone that has tried to explain the meaning of dominance to genetics newbies and had to resort to a random assortment (pun intended) of different examples to give a sense of the many different ways that dominance relationships can arise.  To make matters worse, the technical word 'dominant' has all kinds of non-technical connotations that invite misinterpretation.

Allchin's solution is to point out that students don't actually need the concept of dominance to understand inheritance.  His specific suggestions here were:

1) Re-frame genetics curricula by starting with co-dominant examples as the 'default' type of inheritance (which at the very least would be democratic, since dominant traits are by far the minority.)
2) Use the kind of co-dominant notation used for blood-types.
3) Teach patterns of phenotypic inheritance as part of development instead of inheritance.  (I got the feeling that he meant 'molecular genetics' when he said 'development', but maybe that's because where I think it should go).

I definitely agree that genetics should start with co-dominance and incomplete dominance.  You can certainly first explore Mendel's laws with such examples without muddying the terrain with traits 'dominating' each other, and the idea neatly does away with the textbook fiction that these cases demonstrate 'non-Mendelian' inheritance.  The only truly non-Mendelian inheritance I'm aware of is organellar and epigenetic inheritance, and those topics are rarely explored in introductory classes.

Upside-down Genetics Curriculum

I feel like a really sensible idea was proposed about genetics curricula in the American Journal of Human Genetics last year.  Michael Dougherty points out that the genetics unit of freshman biology typically uses a historical narrative: Mendel noticed that something weird was going on with his peas, proposed the existence of a genetic unit, these genetic units helped analyse pedigrees and crosses, genetic units segregate on chromosomes during meiosis, genetic units are made of DNA, then molecular genetics was finally understood and all was right with the world, hurrah!

Dougherty's idea is that framing genetics in this way and focusing almost exclusively on Mendelian disorders makes the introduction of complex, quantitative traits at the end of the module seem token; just an afterthought, rather than the real prize.  He suggests that this can only fuel the naïve genetic determinism that is prevalent among the public.  What we could do instead is to start with what students already know or can easily observe - variation in phenotypes and an incomplete tendency for phenotypes to be inherited - then build the gene concept up from that basis.  For instance, students would learn about additive polygenic inheritance and the influence of environmental factors before they learned about Mendel and Punnett squares.  For some reason this makes perfect sense to me, and I can't figure out why we haven't always done it that way!

How to watch a video of yourself without gagging

Although it fits the definition of torture given by most human rights watchdogs, watching videos of yourself teaching is also good for you.  This aspect of the FIRST IV training program was generally agreed by all of us to be the most valuable, and I want to share two of the insights we gained from the experience.

1) Watching the video by yourself is good, but watching it in the company of supportive but critical peers and mentors is about a billion times better.  Left to themselves, most people watch the video as hyper-critical train wrecks, obsessing about their annoying speech habits and the distracting way they rock from side to side whenever they're not speaking.  They also tend to see only the the disasters and not to notice the successes and opportunities for growth.  Other people keep you rational and point out the types of things you miss.

2) There is a very simple but powerful question you can ask yourself when analyzing your class: What am I doing that my students should be doing instead?  This was suggested to me by our group mentor and I found it very useful for several situations, but here are some of the examples that are less 'me-specific':

• I want students to become familiar with analyzing graphs, as well as use them to answer difficult questions, and I also expect them to do all that in the exam.  So why, when I presented a graph in class, did I first describe the axes, then describe the data, then spell out what it means and only then ask them a really difficult interpretive question?  Because that's how I present a graph during a science seminar.  But reading and interpreting graphs is what they need to practice, not me, so it would have been more valuable for them if I'd presented the question and then given the graph as a tool to answer it.  Then they would have had to mentally process the data before interpreting it and would have practiced the skills that I expect them to demonstrate in the exam.
• Why am I summarizing the textbook chapter in a lecture before asking the students to do an activity based on it?  Why should they bother reading if I'm going to tell them the most important bits in class?  I could ask them to summarize it and tell me the most important bits before we start the activity.
• I spend a lot of time coming up with questions to generate group discussion.  But they could also come up with discussion questions, and this would force them to engage more with the big picture.

You get the pattern?

My fingers + willemite + calcite + short wave UV lamp

And you thought we were out for the count

Summer is slightly less hot and sticky than it was last week.  Course-co-ordinators are starting to make demands.  Enrolling students are starting to make demands.  Bosses are starting to get their nervous twitches back.  Post-docs are starting to hit the books and panicking about the impossibility of juggling research and teaching.  That's right, semester is nearly upon us.  And with that, you can expect to find me posting again.  Hurrah!

Too Poor for Clickers?

Try phones.

Another talk from the conference was a report from Pat Pukkila on her experimentation with the web-based service Poll Everywhere to replace (or more accurately, extend) multiple-choice clickers as an in-class student response system.  She got students to text or email in their (full sentence!) responses to questions during class and found it to be valuable and very straightforward to use.  It not only relieves the constraint of the dreaded multiple-choice format, but is cheap and requires no investment in new technology (beyond WiFi).  There are several other similar services whose names escape me this late at night.

Primary Literature in the Classroom

A decent conference should slap me awake from the stupor that descends after a long stretch of drudgery at the bench. Right now, Genetics 2010: Model Organisms to Human Biology is having the desired effect; I feel like I'm in an ad for aftershave or sugar-free gum, with water slow-motion splashing down the aisles of the lecture hall.  However, I know the late night poster session will turn all that enthusiasm into exhaustion and cynicism, so I want to share an interesting talk from the education session before that happens.

The talk was given by Sally Hoskins, one of the designers of the CREATE methodology. This approach was developed a couple of years ago at City College of New York in an attempt to address the disconnect between students' static conceptions of science and the hodge-podge reality.  Even better, CREATE asks students to practice those skills that scientists actually value: understanding the primary literature, analyzing data, hypothesizing, proposing new experiments, and then persuading their peers to hand over great wads of cash with which to do them.

Here's how they justify their acronym:

Consider - The class is assigned a paper (without the title, abstract, or author names). At home, they use the paper's introduction to create a concept map and define the key terms.

Read - Still at home, students read the paper. They create cartoons of the experimental design and methods, fully annotate the figures, and in the case of very data rich figures, transform or split up the data into new graphs or tables.

Elucidate hypothesis - Again, still at home, students decide what hypothesis is being tested

Analyze and interpret the data - Class time is dedicated to analyzing and interpreting the data in the paper - it's run much like a lab meeting.

Think of the next Experiment - As homework, students propose two follow-up experiments.

After this, the students form multiple funding panels, peer review each other's proposed experiments and each panel chooses one proposal to fund. Then the whole process is repeated for another 4-5 papers.  Hoskins uses a temporal sequence of papers published by one lab, but I think it would be interesting to study the back and forth of work from competing labs, or across the course of a big conceptual shift in your-favourite-field. Eventually, the class compiles a list of questions to email to all of the authors of the papers they have been studying.  The questions are typically about their career path and whether they 'like being a scientist'.  Unsurprisingly, most people are pleased and flattered to have an entire undergraduate class interested in them and reply with helpful and frank responses.

A good time is clearly had by all.  But is it effective?  Based on the original course and the 8 additional CREATE courses tested on different campuses, the answer is yes, at least for critical thinking, understanding the nature of science and interest in science. The caveat is that it didn't work when only a single paper was done as a 3-week module within a larger course.

It sounds fun, right? Plus it has a nerdy acronym.

It wasn't me

Big thanks to Chong-Han for this quote from the Nature editorial on last year's Nature Education white paper "Time to Decide", which discussed the results of a survey of 450 faculty members:

"Yet although there was general agreement about the low quality of undergraduate education, a substantial majority of the respondents felt that their own teaching was highly effective."

Do students dream of electric beeps?

These lovely experimental philosophers (not to be confused with scientists) have been known to set a device that emits electronic beeps at random intervals during their academic talks.  After a beep, they randomly poll audience members about what was going on in their 'last undisturbed moment of inner experience before the beep'.

The 'representative' results discussed are predictable for anyone who has ever been to any kind of academic gathering: 1 out of 6 are thinking (or 'experiencing') anything at all about the content of the talk, and that solitary person is 'feeling confused'.

I think this is probably also true of most undergraduate lectures, and I need to remind myself of that whenever I am tempted to become a gesticulating, monologue-ing, talking head.  I might be experiencing great intellectual engagement when I present my thoughtful arguments to an audience, but they are more likely to be experiencing the "feeling of tiredness; maybe feeling tingling on tooth from permanent retainer."

Podcast on Scientific Teaching

Jo Handelsman was interviewed by Nature Education (Scitable) last week.  Want to know what scientific teaching is? Listen up.

Learning Objectives

As I alluded to before, my students took quite some time to understand how important the learning objectives for my module were.

Please read this primer on learning objectives if you have not been initiated into their importance; they declare, both to our students and to ourselves, what it is that we want them to learn, and what they should be able to do to prove they have.  The goal of our course structures is alignment of our learning objectives with the activities (which help students achieve those objectives) and with the assessments (which test whether students have achieved those objectives).

I opened my module with a 10-minute lecture on what to expect and how learning objectives work and how I would not cover every single concept and example from the text book and that they could use the learning objectives (and my assigned reading pages!) to decide which bits to read and which to ignore.

After every single class (and in many emails) I got the same question:  "You're not covering everything in the textbook?  How on earth will I know which bits are important for the exam?"

I always responded in the same way, and re-iterated my entreaties to use the learning objectives in class.  Finally, by the fourth class, I was fed up, and tried something new.  I had been putting all of the objectives for the day in a list and presenting them at the beginning, and then again at the end.  It seemed like at the beginning, students didn't know what the objectives were about, and just wanted to get started, and at the end their appearance was a cue to start packing up. 

So instead, before each individual activity I presented the relevant objective and slowly stated something to the effect of: "This...is...what...I...will...expect...you...to...be...able...to...do...in...your...exam...on...Monday." 

I think that this had the desired (possibly short-term?) effect.  My plan for next time is to stick with the individual objective method (sans the slow talking) but also to explicitly introduce the principle of 'alignment' and to present several example exam questions paired with the objective they assess.  Hopefully that works better.

The dreaded Student Evaluations and the elusive Buy-in

 I felt as nervous to start reading my 228 student evaluations as I did walking into the first day of class hugging a gigantic cardboard box full of candy.  I know, I know, evaluation is what I need and want, and even asked for (with participation points as an encouragement), but it still made me queasy, and I put it off for days.

 The reason I was so nervous was that I had heard, over and over again, that students are often hostile towards active learning classes, particularly when there is no opportunity to pre-emptively explore the method-behind-the-madness and encourage student buy-in.  Buy-in is not only desirable for your ego (and evaluation scores), but necessary for the students' successful engagement with the techniques.  Unfortunately, the most time-efficient method of encouraging buy-in, which is the  PR approach of simply stating that the methods you use are the greatest ever and proven by scientists in white coats, is likely to be the least effective way of converting your students to enthusiastic active learners.  For the approved, student-centred exemplar, check out this article from the otherwise subscription-only National Teaching and Learning Forum.

Anyway, as excited as I am by that idea, in practice I only had 10 minutes in my four-class module dedicated to 'encouraging buy-in'.  I spent 99% of that time trying to explain as clearly as possible how the structure of my module would differ from the rest of the course, what was expected of them and how to use the learning objectives.  Not that many of them believed me (more on that in my next post).  So no buy-in was achieved.  Hence my nervousness at their reactions to my module.  Many students liked me, or liked my methods, or liked the class or the examples or the objectives or this, that, or the other, but by far the most common response was :

1) The method was 'inefficient'.
That is, we didn't cover enough.

2) Depending on the student complaining, being called on to report out was either intimidating or 'pointless'. 
In explanation, my method to make sure that people actually engaged in the activities (since no marks were available) was to call on people at random to report out the results of their group discussions.  In passing, several students made it clear in their evaluations that this had worked, by stating that they wouldn't have bothered doing any of the activities if not for the fear of being called out.  But they overwhelmingly hated the idea.

3) Group work and discussion based learning was inappropriate for such a big class.

How I dealt with my bad student evaluations.
The most obvious method for dealing with bad evaluations is not to get them.  To try the buy-in activities. To be organised and make sure the students know what to expect.  To accept that much of the criticism might be valid and look for ways to improve your work.  But the reality is that bad student evaluations could persist anyway.  And that can really, really matter for a tertiary teaching career.  Rightly or wrongly (please read this eloquent diatribe for the 'wrongly' argument) student evaluations are often the information that employers use to assess your effectiveness as a teacher.  The answer that our FIRST IV mentors have given us is (to paraphrase) SHOW THEM THE DATA.  Make sure that you collect good data on learning gains in your classes. Be able to demonstrate that your students are meeting their learning objectives, even if they whine that group work is annoying.  

On this note, I'd like to explain how I regained my cheeriness after reading hundreds of student evaluations complaining about the inefficiency of my methods.  I read their post-instruction 'dinosaur essays'.

No time to blog...must...finish....taxes....

It's almost done.  Post-instruction dino essays collected, evaluation form posted, recitations finished.  Only things left for this semester are an exam on Monday and then the final exam.  I hope I'm still alive by then.

I came, I clicked, I conquered.

I have to admit, before the FIRST IV workshop in spring last year I had never heard of 'clickers' (a.k.a. personal response systems, or the little infrared doodads that students can use to submit their answers to multiple-choice questions posed by the class facilitator).  In this naïve state, my very first experience of their use was an inspiring example of state-of-the-art clicking.  Unfortunately, my real-life-teaching experiences with clickers since then have been underwhelming, so I'm really glad I got to see what they are capable of before I had my dreams of clicker conquest waylaid.  At least I know what I'm aiming for...

What exactly did I witness that gave me such hope for clicker world domination?  It was a demonstration given by faculty experienced with using clicker questions to engage students, reveal misconceptions and tease out those famous 'teachable moments'.  They had the workshop participants already organised into co-operative groups, but asked us to use our clickers to answer the Radish Problem (see here for more) by ourselves.  The radish problem diagnoses common student difficulties in 'tracing matter' that is interconverted during photosynthesis and respiration.  By definition, every participant in the workshop has a PhD in biology, and yet a large proportion of us (maybe half?) got this introductory biology question utterly, hopelessly, wrong.  A great way to get our attention!  Some heated and productive discussion in our groups followed, then more discussion as a class, we were re-polled, and then magically we all knew the answer.  More than that, we won't magically forget the answer (as we obviously had after our extensive and apparently successful undergraduate educations) because we were fully engaged in solving the problem.  Genius.

After this, F1B and I were so enthusiastic about the radish problem that we subjected our entire (rather large) lab to a demonstration of the power of active learning during our next Friday morning lab meeting.  Once again, a 'textbook' discussion ensued, including my very smart P.I. giving a wonderfully lucid and biochemically detailed justification for the wrong answer.

How did it work out in real-life-teaching? 

First off, it seems like you have to administer clicker questions or students simply won't turn up (clickers determine their participation grade).  They even feel ripped off if they don't get a question, since there's no reward for turning up. However, as you might expect, it is really, really hard to write questions as awesome as the radish problem (the dreaded multiple-choice questions!).  All our attempts (and we have 1-2 per class, on average) have apparently been way too easy.  Nearly everyone gets them right, and it's hard to have much engagement or discussion when everyone apparently agrees (even if you have a sneaking suspicion that not everyone really 'gets' it).  However, I will admit that we haven't been getting them to answer by themselves first (i.e. before their neighbours have a chance to tell them the answer).  I suspect this is part of the problem, but I also think our questions really are a bit too easy to work well.  I've also heard jaded and weary faculty complain about the opposite problem: students don't know the answer, discuss and discuss, and then still don't know the answer.  I've never seen that myself, and feel like a spot of expertly-placed Socratic questioning must surely help, but I can see how this situation would also lead to clicker-disenchantment.  The battle continues.

Resources:   There are many resources on clicker questions around, such as those compiled at the CWSEI, or the recently-abandoned ASCB education library BioEducate, including quite a lot of genetics-ey type sample questions from William Wood (of the review article in the previous post) and Jennifer Knight.

Innovations in Undergraduate Biology

Innovations in Teaching Undergraduate Biology and Why We Need Them  is an uber useful review article from Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology that could have been a textbook for the FIRSTIV workshop last year (but we already had one).

Biology, I missed you.

I'm only half-way through my paltry teaching load this semester, so maybe I'm not ready to say what I do and don't like about teaching, but I can definitely say what I love about designing classes and assessments.  I love learning about, thinking about, analyzing, reimagining and immersing myself in biology.  Until I had to design introductory biology classes I hadn't realised just how much I missed thinking and learning about the big concepts in biology; I was trapped in the minutiae of my research.  I guess I still am, most days, but at least teaching now gives me an occasional outlet.

Should we attract better teachers or train better ones?

A really interesting article in the NYT about goings-on in the world of teacher education.

Preventing coffee spills on student papers

 Here's some stylish and practical advice from Adventures in Ethics and Science for juggling your essays and your rubrics.

Sweet, sweet candy (and random matings)

Today F1B and I spent a good deal of time loudly and earnestly debating the mechanics of Hershey Kiss matings and inter-candy marriage.  I wasn't surprised to get some funny looks from fellow lab-mates, but I was happy to hear more than one commentator express regret at missing out on the fun.

I don't know how fun it actually was, but Operation Random Mating is almost Mission Accomplished.  Albeit with a few casualties (40 alleles were consumed or had mysteriously migrated before the end of the exercise).

FIRST-IV-ers may recognize our shameless plagiarism of the Hershey Kiss/Tootsie Roll Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium simulation, in which students are assigned a genotype at a two-allele candy locus.  I really love the idea of making an abstract model a little more tangible, but I was worried all the 'mechanics' involved would suck up our very limited time.  It turns out the mechanics were fine (our students are very efficient at mating), but it took a really long time for students to get their head around the maths.  And this is very, very simple maths.  I'm interested to see what happens when the activity continues tomorrow....

250 bums-on-seats, 250 pairs of blinking eyes, 250 texting thumbs

So my personal genomics module was fun - it was a very small class of co-operative students who are used to asking and answering questions and doing the occasional activity.  I'll write more on how it went once I've surfaced from the avalanche of work that has buried me for the last few weeks.  In the meantime, I'm freaking out about the prospect of herding 250 students through some pretty complex activities.

My departmental FIRST IV Buddy (let's call him F1B) took the first class in a similarly-sized section last week, and of course did a fabulous job, including presenting the results of their natural selection pre-test (some questions from the CINS and the dinosaur question) as a introduction to the misconceptions we will be addressing.  However, the difficulties of 'parachuting in' a totally new learning mode for two weeks in the middle of a semester became obvious.  We can't create formal groups, and even if we could, we have no mechanism to introduce group accountability, because all the marks have to come from the exam or clicker questions. This also means that there is no grade incentive to actually engage in any of the activities, only the nebulous (to a stressed-out freshman) incentive of improved learning.  And I believe in grade incentives; they're the currency of teaching and learning.  We are assigning a value to the various pieces of work that students are asked to do, and the value we assign should reflect the importance of that work to achieving learning goals.  If I think it's so important to engage in a learning activity, then a grade tells students I really mean it.  At least, that's the way students talk about it (they're always complaining about unassessed work and 'optional' readings).

The obvious drawback to my opinion is that 250 bums-on-seats  eventually means 250 scrawled short answers or cramped concept maps/mini-maps/box-and-arrow-diagrams.  I know that Diane and some of our esteemed FIRST IV faculty use undergraduate teaching assistants to help with grading, but my university absolutely forbids us to do that.  So, the solution I've come up with this morning, which I'll ask F1B about today, is to have some clicker question marks tied to activities.  For instance, on Monday they'll be doing a Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium activity in which they'll have to do things like calculate allele frequencies and predict equilibrium genotype frequencies.  To encourage participation, we could get them to 'click-in' one of their answers (from 5 choices).  It seems lame, but otherwise I envisage one-half of the class bothering to join in and one-half not bothering.

Structure-Behaviour-Function-Questions?

The following is part of an email from Diane in response to the concept map post:

Keep in mind that concept maps are models -- all models have structure, behavior (what links two or more concepts) and function (of the model). 

A graph is a model, a picture is a model, a box and arrow diagram is a model, a concept map is a model.  The key for any model is the relationship between and among concepts.  We find the rules of concept maps (aka hierarchy) too constraining.

Working with students re:modelling any concept, system, relationship is extremely valuable.

On the topic of Structure-Behaviour-Function of models, I have heard much about this idea, but am still struggling to picture how it gets used in the classroom.  Does anyone have any examples?

I choose (b) concept maps

Last night, while I was whining like a baby posting about my difficulties writing multiple-choice questions, I had the germ of an idea that made me feel a bit better.  It involves concept maps, which are awesomeness (Fig. 1).  We are planning to include a concept mapping activity toward the end of the natural selection module. A concept map is made up of nodes that represent concepts, and links that represent the relationships between them.   Creating concept maps helps students structure their knowledge because it asks them to make decisions about the connections between concepts.  They are inherently hard to assess, because many different maps can be correctly constructed from the same terms, but they are apparently a good tool for discussion of the 'big picture' and we are keen to give them a go.  My nascent idea is that we can also broaden our narrow array of multiple-choice questions by including a couple based around concept maps.  I can imagine two sorts:

1) Choose the most accurate concept map from five (this is lower level, space-consuming, also time-consuming to read, but still possible).

2) Choose from five possible linking phrases to go between nodes in an 'unlinked' concept map (slightly higher level, slightly less space consuming)

Once we have tried this idea out, I'll post something on whether it worked out.

PS If you have ever wanted to make a concept map without exposing your horrible hand-tremor and blotchy penmanship, try the programme Cmap, which is incredibly straight-forward and also free.

 

Figure 1. Judge me only on artistic merit

Multiple-choice questions make me want to choose (e) Instant death

Like the majority of large enrollment freshman biology courses, the one I will be involved in teaching is assessed entirely by MCQs.  This may be because anyone who has to had to read 300 freshman biology essays is already dead, and therefore unable to write any more essay questions.  However, this also means that the only way that I can assess any of the learning objectives  I have been carefully assembling (with my teaching buddy and FIRST IV team member, who will take a parallel lecture section) is to ask for a choice between (a)-through-(e).  While I believe that MCQs can be profound and rich and fantastically high level, it turns out I just don't have the skills required to write them that way.  Let me elaborate:

a) To write good 'distractors' I need to have a good idea of what students' misconceptions are likely to be.  I don't.  I've never taught freshpeople before, and the published information I could find on this was only partly helpful.

b) There are some types of objectives that we just can't find a way to assess by MCQ:  For instance, you can kiss goodbye to objectives that contain verbs like explain, construct, model, diagram, interpret, conclude, criticize and countless more.

c)  With no ability to show working, even calculate objectives are nightmares to write, because calculators are banned.

d) Sometimes there just don't seem to be four additional plausible-sounding alternatives to the right answer.  Most of the time there is one, or maybe two.

e) Often, it seems like some questions are only harder because they require a higher level of reading comprehension (e.g. noticing the importance of certain words to sentence meaning, like because, always, might, only, therefore, required and so forth) which is obviously very important, but isn't the only learning objective I want to assess.

Ack.

Don't get your POGILs in a twist

I'll admit that I have on occasion struggled to tell my PBLs from my POGILs and my PLTLs.  Thankfully I found a paper in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education that compares these active learning approaches side-by-side in a handy table, while coining the staggeringly nerdy abbreviation "PX_nL".

How to address misconceptions about evolution in introductory biology

There's a nice article in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology about how to best use the information gathered in misconception pre-tests.  Basically, the author shifted from using the misconception data as a measurement of whether students were making learning gains, to using it as a tool to address the misconceptions directly. 

Grant presented histograms of the results of the pre-tests in class and engaged the students in metacognitive discussion (thinking about their process of learning).  He then explicitly arranged the course content around the misconceptions identified.  Apparently this didn't affect the type of content addressed as much as the structure.

Practitioner Research Improved My Students’ Understanding of Evolution by Natural Selection in an Introductory Biology Course • Bruce W. Grant

and also a much longer version NAS/NRC Board of Science Education here.

Happy Darwin Day

So, like me, you're stuck in some American city where Creation isn't going to be showing.  Try this for a tear-jerker instead.

Personal Genomics and me

All the glossy magazines tell us that direct-to-consumer personal genomics is upon us and that our individual futures can now be predicted. Just because the science behind the predictions is (ahem) under-ripe does not mean that the whole venture is destined for extinction. Today’s undergraduates are highly likely to be consumers of information about their own genome and I hope they turn out to be informed ones. To this end, I’ll be integrating the topic of personal genomics into a two-class module on complex trait inheritance for a small introductory biology course. Next week.

So, yes, I’m feeling sleep deprived and jittery and I’m starting to dream about vanishing learning objectives, the way I used to dream about pushing electrons and sliding redox states as an undergrad. It’s only thanks to the mentoring of some helpful faculty members that I haven’t already burst into flames.

Assuming my lack of spontaneous combustion lasts until next Friday, this is what I’m thinking of trying:

Class I (2h minus break)
1) Social implications of disease testing – group disccusion of the reading
2) Huntington’s disease minilecture: Pedigrees, linkage and finding causative mutations by looking for markers physically linked to them
3) Activity drawing linked and unlinked alleles on chromosomes through the steps of meiosis and crossing over
4) Introduction to complex traits – examples of muliple genetic influences, environmental influences and gene x environment interactions
5) Brainstorm on ‘what is environment?’
6) Group activity on coming up with experimental designs to decide whether genetics or environment has more influence on a trait
7) Introduction to heritability
8) Think-pair-share on example of heritability misconception

Class II (2h minus break)

1) In-class quiz on homework problem set
2) Introduction to genome-wide association studies as a way to find linkage for complex traits and the current limitations on risks predicted from them.
3) In small groups, use the 23andMe demo genomes and answer guided questions to relate their existing knowledge of genes and alleles and loci and punnett squares and dominance relationships to the SNP genotypes on the screen. Group discussion of results.
4) Small groups each prepare a short genetic counselling session for either Lilly or Greg. Guided by fictional case notes for each that change the interpretation of the results.
5) Group synthesis of our interpretations of absolute vs. relative risk, genetic vs. environmental influences, actinable vs. non-actionable information.

Absurdly optimistic? Too dumbed down? I have no idea! Help!

You may notice that class II involves mostly footling around at the 23andMe website, looking at the demo genomes of ‘Lilly and Greg Mendel’ (not their real names). If you have never done this, I highly recommend it for late-night entertainment. The thing that bothered me at first was that my class could turn into a PR exercise, in which I tacitly endorse 23andMe by forcing my students to spend nearly 2 hours exposed to their advertising material. I’ve decided to go ahead with it anyway, because it's too nice an opportunity and I can at least summarise the uncertainties that hover around SNP risk estimates at the moment.

One last thing, I promise: I got a very interesting tip from the genetics lecturer in my department today. She said that she has struggled to get students to let go of the misconception that a complex trait is just a complicated one. The confusion is revealed when they always classify multi-allelic single gene traits as complex traits. It’s possible it would be easier for them if we jettisoned the term ‘complex’ and substituted ‘multifactorial’, but I still don’t know if there is some terminological difference between the definition of complex and multifactorial traits that I have missed.

Say no to taking notes.

I've always been vehemently against taking notes (I never did in college, but then again, I was asleep most of the time). So, the Chronicle of Higher Education says some boffins agree with me.

Learn.Genetics/Teach.Genetics

Learn.Genetics and Teach.Genetics are a pair of awesome websites from the Genetics Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. The project is described in an issue of Science last week, if you have access. Every month this year, Science will feature one of the 12 winners of the SPORE prize (Science Prize for Online Resources in Education).

Who died and left me in charge of teaching the mechanisms of evolution to a pack of gum-chewing, skinny-jeaned, re-tweeting 18-year olds?

How clever of me to dive (or belly flop) into the deep-end with my very first teaching experience. Sure, like all grad students, I led tutorials and I have inducted many shaky-handed undergraduate researchers into the world of the lab, but I never had the responsibility of figuring out what was supposed to be learned or how I would know that students had learned it. And now, the results of my first experiments in this area may determine whether or not some spotty kid believes in evolution or not. Oh, and did I mention I'll be videotaped for the purposes of critiquing my performance? No pressure.

Luckily I have the keenest and most massive roadcrew ever assembled to help a poor post-doc bumble their way through a teaching assignment. It’s called the FIRST IV network and it’s a

…national dissemination project designed to reform undergraduate science education through professional development of postdocs who will design an introductory biology course for a learner-centered classroom.

In addition to ‘disseminating’ their reform through me and my cohort of 100 elite-crime-fighting postdocs, FIRST IV intends to establish a formal network of next-gen biology teachers. We will be there to provide support and ideas to each other for the rest of our natural lives. Yes, I have joined a cult.