Challenging Endocrinology Students with a Critical Thinking Workbook

This is the accepted manuscript of an article published in Advances in Physiology Education. The version of record can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00101.2019A central goal of science education is to help students develop higher order thinking skills to enable them to face the challenges of life. Accordingly, science instructors are now urged to craft their classrooms such that they serve not only as spaces for disseminating information, but also an arena through which students are encouraged to think scientifically and develop critical thinking skills. This project aimed to develop a workbook that helps postsecondary students learn endocrinology and engages them in critical thinking. Each of the five chapters focus on a different topic rooted within core biological concepts relevant to endocrinology. Such topics were identified upon cross referencing seminal reports on science education. Tenants of Numrich’s Sequence of Critical Thinking Tasks were used to guide the development of chapter sections with the intent of engaging students in critical thinking over time by way of practice and scaffolded guidance. Chapter sections include modeling, event sequencing, clinical application, research and communication, and simulation, each of which target a different repertoire of skills presented in Numrich’s framework. Students’ learning, experiences, and behaviors were used to evaluate the workbook and inform the revision of the workbook into the publicly-available second edition

COMPUTATIONAL MODELING INTERVENTION: USING DYNAMICAL MODELS TO TEACH COMPLEX BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The Unites States, while being one of the richest countries in the world, ranks 17th in science proficiency out of 31 countries. New techniques for teaching are needed if the US wants to keep up with increasing global competition. Often the problem with traditional methods for teaching biological processes is that they present the material as linear or causal, when in fact there is a much wider network at play. For example, cellular respiration is often represented as a linear process that always starts with glucose and always ends with ATP and water. However, there are several entry and exit points of cellular respiration that interact with other metabolic pathways and are additionally controlled by allosteric regulation based on cellular conditions. This sort of big-picture view is rarely seen in general biology and thus gives a misleading representation of how the cell undergoes cellular respiration.Computer modeling and technology-based methods for analyzing scientific information is quickly becoming the norm in advanced scientific labs, a trend that should also be reflected in the classroom. Exposing students to computer modeling programs now allows them to be better equipped for this new era of data processing based on bioinformatics. In addition, modeling offers a way for students to visualize behavioral relationships of biological processes, such as gene transcription. This enables students to master material instead of just memorizing it. This research group aims to examine the usefulness of computational modeling intervention (CMI) for the teaching of basic to advanced biological processes through the use of the interactive modeling program, Cell Collective

Changes in students’ mental models from computational modeling of gene regulatory networks

Background: Computational modeling is an increasingly common practice for disciplinary experts and therefore necessitates integration into science curricula. Computational models afford an opportunity for students to investigate the dynamics of biological systems, but there is significant gap in our knowledge of how these activities impact student knowledge of the structures, relationships, and dynamics of the system. We investigated how a computational modeling activity affected introductory biology students’ mental models of a prokaryotic gene regulatory system (lac operon) by analyzing conceptual models created before and after the activity. Results: Students’ pre-lesson conceptual models consisted of provided, system-general structures (e.g., activator, repressor) connected with predominantly incorrect relationships, representing an incomplete mental model of gene regulation. Students’ post-lesson conceptual models included more context-specific structures (e.g., cAMP, lac repressor) and increased in total number of structures and relationships. Student conceptual models also included higher quality relationships among structures, indicating they learned about these context-specific structures through integration with their expanding mental model rather than in isolation. Conclusions: Student mental models meshed structures in a manner indicative of knowledge accretion while they were productively re-constructing their understanding of gene regulation. Conceptual models can inform instructors about how students are relating system structures and whether students are developing more sophisticated models of system-general and system-specific dynamics

Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project.

We report the generation and analysis of functional data from multiple, diverse experiments performed on a targeted 1% of the human genome as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE Project. These data have been further integrated and augmented by a number of evolutionary and computational analyses. Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and features of chromatin accessibility and histone modification. Third, a more sophisticated view of chromatin structure has emerged, including its inter-relationship with DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Finally, integration of these new sources of information, in particular with respect to mammalian evolution based on inter- and intra-species sequence comparisons, has yielded new mechanistic and evolutionary insights concerning the functional landscape of the human genome. Together, these studies are defining a path for pursuit of a more comprehensive characterization of human genome function