Beyond Navel Gazing: The Evidence Base for Employing Reflective and Metacognitive Practices in our Teaching

Most of us work hard to build our students’ discipline-specific skills, content knowledge, and even that elusive goal, critical thinking. Rarely, though, do we train our students in how to reflect on their learning practices and current level of understanding, or how to change their practices to deepen understanding. Lacking such skills, they often exhibit shocking (to us!) failures to make connections among what they have learned, improve ineffective study behaviors, or see what they’re learning in a broader context. The research in cognitive science now demonstrates the importance and value of metacognition and reflection in formal learning, and fortunately for us, our fellow educators have developed and tested many specific techniques that we can use to teach our students how to effectively reflect on their learning and understanding. I’ll describe several techniques, applicable to a variety of disciplines, that you can apply right away in your classroom, ranging from simple to complex, and provide the evidence base for each. By choosing approaches that help our students become both more self-aware and self-regulating learners, we can achieve the deeper understandings that we, and many of our students, yearn for

Functionally Significant Features in the 5′ Untranslated Region of the ABCA1 Gene and Their Comparison in Vertebrates

Single nucleotide polymorphisms located in 5′ untranslated regions (5′UTRs) can regulate gene expression and have clinical impact. Recognition of functionally significant sequences within 5′UTRs is crucial in next-generation sequencing applications. Furthermore, information about the behavior of 5′UTRs during gene evolution is scarce. Using the example of the ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) gene (Tangier disease), we describe our algorithm for functionally significant sequence finding. 5′UTR features (upstream start and stop codons, open reading frames (ORFs), GC content, motifs, and secondary structures) were studied using freely available bioinformatics tools in 55 vertebrate orthologous genes obtained from Ensembl and UCSC. The most conserved sequences were suggested as hot spots. Exon and intron enhancers and silencers (sc35, ighg2 cgamma2, ctnt, gh-1, and fibronectin eda exon), transcription factors (TFIIA, TATA, NFAT1, NFAT4, and HOXA13), some of them cancer related, and microRNA (hsa-miR-4474-3p) were localized to these regions. An upstream ORF, overlapping with the main ORF in primates and possibly coding for a small bioactive peptide, was also detected. Moreover, we showed several features of 5′UTRs, such as GC content variation, hairpin structure conservation or 5′UTR segmentation, which are interesting from a phylogenetic point of view and can stimulate further evolutionary oriented research