Concurrent Pedagogy Sessions

Understanding by Design: Using Intelligent Course Design to Build Learning Environments
Spencer Benson, University of Maryland and 2011 Carski Foundation Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Awardee

Understanding by Design (UbD) is also referred to as Backward Design and is used by many Pre-K through 20 educators and instructional designers.  This session will use the work of Wiggins and McTighe as a background to discuss a learning centered approach to course and learning activity design.  In the session participants will work through a series of exercises to define what is information/knowledge that is central to their course, how to assess if students are developing understanding of the materials and how one selects content that support the desired learning goals.  Participants should attend with a specific course in mind and bring a recent syllabus for the course they are teaching, restructuring, or thinking of developing.

Using Serious Games to Teach Microbiology

Kristi G. Bowling, Rice University

MedMyst, a serious game with multiple independent segments, was created through grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Center for Research Resources. The underlying concept was to use game-based learning to teach middle school students about infectious diseases while reinforcing the scientific method and encouraging STEM careers. In this session, an overview of the seven MedMyst missions, accompanying classroom activities, and teacher support materials will be presented. The original target audience was middle school students, however, MedMyst has been used at many educational levels and in multiple ways, some of which will be discussed. This free web site allows students to use inquiry and process skills to investigate pathogens, the diseases they cause, and the body’s immune response. In the games students perform virtual experiments, such as case-control studies, a Koch’s postulates simulation, necropsies, and viral microarrays that engage students in the scientific method and aspects of microbiology careers. Results of recent research indicate the efficacy of this methodology in achieving specific learning objectives and the appeal of this type of teaching tool. See http://medmyst.rice.edu/      

Lab Design Based on Scientific Methods

Madhusudan Choudhary, Sam Houston State University

Jorge L.M. Rodrigues, University of Texas

Transforming Laboratory Activities to Enhance the Undergraduate Research Experience

Madhusudan Choudhary, Sam Houston State University

Undergraduate research experiences are necessary for active learning and the development of higher-order critical thinking. Although traditional practices help students to perform certain laboratory experiments, students have only limited exposure and interaction with the scientific process and methodology. The objective of this proposal is to organize a panel discussion to discuss the principles and activities that would transform conventional laboratory practices so that students can directly gain research experience and learn about the process of scientific investigation. The panel will consist of educators who are committed to incorporating research activities into the classroom and have first-hand transformed traditional laboratory activities by introducing research-based activities into their own courses. These activities include reading scientific literature, developing hypotheses, designing experiments, making reliable and logical inferences, and preparing and reviewing manuscripts. Topics of presentations will include information from a diverse set of course offerings in microbiology, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. New designed laboratory modules will be shared with educators interested in adding this approach into their courses.

Challenging undergraduates through a discovery-based laboratory course.

Jorge L.M. Rodrigues, University of Texas

Microbiology undergraduate students take a number of laboratory courses to fulfill program requirements. Traditionally, laboratory courses are structured around basic exercises, followed by a questionnaire that will be answered at the end of the class period. Students describe these exercises as easy, repetitive, and tedious. More importantly, learned skills are lost as students’ progress towards the degree. I hypothesize that students will learn problem-solving skills when properly challenged in class. In order to develop skills in classical and molecular microbiology methods, I developed an upper division laboratory course, in which students are challenged to isolate and characterize an unknown microorganism. Samples come from the student’s interest in a particular environment. In the first teaching module, students receive general laboratory protocols and are required to maintain laboratory notebook for the experiments. The American Society for Microbiology instructions to authors serves as a guide for a mid-term and final laboratory reports. During the second teaching module, students receive a number of tasks for molecular characterization of the microorganism, but no protocols are provided. Students are challenged to identify research objectives through searches and discussion the current literature. They develop their own experimental protocols for polymerase chain reaction, primer design, and molecular taxonomy. Each student successfully characterized its isolate. Students enhanced their quantitative skills through growth curve analysis and statistical significance of results, gained laboratory skills for DNA amplification, cloning, and transformation, and learned to write and evaluate technical literature.

Creating Videos and Public Service Announcements as a Means of Promoting Student Engagement
Lisa Cuchara, Quinnipiac University

There is a recognized need for scientists/health professionals to effectively communicate science to the public. This presentation will describe taking this “Citizen Scientist” goal from the passive world of discussion boards to the public, interactive, dynamic Web 2.0 arena. Student created vaccine ‘public service announcements will be shown. These videos are examples of higher order Bloom’s taxonomy outcomes and yield more “citizen scientists”. The students also learn about vaccines, vaccine preventable diseases and myths related to vaccines to a higher level through the creation process. A wonderful side effect was mastery of technology and enhanced learning of the topic itself, the latter falling under the constructivism learning philosophy (“humans can understand only what they have themselves constructed”). Constructivism learning involves avoiding the internalization of factoids only to be regurgitated later on and emphasizes learning as result of individual mental construction

Transforming “Lecture” Halls into Student-Centered Classrooms

Michael J. Dougherty, American Society of Human Genetics

Large lecture halls do not have to be barriers to student-centered instruction. With proper implementation, as few as one or two interactive teaching strategies can make any classroom more interactive and students more responsible for their own learning. Moreover, several of these techniques have been demonstrated to improve student achievement. In this session, you will learn how to use think-pair-share in combination with conceptual, multiple-choice questions to dramatically change the learning environment in your classes. The workshop will feature situated-apprenticeships in which participants will apply what they’ve learned using their peers in the role of students. This will give you the confidence to try these techniques immediately with your own students and to be successful quickly.

Forming Effective Student Groups for Active Learning Pedagogies

Samantha Elliott, St. Mary’s College of Maryland and 2008-2009 Biology Scholar

Many models of student-centered learning environments revolve around the use of group work.  How does one create these groups for maximum effectiveness in the classroom?  What does a functional group look like?  What factors must be addressed to best create groups to fit the pedagogical goal of the day?  Should groups be changed frequently or remain static throughout the semester?  We will review what the literature tells us about group dynamics in the undergraduate classroom, and the presenter will share data from her own experiences.  Then participants will break out into small groups to discuss their individual pedagogies that require group work and align what they have learned in the session to their classroom needs.

Programs and Best Practices to Increase Retention and Graduation Rates of Students from Underrepresented Groups in STEM: An Overview of the California State University Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Program

Enid Gonzalez and Juanita Barrena, California State University, Sacramento

Lilia De La Cerda, California State University, Fresno

Margaret Jefferson, California State University, Los Angeles

The California State University Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (CSU-LSAMP) is a CSU system-wide effort that provides a strategic framework for students who face social, educational, or economic barriers to careers in STEM.  For the last eighteen years, CSU LSAMP, which currently includes 22 campuses of the CSU, has served a total 19,387 students, 85% of these students are from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, and has achieved the following outcomes:  1) 2.5 fold increase in the number of STEM baccalaureate degrees granted by the CSU; 2) Increased persistence and graduation rates of LSAMP URM graduates; 3) Increased participation of URM students in undergraduate research experiences, both domestic and international; and 4) increased progression of URM students to doctoral level of study in STEM.  These objectives are achieved by providing students an array of support activities ranging from “gate-keeper” course support to the design of unique undergraduate research experiences.  In this session we will present an overview of CSU LSAMP as a system-wide effort, examples of three campus-based CSU-LSAMP programs, and a more detailed description of 1-2 of the best practices developed by each of the campuses.

Using the Scientific Literature to Teach Science Literacy

Jodie Krontiris-Litowitz, Youngstown State University and 2009-2010 Biology Scholar

Science literacy demands that scientists be fluent in the discipline, able to interpret numeric information, and able to gather and integrate information from primary sources to support positions and arguments.   Teaching science literacy presents a challenge for faculty, many of whom support teaching literacy skills but feel conflicted about teaching them at the expense of content.  In this session I will present a set of science literacy skills aligned with Bloom’s taxonomy and show how they were embedded into an introductory biology course using journal article assignments that paralleled course content.  Attendees will develop assignments that embed science literacy skills and devise assessments to evaluate them.  Finally, we will talk about how this skill set can be used in advanced courses to move students toward expert science literacy. 

Rock Stars, Deficit Models, and Stereotype Threats: Learning to See Inequity in Science and Strategies for Addressing It

Kimberly Tanner, San Francisco State University, 2010 National Science Foundation CAREER Grant Awardee and 2011 Society for College Science Teachers Outstanding Undergraduate Science Teacher Awardee

Interested in understanding issues that impede efforts to diversify the biological sciences? Want strategies that can promote equity, fairness, and diversity in all your professional interactions as a biologist? While attempts to diversify the sciences have been ongoing for decades, progress has been modest at best. Multiple lines of research from the social sciences suggest that scientists’ efforts to diversify their ranks may be misdirected or even counterproductive. Findings from research on why talented individuals leave the biological sciences, as well as examples of both successful efforts and problematic attempts towards diversifying the biological sciences will be considered.