Finding alternatives techniques to facilitate digestion and consolidation of knowledge derived from distinct scientific disciplines is an important task of interdisciplinary teaching. During a master course that enrolled 63 individuals, we aimed at evaluating the integration of opening teaching sessions (OS) and their impact on formative assessment and student satisfaction. Integration of OS significantly increased the acquisition and usage of elementary bioinformatic concepts/skills, which was evaluated throughout inquiries for formative teaching. Furthermore, application OS corresponded with a high level of satisfaction possibly by driving instructional effectiveness and student centeredness

L. Castro-Mejía, Josue

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17Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitatebioinformatic digestion in dry-laboratoryexercisesJosue L. Castro-MejíaDepartment of Food ScienceUniversity of CopenhagenSummary. Finding alternatives techniques to facilitate digestion and consolida-tion of knowledge derived from distinct scientific disciplines is an important taskof interdisciplinary teaching. During a master course that enrolled 63 individuals,we aimed at evaluating the integration of opening teaching sessions (OS) and theirimpact on formative assessment and student satisfaction.Integration of OS significantly increased the acquisition and usage of elemen-tary bioinformatic concepts/skills, which was evaluated throughout inquiries forformative teaching. Furthermore, application OS corresponded with a high levelof satisfaction possibly by driving instructional effectiveness and student centered-ness.Keywords: opening sessions, electronic voting system (EVS), formative assess-ment, student satisfactionIntroductionBetween September and November 2019, the section for Microbiologyand Fermentation at Department of Food Science held the Master Sci-ence Course entitled “Microbiology of Fermented Foods and Beverages”(MFFB), in which 63 students were enrolled. The course structure includedlectures, wet- and dry-laboratory exercises, theoretical exercises and casestudies. In this course over 10 teachers were involved, including profes-sors/associates, postdocs and PhD students. Most of the activities related224 Josue L. Castro-Mejíato lectures and wet-laboratory exercises have been extensively optimizedwithin the last 5-10 years. However, when dealing and focusing on dry-laboratory exercises (data analysis), particularly in the analysis of molecu-lar biology results, the interpretation of data can become a tedious, slowand frustrating process for students and teachers. Courses like MFFB andsimilar require students to rapidly acquire an intermediate level of profi-ciency with a number of bioinformatic software, online tools and databases.In its current form, rather than allocating most of the exercise’s time foranalyzing and interpreting the results obtained throughout wet-laboratoryexperiments, students often straggle the most with (i) understanding basictechnical concepts and (ii) for running a given software/tool/database. Apossible solution to this would be to implement a new course within thestudy program to address the aforementioned issues, but this may not rep-resent the most viable solution given a number of inherent limitations. Al-ternatively, another way to deal with this challenge could be to implementopening teaching sessions (OS) (before the beginning of the exercise) tocoach bioinformatic (technical) concepts related to the questions and chal-lenges of the exercise. Under this new setup, students would not only spendless of their time learning tools usage and searching for sites of accurateinformation, but rather allocating time for problem formulations and inter-pretation of results derived from problem-based projects (Krogh & Wiberg,2015) that are previously developed in wet-lab activities. From a pedago-gical perspective, it can be pointed out that this approach may be able tofoment longer periods of formative feedback and interactions. This couldpromote constant dialogues between students-students (within and betweengroups) and students-teacher (Rienecker & Bruun, 2015), which may ulti-mately lead to the arouse of critical thinking among the study participants.With this in mind, the aim of this project was to evaluate the integrationof OS at the beginning of dry-laboratory exercises (DL-Exercise) from twoangles. The first was focused on testing the efficiency for acquiring elemen-tary concepts and skills on the basis of OS by formative assessment (Coutoet al., 2019; Rienecker & Bruun, 2015). The second angle was focused onmeasuring the level of students’ satisfaction (Elliott, 2002) in relation to theimplementation of OS. To accomplish this, we applied online tools basedon an electronic voting systems (EVS), commonly known as “clickers”,which in previous years have been demonstrated to be an efficient tool foroptimizing students’ engagement and learning (Balta & Tzafilkou, 2019;Mathiasen, 2015). In this project, the application of EVS allowed to gain17 Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate... 225knowledge on efficiency of formative feedback and the students’ satisfac-tion.MethodsImplementation of short opening sessionsUp to 48 students participated in two DL-Exercises (Figure in appendixA), representing 76% of the registered students in the course. In our ex-perimental setup, DL-Exercises I and II were performed in two indepen-dent days and relied on problem-based projects previously developed inwet-lab activities according to the course plan. A teaching opening session(OS) with a duration of 30 min was integrated exclusively in DL-ExerciseI, where a general overview of the exercise program and basic knowledgein bioinformatics (e.g. blast algorithm, indels, id, alignment, etc.) (Figurein appendix A) was delivered. Formative assessments were implemented inDL-Exercises I and II, while a satisfaction survey was carried out only atthe end of DL-Exercise I (Figure in appendix A).Electronic Voting System (EVS)Licensed EVS platform based on the Socrative application (socrative.com)was used during the short opening sessions (OS), for both formative as-sessment and satisfaction evaluation. Data on formative assessment wascollected as technical questionnaires of multiple-choice, while for student-satisfaction data were collected through a binary questionnaire.StatisticsSignificant differences in the distribution of students proving accurate/inaccurateanswers as a measurement of concept and skill acquisition were evaluatedthrough Chi-square test as implemented in R (v. 3.6.0).ResultsStudents perform best in formative assessments when openingsessions are integratedTo test whether opening sessions (OS) could increase the acquisition ofconcepts and skills throughout DL exercises, we applied an informal for-226 Josue L. Castro-Mejíamative assessment by means of EVS. Students were exposed to two ques-tions at different stages of the exercises. The aim of these questions was toevaluate learning needs and problems, as well as to develop a stronger un-derstanding of their own strengths and weaknesses of their problem-basedscenarios. It is important to clarify though that that the questions asked tothe study participants were typical inquiries applicable at any time underthe course examination. This includes, e.g.“You managed to get a bacterial isolate and your gut feeling tells youit’s a Lactobacillus spp., but you’re not sure. Thus, you decide to amplifythe 16S rRNAgene and send the amplicons (products) to Macrogen for se-quencing. After two days turn around, you finally get the sequences andyou blast them against NCBI. What bacterial specie have you isolated?A) Lactobacillus plantarum (%Identity: 99, %Query-Cover 99.3, e-value:0.0)B) Lactobacillus pentosus (%Identity: 99, %Query-Cover 99.3, e-value:0.0)C) The isolate belongs to either Lb. pentosus or Lb. plantarum, but I cannotdiscriminate them based on 16S rRNA.D) The database is wrong and cannot trust the results!”The results of this intervention revealed that when OS was integrated(DL-Exercise I) over 85% of the evaluated study participants were able tocorrectly answer applied questions related to the molecular biology sub-ject of topic (Figure in appendix B). On the contrary, when opening ses-sions were not incorporated (NOS) (Exercise II), the proportion of studentsthat accurately answered questions was more variable and significantly de-creased as compared to those obtained through OS (Figure in appendix B).Students consider short opening sessions (OS) as an importantcomponent for future coursesAt the end of the exercise in which OS was integrated (DL-Exercise I) stu-dents were asked to evaluate the importance of OS in their learning. Thus,this was evaluated on the basis of a binary question on EVS that couldgather a closer answer to their own perception. Here, a vast majority (ac-counting 97%) of students expressed that the use of OS allows them to gainand/or re-assure knowledge needed to accomplish problem formulationsand results interpretation in their projects (Figure in appendix C). Further-more, only 3% of the students declared that they did not obtain relevant17 Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate... 227information from OS, as their knowledge was already high enough (Figurein appendix C).DiscussionGiven to the rise of interdisciplinary approaches to which applied coursesare being subjected, institutions of higher education are dealing with chal-lenges associated with cognitive mindset and limited resources (MacLeod,2018). Therefore, finding alternatives to facilitate fusion and digestion ofseveral scientific disciplines in a time and cost-effective way is becomingan imperative task. In this project, we aimed at implementing an alternativesolution to reduce the gap between food science students and their know-ledge in bioinformatic concepts, which in previous years has generated alot confusion in a number of courses at the department of Food Science.Yet, although the application of bioinformatic concepts and tools have beencommonly applied within several areas of Food Science, students at thisdepartment are not regularly exposed to the field of bioinformatics.During our master course (MFFB), where 63 students from variousbackgrounds were admitted we decided to test the implementation and ac-ceptance of short opening sessions (OS) in bioinformatic background priorDL-Exercises. Throughout the exercises and by means of formative assess-ment, we observed a significant improvement in the acquisition and usageof elementary concepts and practical skills on the basis of OS. Based on ourresults we cannot conclude or speculate whether OS had significant andpositive influence on the final students’ grades. However, in recent simi-lar approaches, it also been shown that application of assessments test andformative assessments in tutorial sessions correlated positively with sum-mative assessments and progress tests (Bestetti et al., 2017; Couto et al.,2019), which reinforced ultimately the problem-based learning.The application of OS in our setup resulted also in high level of satis-faction among the study participants, where over 95% of the proportion ofstudents expressed that OS allowed to gain and/or re-enforce their know-ledge. The application of innovative approaches may not always be asso-ciated with improved satisfactions among institutions of higher education(Serdyukov, 2017). However, in connection to our results, it can be specu-lated that the high level of satisfaction obtained may be linked to instruc-tional effectiveness and student centeredness as key determinants of theirsatisfaction (Elliott, 2002).228 Josue L. Castro-MejíaLast, but not least it is also important to point out the importance ofEVS as a central tool to retrieve quantitative information from interven-tional teaching studies (Faya Cerqueiro & Martin-Macho Harrison, 2019).As knowledge facilitators we often benefit from such clickers by either pro-moting student’s activation or driving a convenient approach towards for-mative teaching. Furthermore, by adequately formulating questions, teach-ers can get an overview of students acquisition of concepts and skills, ses-sion weaknesses and strengths.ReferencesBalta, N., & Tzafilkou, K. (2019). Using socrative software for instant for-mative feedback in physics courses. Education and InformationTechnologies, 24(1), 307–323.Bestetti, R. B., Couto, L. B., Restini, C. B., Faria Jr, M., & Romao, G. S.(2017). Assessment test before the reporting phase of tutorial ses-sion in problem-based learning. Advances in medical educationand practice, 8, 181.Couto, L. B., Durand, M. T., Wolff, A. C., Restini, C. B., Faria Jr, M.,Romao, G. S., & Bestetti, R. B. (2019). Formative assessmentscores in tutorial sessions correlates with osce and progress test-ing scores in a pbl medical curriculum. Medical education online,24(1), 1560862.Elliott, K. M. (2002). Key determinants of student satisfaction. Journalof College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 4(3),271–279.Faya Cerqueiro, F., & Martin-Macho Harrison, A. (2019). Socrative inhigher education: Game vs. other uses. Multimodal Technologiesand Interaction, 3(3), 49.Krogh, L., & Wiberg, M. (2015). Problem-based and project-organisedteaching. In L. Rienecker, P. S. Jørgensen, J. Dolin, & G. H. In-gerslev (Eds.), University teaching and learning (1st ed., pp. 215–227). Samfundslitteratur.MacLeod, M. (2018). What makes interdisciplinarity difficult? some con-sequences of domain specificity in interdisciplinary practice. Syn-these, 195(2), 697–720.17 Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate... 229Mathiasen, H. (2015). Clickers. In L. Rienecker, P. S. Jørgensen, J. Dolin, &G. H. Ingerslev (Eds.), University teaching and learning (1st ed.,pp. 281–288). Samfundslitteratur.Rienecker, L., & Bruun, J. (2015). Feedback. In L. Rienecker, P. S. Jør-gensen, J. Dolin, & G. H. Ingerslev (Eds.), University teachingand learning (1st ed., pp. 259–280). Samfundslitteratur.Serdyukov, P. (2017). Innovation in education: What works, what doesn’t,and what to do about it? Journal of Research in Innovative Teach-ing & Learning.230 Josue L. Castro-MejíaAFig. 17.1. Setup of OS implementation in DL exercises.17 Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate... 231BFig. 17.2. Summary of formative assessment in dry-laboratory (DL) -Exerciseswhere Opening Session (OS) or non-Opening Sessions (NOS) were provided. Forevery DL exercise, two technical questions (Q1 and Q2) to determine whether spe-cific concepts and skills were acquired and understood. Technical questions werepresented to students in a multiple-choice fashion through EVS. Significant differ-ences in the proportion on answered questions (correct/inaccurate) were carry-outwith Chi-square.232 Josue L. Castro-MejíaCFig. 17.3. Distribution of study participants in relation to their satisfaction afterintegrating OS in DL exercises.

Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate bioinformatic digestion in dry-laboratory exercises

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Opening sessions (OS): A tool to facilitate bioinformatic digestion in dry-laboratory exercises

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