Guest post by Erin Vinson, University of Maine and Michelle Smith, Cornell University

Are you teaching genetics and looking for some new ideas? Check out CourseSource, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes field-tested articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA. Many of the articles on CourseSource are easily adapted to be taught in online formats, and new submissions are always welcome!

Here are some recent genetics articles:

The ACTN3 Polymorphism Applications in Genetics and Physiology Teaching Laboratories

Frey, Somers, and colleagues describe a set of inquiry-based laboratory modules that focus on a common polymorphism in the ACTN3 gene. This Lesson article addresses principles in genetics and physiology, and it includes an accompanying Science Behind the Lesson article about ACTN3 Polymorphism.

DNA Detective: Genotype to Phenotype. A Bioinformatics Workshop for Middle School to College

Sternberger and Wyatt designed this workshop to introduce students from middle school to college to big data and bioinformatics. This lesson uses CyVerse and the Dolan DNA Learning Center’s online DNA Subway platform.

Fruit Fly Genetics in a Day: A Guided Exploration to Help Many Large Sections of Beginning Students Uncover the Secrets of Sex-linked Inheritance

Croshaw and Palmtag developed a short, guided exploration laboratory activity that illustrates contrasts between sex-linked and autosomal inheritance mechanisms.

CURE-based Approach to Teaching Genomics Using Mitochondrial Genomes

Pogoda and colleagues developed a four-week CURE module centered around teaching genome annotation. Students have the opportunity to publish their annotated genomes to NCBI’s GenBank.

There are also a variety of articles not specific to genetics that would be a great fit in any class. Here are a few:

Using Comics to Make Science Come Alive

Gormally uses graphic memoirs to help students understand the relationship between science and issues they face in everyday life. These comics often serve as a powerful entry point for non-science majors.

Structuring Courses for Equity

Hocker and Vandegrift identified four evidence-based elements that they used in course design and implementation. The authors discuss the relevant literature and their own experience supporting equitable classrooms.

The Pipeline CURE: An Iterative Approach to Introduce All Students to Research Throughout a Biology Curriculum

Lee and colleagues present the pipeline CURE framework, which integrates one research question throughout a biology curriculum. The authors discuss evidence-based teaching methods and ongoing scientific research to help students overcome barriers to participation in undergraduate research.

Guest post by CourseSource Editor-in-Chief Michelle Smith and Managing Editor Erin Vinson.

In partnership with Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) meeting, CourseSource is hosting an ONLINE Writing Studio Short Course. We have switched to an online setting because the SABER meeting will no longer be taking place in Minneapolis, MN this summer.

We will offer this online Writing Studio twice this summer:

• June 15–17 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EDT
• July 21–23 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EDT

We acknowledge that many of you needed to quickly switch to online education this spring. CourseSource is supportive of your efforts and hopes that you will consider sharing your innovative ideas through future publications.

About CourseSource

CourseSource is a peer-reviewed and open-access journal that publishes tested, evidence-based undergraduate activities for life sciences. The articles include details in a format, style, and voice that support replicability. Publishing activities in CourseSource provides authors with recognition of the creativity, experience, and time needed to develop effective classroom materials, while also supporting the dissemination of evidence-based teaching practices. Authors can list CourseSource articles in the peer-reviewed publication section of their curriculum vitae and use them as evidence for excellence in teaching.

Eligibility

The Writing Studio Short Course is open to instructors (including faculty, graduate students, and postdocs) who teach biology to undergraduate students and are planning to publish an activity in CourseSource.

Participants must commit to attending the full Writing Studio Short Course, either the June or July session. Preference is given to applicants who have taught the activity that they will be working on at the Writing Studio and who have not previously published in CourseSource. Faculty from community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, and minority-serving institutions (colleges and universities) are encouraged to apply.

Participant Benefits

The Writing Studio will provide time for you to work on your CourseSource manuscript and receive advice and feedback from editorial staff. We will also connect you with other prospective authors.

To apply, visit this link: https://umaine.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2uvbistCjthb8Rn. Application review will begin on April 20, 2020. If you have questions, contact Editor-in-Chief Michelle Smith and Managing Editor Erin Vinson.

Guest post by Abha Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences at Minerva Schools at KGI.

As on-campus meetings for laboratory courses are canceled, you might be wondering if you’ll be able to meet your goals in a virtual environment. It will take some adjustment, but it is doable if you are strategic about what you want your students to learn and why. Begin by asking yourself, “What was the goal of the lab session and lab course?” Typically, lab courses allow students to gain some exposure to specific techniques and instrumentation. Ultimately, however, the larger purpose of labs is to allow students to apply the process of science and develop scientific reasoning skills. With this new framing, here are three approaches that allow students to conduct authentic research (without setting foot in the lab!).

Do a structured analysis of primary literature: Engaging with primary literature promotes the development of data interpretation skills and allows students to see how specific techniques fit into their scientific discipline. However, left to their own devices, novices get overwhelmed by jargon and technical details (Lie et al. 2016) and lose the forest for the trees. Therefore, it is important to structure this task and guide students’ reading to clarify critical concepts and emphasize aspects most relevant to your course goals and learning outcomes. 

• Write a custom reading guide including an explanation of why you selected a particular article and how it links to the course. Design study questions that require students to articulate the big question and specific hypotheses, key features of the study design, and how specific results relate to the authors’ conclusion. In this annotated sample custom reading guide, I illustrate a flipped-classroom approach.
• Primers in Genetics from the Genetic Society of America are a fantastic resource to support the use of peer-reviewed articles in college classrooms. Use these primers to write your reading guides or as supplementary resources for students. 
• CREATE is a peer-reviewed, evidence-based strategy for intensive analysis of Primary Literature. A CREATE module consists of four articles, published from the same lab. You can task students to read and analyze these articles sequentially, and there are several ready-to-use modules and roadmaps on a variety of topics available.

Analyze real-world data sets: Ask students to analyze and visualize real-world data, then interpret and contextualize their findings. This will allow them to practice and improve their data analysis and quantitative reasoning skills. Moreover, compared to cook-book labs, using authentic data is more interesting and engaging for students (Kjelvik & Schultheis 2019). Try these freely available data sources that include advice on implementation and execution:

• Data nuggets 
• Course Source Bioinformatics modules 
• QUBES

Write mock grant proposals: Research proposals require students to synthesize and critique primary literature, think creatively about open questions in a line of inquiry, and design studies to test their ideas. Best practices for such assignments include scaffolding the grant writing process with multiple staggered deadlines, sharing rubrics and evaluation criteria, and integrating opportunities for feedback and deliberate practice. The articles below contain several useful resources including grading rubrics and template assignment directions. 

• “Thinking like a neuroscientist”: Using scaffolded grant proposals to foster scientific thinking in a freshman neuroscience course
• The use of mock NSF-type grant proposals and blind peer review as the capstone assignment in upper-level neurobiology and cell biology courses

To make class time feel engaging, ask students to prepare parts of the assignment tasks in advance and spend class time having students work in small groups to improve and iterate on their work. Peer instruction will help students learn from each other and give them a valuable opportunity to connect, which is especially important if they are all suddenly remote. For instance, you might follow up on grant proposals with a mock grant panel in class. Each of these strategies can also be adapted to asynchronous classes; Instructors could spread assignment tasks over several weeks, and students would use collaborative document editing tools (such as Google Documents) to exchange feedback asynchronously. Collaboration is an essential part of the scientific process; this just might be an opportunity to teach students more than they could have learned in a traditional lab.

Bibliography

Bringing authentic research and data into K-16 classrooms. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://datanuggets.org/

Bioinformatics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.coursesource.org/courses/search/c/bioinformatics

Hoskins, S. G., Stevens, L. M., & Nehm, R. H. (2007). Selective Use of the Primary Literature Transforms the Classroom Into a Virtual Laboratory. Genetics, 176(3), 1381–1389. doi: 10.1534/genetics.107.071183

Itagaki H. (2013). The Use of Mock NSF-type Grant Proposals and Blind Peer Review as the Capstone Assignment in Upper-Level Neurobiology and Cell Biology Courses. Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 12(1), A75–A84.

Kjelvik, M. K., & Schultheis, E. H. (2019). Getting Messy with Authentic Data: Exploring the Potential of Using Data from Scientific Research to Support Student Data Literacy. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2). doi: 10.1187/cbe.18-02-0023

Köver, H., Wirt, S. E., Owens, M. T., & Dosmann, A. J. (2014). “Thinking like a Neuroscientist”: Using Scaffolded Grant Proposals to Foster Scientific Thinking in a Freshman Neuroscience Course. Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education: JUNE: a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 13(1), A29–A40.

Lie, R., Abdullah, C., He, W., & Tour, E. (2016). Perceived Challenges in Primary Literature in a Master’s Class: Effects of Experience and Instruction. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4). doi: 10.1187/cbe.15-09-0198

Teaching Quantitative Biology Online. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/quant_bio_online/resources

About the Author

Abha Ahuja is an Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences at Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute, where she teaches in a virtual classroom using active learning pedagogy. If you want to learn more about teaching life sciences via active learning online email me at abha@minerva.kgi.edu.

Guest post by Cassidy Villeneuve, Wiki Education.

A Wikipedia writing assignment is a great opportunity for instructors to teach science communication skills on a world stage. In this kind of assignment, genetics students create or improve Wikipedia articles related to course topics. They’re especially well equipped to translate scientific concepts this way for a general audience, because they remember what it was like learning these concepts for the first time. And they feel an increased sense of motivation to produce quality work, considering that millions of readers can access it. Students also gain familiarity with the backend of a website they use all the time, preparing them to consume information online with a more critical lens in the future. 

If you’re teaching an upcoming course, consider utilizing an assignment like this. Wiki Education has free assignment templates, student trainings, and staff support to help you be successful. Here are just a few success stories from genetics and other biology courses that have done this in the past!

Students dive deep into a niche topic by improving a “stub” article

Many biology and genetics-related courses that incorporate Wikipedia writing assignments focus on Wikipedia’s “stub” articles, which are only a few sentences long. They’re a great starting place for students who don’t necessarily have the expertise to edit high-value, frequently visited pages.

That’s exactly what Laura Reed’s students did at the University of Alabama last fall. Among the 21 Wikipedia articles that her 17 students expanded, the one about odorant-binding proteins stands out. The student added 39 new references to it! 

Students edit high-value Wikipedia articles about fundamental biology topics

A student in Eric Guisbert’s developmental and molecular biology course at the Florida Institute of Technology contributed content to Wikipedia’s cell division article last spring. The page receives about 1,000 pageviews every day. It was a great chance for a single student to make a big impact by putting well-researched information related to course topics into the hands of so many people at once.

In addition to trainings that prepare students to make meaningful content edits, Wiki Education’s Dashboard has an Authorship Highlighting feature. Instructors can see exactly what each student contributed to their assigned article. See Guisbert’s student’s contributions to the cell division article, for example. While the student only added about 1,500 words, the process of contributing to Wikipedia required them to:

• understand how to evaluate their article for missing content,
• find sources that meet Wikipedia’s standards, and
• incorporate their research into the article’s existing content in a succinct way.

Wiki Education trainings provide guidance for the Wikipedia side of things, while instructors provide content expertise. By the end of this rigorous process, students can really feel like an expert!

Students create brand new articles

Some instructors who conduct this assignment have students create new articles for topics previously unrepresented on Wikipedia. Quite a few students did so in Nigel Atkinson’s epigenetics course at the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2018. The Wikipedia article about the epigenetics of anxiety and stress-related disorders is brand new. You can already see through Authorship Highlighting on the Dashboard that Wikipedia volunteers have added some content to the article since the student created it. Collaborating to expand information about topics is what Wikipedia is all about!

Want to get involved?

There are a few ways you can get involved in improving science content on Wikipedia!

• Use Wiki Education’s free assignment templates to have your students write Wikipedia articles related to genetics: teach.wikiedu.org. 
• Learn how to edit Wikipedia yourself and expand your educational reach to the public: learn.wikiedu.org.
• Explore how you and your students can contribute data about genetics to Wikidata, the global open data repository that informs AI like Siri: data.wikiedu.org. 

About the author:

Cassidy Villeneuve is Wiki Education’s Outreach and Communications Associate

Improving research mentor training requires new approaches.

Mentoring is essential for the success of researchers at all career stages, but not all mentor-mentee relationships are created equal. Students from historically underrepresented backgrounds often receive less mentoring than their peers, and many mentors are not trained in how to mentor effectively. To address some of these needs, Entering Mentoring, an evidence-based program for research mentor training, was developed and shown to be effective in improving mentoring. 

Of course, such programs are only useful if people have access to them. In CBE—Life Sciences Education, Spencer et al. report on the infrastructure they have created to facilitate more widespread research mentor training.

The first hurdle that must be cleared for more mentors to receive training is to have more people capable of giving the training. Therefore, the authors took a train-the-trainer approach and recruited and trained master facilitators to instruct others in how to implement research mentor training, termed facilitator training. This approach has resulted in nearly 600 people being trained as facilitators, with over 4,000 mentors receiving research mentor training.

In order to be broadly useful, training for mentors needs to be applicable in a variety of settings, including at different institutions and for researchers at multiple career stages. The original Entering Mentoring program was designed as a summer seminar for graduate students mentoring undergraduates, but it has been expanded for different research areas and for those mentoring everyone from undergraduates to junior faculty. Modules to address specific concerns, like culturally aware mentoring, have also been developed, and there are resources available for structuring the programs in a variety of formats.

Even though a person might be trained in facilitating research mentor training, actually running such workshops requires time, resources, and support, which are not always available. To help address these concerns, facilitator training workshops were restructured to include resources and strategies for overcoming obstacles to implementation, such as encouraging facilitators at the same or similar institutions to cooperatively plan.

As mentorship programs expand, quality control is necessary to ensure that workshops are productive and that resources are accessible. Therefore, assessment tools were developed for facilitators to evaluate workshops they run, and a centralized evaluation system was developed to more effectively make use of feedback.

By developing this infrastructure, better training will become more accessible for more mentors. Early results of self-reported surveys suggest that research mentor training is already being effectively implemented—ultimately helping make science more accessible and productive. 

CITATION:

Building a Sustainable National Infrastructure to Expand Research Mentor Training

Kimberly C. Spencer, Melissa McDaniels, Emily Utzerath, Jenna Griebel Rogers, Christine A. Sorkness, Pamela Asquith, Christine Pfund

CBE—Life Sciences Education Published Online: 28 Aug 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-03-0034

Guest authors Sanjai Patel and Andreas Prokop explain why school biology lessons are important places to advocate fundamental biomedical research, and they present strategies developed by the Manchester Fly Facility to bring Drosophila research into primary and secondary classrooms.

The need for fundamental biology research has perhaps never been greater than today, yet the conditions for meaningful biology research are in dire straits (e.g. 15; 5; 46; 42; 23; 25; 16; 12; bulliedintobadscience.org). Rectifying this situation requires science communication (scicomm) based on genuine long-term commitment paired with clever, engaging, and impactful strategies and narratives — aspiring to reach out to relevant target audiences and eventually also convince decision and policy makers.

Today’s school pupils will shape the future of our society. They are therefore a highly relevant audience for scientists who want to have a lasting impact on public support for fundamental research and science-backed policy. There is also clear evidence that experiences in early life impact later attitudes and decision making (1; 6; 17). Importantly, scientists working in fundamental biomedical research have the advantage that their area of expertise tends to be closely related to topics taught in school biology lessons. This provides excellent opportunities to collaborate with teachers in order to improve lesson content and the pupils’ experience of science.

I regularly encounter long-term retention of school experiences when talking with visitors at science fairs about Drosophila research and its importance (36); those who have seen Drosophila in schools, even decades ago, often want to share this experience with me and tend to engage more openly in dialogue from the start. Therefore, engaging with schools should be a no-brainer for scientists with a long-term vision, and we provide here some insights into the school work of the “Manchester Fly Facility” (ManFly) initiative, as an example that readers might find helpful.

Aims of the “Manchester Fly Facility” scicomm initiative

To our knowledge, the Manchester Fly Facility (ManFly) is the only long-term initiative dedicated to communicating and advocating for Drosophila research, alongside more research-oriented initiatives such as DrosAfrica (22; 44)and partly also TReND in Africa. Primarily driven by the two authors of this article, ManFly was launched in 2011 and has gradually expanded into six main areas of activity that reach a wide spectrum of audiences (26b; 27). These include:

• the development of resources for fly practical training;
• presentations at science fairs;
• science fair organization (e.g. the “Brain Box” event with over 5K visitors; 37);
• the making of educational movies (19);
• school engagement (see below); and
• encouraging other drosophilists and teachers to adopt our scicomm ideas and resources (see below).

Two of these ManFly activities stand out for their potential impact. Firstly, the fly training resources have had a major impact worldwide, with ~100,000 views and ~31,000 downloads across the four dissemination platforms (8; 28;29;41). Secondly, our school work has had the strongest growth and likely has the biggest future potential, as will be explained in the following.

A more effective way to engage pupils

As detailed in previous publications (26b; 27), ManFly’s school outreach was born out of our ideas developed for science fair presentations. Initially, we went into schools to showcase Drosophila research but learned very quickly that this approach is not very effective. Although it does address one important objective of teachers, that is, to bring pupils in contact with real researchers, it is far more powerful to also align with the teachers’ task of conveying curriculum-relevant content. This approach gains the attention of more pupils whilst generating memorable encounters with fruit flies, and it provides excellent opportunities to develop true dialogue between the two professional groups of scientists and teachers.

By now, ManFly has gathered experiences from over 80 events, including visits to schools, visits by school classes, and teacher seminars. We use these events to optimize our strategies and resources, and have formalized this approach through the launch of the “droso4schools” project in 2015 (10; 26a).

The droso4schools project: teaching with flies not about flies

The overarching objective of droso4schools is to use Drosophila as an effective tool for teaching curriculum-relevant content in biology school classes — ideally to achieve that its use would become a recommended or prescribed strategy in national curricula. Drosophila has essential advantages to this end: fruit fly research covers a broad spectrum of fundamental biology topics, providing excellent conceptual understanding, and there are many opportunities to perform micro-experiments that are memorable, cheap, simple, and easy to set up, even by teachers with little background in this area.

To achieve our objectives we capitalize on mutual collaboration with teachers: we as researchers bring our scientific experience and knowledge and can suggest conceptual improvements to content, and spice things up with engaging anecdotes, experiments, and relevant examples. Teachers provide the essential professional expertise of the curriculum and of effective teaching styles that match the realities of school life.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQKFtt3p2C8&w=500]

To implement teacher collaboration and/or get professional feedback, we use three different strategies:

• We place graduate students as teaching assistants in schools and have regular meetings during this placement (10; 26a).
• We invite teachers to continuing professional development events, which is an effective way of obtaining feedback and hearing a wider spectrum of teacher views (2).
• We build trust through repeated extracurricular school visits involving up to 200 pupils experiencing 3–4 different lessons in a single day. This also provides excellent opportunities to test new or improved resources (34).

The key products of all our school activities are our school lesson resources (Box 1; 30). So far, we have developed six lessons that are completed for teacher use and comprise a PowerPoint file accompanied by support materials (homework tasks, activity sheets, teacher notes, risk assessments). Two further lessons are under development but are already suited for extracurricular school visits. All of these lessons use Drosophila as a teaching tool to address a specific curriculum-relevant topic and are spiced up with micro-experiments and examples of research relevance.

Our classes are highly interactive and all contain micro-experiments. Examples shown are: A) using optogenetics to induce epilepsy-like seizures; B) identifying genetic marker mutations; C) performing dissections of maggots and colour reactions to demonstrate enzymatic activity; D) performing the climbing assay followed by data analysis and statistics. Experimental instructions are available at (39).

Outreach opportunities in primary schools

Most of our school resources aim at the higher levels of secondary school. More recently we also explored how to introduce Drosophila in meaningful ways in primary schools. Primary school engagement reaches kids at an even earlier age and provides opportunities to spawn fascination for and appreciation of nature, biology, or evolutionary theory, thus potentially influencing their future attitudes towards societal, ecological, or scientific challenges (see also 13; 14). But primary schools also pose new challenges:

• primary teachers tend to have less or no scientific training, and the nature of any collaboration tends to be less science-centred than in secondary schools;
• science is not as high a priority in primary schools (45);
• pupils are curiosity-driven but less prepared to follow scientific logic; it can sometimes be surprising what messages kids take away from lessons.

Illustrating the metamorphosis of muscles during the pupal stage of Drosophila to pupils. Source: movie taken and modified from Wikimedia (4).

For primary schools, the national school curriculum in England lists three relevant topics: inheritance, life cycle, and evolution (7), of which we chose the latter two. For both topics, Drosophila offers fantastic conceptual and experimental opportunities, as is detailed in our recent blog post (35). For example, pupils can observe and protocol the life cycle of flies in only two weeks and there is unique understanding of the metamorphosis that transforms Drosophila maggots into flies. The surprising fact that concepts of human biology can be discovered through work in flies is an example par excellence for concepts of deep homology, evolutionary trees, and the idea of common ancestors (11; this can be further enriched in secondary schools by uniquely enlightening fly examples of population genetics or speciation; 9; 3; 24). To actively engage the kids with evolution, they use microscopes to look at flies carrying marker mutations, and then use this experience to jointly invent an evolutionary tree.

Screenshot from the evolution lesson. Fly images were generated using the free “Genotype Builder” (29; 41).

The key challenges: evaluating and marketing our resources

Developing our lesson pool was a lengthy and laborious process, yet it was only the first step; since then, we have been faced with the far greater challenge of (a) evaluating the lessons and (b) encouraging others to use them.

Carrying out evaluations is a science of its own and requires strategy, time, and human resources to degrees that must be carefully considered from the start (43). So far, we have used simple surveys. In these surveys, pupils usually expressed positive views about enjoyment of the event, seem to have gained new understanding of biology topics (details in 34and 35), and the data suggest that we are able to ignite an interest in Drosophila: thus, before our school visits, awareness of fruit fly research was low, whereas afterwards there was strong support for introducing Drosophila in classrooms and even the use of fruit flies in research. These results look very promising but will have to be properly validated, for example by using pre- versus post-event surveys to assess knowledge gain, long-term surveys to test knowledge retention, or homework tasks to appraise depth of understanding and of subject engagement.

Evaluation results from a primary and a secondary school visit (details in 34; 35) demonstrating how lack of knowledge about Drosophila research can be turned into strong support. Click image to see a larger version.

To have maximum impact, we aim to encourage the use of our resources and ideas within the communities of teachers and drosophilists. This requires spreading awareness of the resources and facilitating their use. As an essential step to this end, we freely share our resources, for which we launched two dedicated figshare.com repository sites: the first one is primarily for teachers and hosts the six completed lessons (37); the second site is for drosophilists and provides access to extracurricular lessons and science fair materials (39).

As a further measure, we launched the droso4schools support website (20). This website introduces and links to our resources, provides lesson-specific pages with details about the content, and additional information about Drosophila (“Why fly?” and “Organs“).

These online resources provide proof-of-principle for our strategy and can now develop their own momentum, either by being actively used or serving as a template for resource development. With this in mind, we are promoting them through blog posts (30; 34; 35), talks and workshops at international conferences (31; 32; 40), journal articles for teachers (10) or drosophilists (26a), and finding allies who can help to drive the agenda politically or institutionally (see last section).

An appeal to scientists to join the school endeavor

What has been achieved so far with our school work is promising, as illustrated not only by the evaluations, but also by teacher and researcher comments from across the globe, as evidenced in our impact document (21). However, we hope that more teachers and drosophilists will be inspired to capitalize on our resources — be it using them as they are, adapting them for modified classes, or taking them as examples for designing lessons on new topics! If the principal strategy gains sufficient momentum and more of us adopt the necessary collaborative spirit across disciplines, communities and countries, and the relevant learned societies and science organizations drive the science education agenda politically (33), there is a realistic chance that flies can become established as routinely used teaching tools in schools — to the benefit of teachers, pupils, and researchers alike.

About the authors:

Both authors work at the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Healthof The University of Manchester. Sanjai Patelis the manager of the Manchester Fly Facility, Andreas Prokopis professor of neurobiology and academic head of the facility, and together theydrive the “Manchester Fly Facility” initiative and the ‘droso4schools‘ project mentioned in this blog post.         

References

(1) Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Osborne, J., Dillon, J., Willis, B., Wong, B. (2012). Science Aspirations, Capital, and Family Habitus:How Families Shape Children’s Engagement and Identification With Science. American Educational Research Journal 49,881-908 — (LINK)

(2) Blackburn, C. (2018). A droso4school CPD event for teachers. Blog post in“The Node” — (LINK)

(3) Brookes, M. (2001/2002). “Fly: The Unsung Hero of Twentieth-Century Science.” Ecco/Phoenix — (LINK)

(4) Chinta, R., Tan, J. H., Wasser, M. (2012). The study of muscle remodeling in Drosophila metamorphosis using in vivo microscopy and bioimage informatics. BMC Bioinformatics 13,S14-S14 — (LINK)

(5) Cohen, B. A. (2017). How should novelty be valued in science? Elife6,e28699 — (LINK)

(6) Croll, P. (2008). Occupational choice, socio-economic status and educational attainment: a study of the occupational choices and destinations of young people in the British Household Panel Survey. Research Papers in Education 23,243-268 — (LINK)

(7) Department for Education (2015). Statutory guidance – National curriculum in England: science programmes of study — (LINK)

(8) Fostier, M., Patel, S., Clarke, S., Prokop, A. (2015). A novel electronic assessment strategy to support applied Drosophila genetics training on university courses. G3 (Bethesda) 5,689-98 — (LINK)

(9) Green, J. E., Cavey, M., Caturegli, E., Gompel, N., Prud’homme, B. (2018). Evolution of ovipositor length in Drosophila suzukii is driven by enhanced cell size expansion and anisotropic tissue reorganization. bioRxiv  — (LINK)

(10) Harbottle, J., Strangward, P., Alnuamaani, C., Lawes, S., Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2016). Making research fly in schools: Drosophila as a powerful modern tool for teaching Biology. School Science Review 97,19-23 — (LINK)

(11) Held Jr., L. I. H. (2017). “Deep homology? Uncanny similarities of humans and flies uncovered by evo-devo.” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge — (LINK)

(12) Jones, R., Wilsdon, J. (2018). It’s time to burst the biomedical bubble in UK research — (LINK)

(13) Kover, P., Hogge, E. (2016). Teaching Evolution for Primary Children (website) — (LINK)

(14) Kover, P., Hogge, E. (2017). Engaging with primary schools: supporting the delivery of the new curriculum in evolution and inheritance. Sem Cell Dev Biol  — (LINK)

(15) Lawrence, P. (2016). The last 50 years: mismeasurement and mismanagement are impeding scientific research. Current Topics in Developmental Biology  — (LINK)

(16) Maartens, A., Prokop, A., Brown, K., Pourquié, O. (2018). Advocating developmental biology. Development 145,dev167932 — (LINK)

(17) Maltese, A. V., Tai, R. H. (2011). Pipeline persistence: Examining the association of educational experiences with earned degrees in STEM among U.S. students. Science Education 95,877-907 — (LINK)

(18) Manchester Fly Facility. For the public (website) — (LINK)

(19) Manchester Fly Facility (2014). YouTube channel — (LINK)

(20) Manchester Fly Facility (2015a). droso4schools: Online resources for school lessons using the fuit fly Drosophila(website) — (LINK)

(21) Manchester Fly Facility (2015b). Manchester Fly Facility Resources. figshare,10.6084/m9.figshare.1328031 — (LINK)

(22) Martín-Bermudo, M. D., Gebel, L., Palacios, I. M. (2017). DrosAfrica: Establishing a Drosophila community in Africa. Sem Cell Dev Biol 70,58-64 — (LINK)

(23) Martínez-Arias, A. (2015). The case of the Irish Elk, a parable for the weight of the glamour journals. Blog post in “Martinez-Arias Lab Blog” — (LINK)

(24) Moreno, E. (2012). Design and construction of “synthetic species”. PLoS One7,e39054 — (LINK)

(25) Nerlich, B. (2017). Making science public: Taking stock. Blog post in “University of Nottigham Blog” — (LINK)

(26a) Patel, S., DeMaine, S., Heafield, J., Bianchi, L., Prokop, A. (2017). The droso4schools project: long-term scientist-teacher collaborations to promote science communication and education in schools. Semin Cell Dev Biol 70,73-84 — (LINK)

(26b) Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2017). The Manchester Fly Facility: Implementing an objective-driven long-term science communication initiative. Semin Cell Dev Biol 70,38-48 — (LINK)

(27) Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2018). An objective-driven long-term initiative to communicate fundamental science to various target audiences – a Drosophila case study. Blog post in“PLOS | BLOGS” — (LINK)

(28) Prokop, A. (2013a). 2^ndyear Drosophila developmental genetics practical. figshare,m9.figshare.156395 — (LINK)

(29) Prokop, A. (2013b). A rough guide to Drosophila mating schemes. figshare,dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.106631 — (LINK) http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.106631

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Biology students who participated in a one-on-one homework activity with a classmate showed increased learning gains.

The huge sizes of many undergraduate science courses make it rare for a student to get valuable one-on-one interaction with a professor. Teaching assistants and student tutors can help with this problem, but an expert may not actually be required to help students attain deeper levels of understanding—simply engaging with the material with another person might be enough. In CBE-Life Sciences Education, Bailey et al. asked if a simple peer-tutoring homework assignment could help students in a general biology course learn the content.

The authors used two sections of an undergraduate biology class for non-majors. The experimental section was given peer-tutoring assignments in which two students would meet outside of class. One student, the “teacher,” instructed their peer based on a set of learning objectives. The other student, the “questioner,” asked the teacher questions about the material. After 15 minutes, the two students switched roles. These sessions were recorded, and the audio was sent to the instructors for credit. The control section was instructed to study the learning objectives on their own for 30 minutes in lieu of the peer-tutoring exercise.

Based on a preliminary assessment given at the beginning of class, the two sections were essentially equivalent in terms of starting scientific knowledge and interest. After the exercise, students in the section that completed the peer-review assignment performed better on all class tests, averaging 6% higher scores than their counterparts who studied alone.

Interestingly, the highest gains were seen for students who scored lowest on the preliminary assessment, suggesting that this peer-tutoring activity might be particularly effective for students starting out with less developed scientific skills. Additionally, students who asked more questions during the peer-review assignment were more likely to do well on the final exam.

Students in both sections were also given a survey on their perceptions of the peer-tutoring exercise, and they reported it being helpful. Students given the exercise consistently ranked it highly among the class activities that helped them learn, and students in the control section generally reported believing that being required to study with a peer would have been helpful to them. This shows that students are receptive to peer-tutoring exercises.

Although this study only reported on two sections of one class, the methods described are particularly useful to instructors due to their simplicity: the teacher/questioner peer-tutoring exercise does not take up class time, but it still gives students a chance to ask questions and verbally engage with class content. The authors conclude their paper with suggestions for instructors on implementing similar assignments in undergraduate classrooms.

CITATION:

Learning Gains from a Recurring “Teach and Question” Homework Assignment in a General Biology Course: Using Reciprocal Peer Tutoring Outside Class

E. G. Bailey, D. Baek, J. Meiling, C. Morris, N. Nelson, N. S. Rice, S. Rose, P. Stockdale

CBE-Life Sciences Education 11 May 2018; https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-12-0259

https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.17-12-0259

Guest post by Michelle Smith, Cornell University.

Teaching genetics and looking for some new course ideas?  Check out CourseSource, which is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA.

Here are some recent genetics articles:

Meiosis: A Play in Three Acts, Starring DNA Sequence

Newman and Wright designed a new way to have students demonstrate meiosis with long strips of paper that contain DNA sequence. The questions instructors ask students help them learn about sister chromatids, homologous chromosomes, and chromosome pairing. The big “ah-ha” moment comes when students figure out they can use DNA sequence to find their homologous pair.

A Clicker-based Case Study that Untangles Student Thinking About The Processes in The Central Dogma

Pelletreau and colleagues from six different institutions designed a clicker-based case study activity that asks students to predict the effects of different types of mutations on DNA replication, transcription, and translation. Students often have mixed models of the Central Dogma of Biology and this activity helps them better understand what information is encoded at each stage.

A Hands-on Introduction to Hidden Markov Models
Weisstein and colleagues designed an interactive lecture, examples, and homework problems to teach students about Hidden Markov Models (HMM), which form the basis for many gene predictors. Student understanding of HMM is becoming increasingly critical in the era of big data, where biologists and computer scientists often collaborate on important scientific questions.

Linking Genotype to Phenotype: The Effect of a Mutation in Gibberellic Acid Production on Plant Germination
CourseSource also publishes laboratory lessons that can be performed in a variety of environments. For example, Mann and colleagues developed a hands-on activity about the effect of the plant hormone gibberellic acid (GA) on plant germination.

There are many more activities covering concepts such as linkage, insertion/deletion mutations, conservation biology, and genetically modified organisms. Having access to these high-quality, well-vetted active learning activities can help you with class preparation and provide new learning opportunities for your students.

About the author:

Michelle Smith is Editor in Chief of CourseSource and an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Cornell University.

You’ve probably encountered at least one diagram in a biology textbook that didn’t make any sense to you. Although these pictures are supposed to clarify ideas, sometimes they leave readers befuddled. This is a particular problem for students; experts looking at schematics are able to fall back on their knowledge of a subject, while novices cannot. To help students learn, textbook illustrations must be as clear as possible.

In a paper published in CBE-Life Sciences Education, Wright et al. examined the use of arrows in biological diagrams. They looked at two introductory textbooks and found a wide variety of arrow styles used—including fat, skinny, dashed, and curved—to convey many distinct meanings—like chemical reactions, movement, and energy transfer. They found that many arrow styles were used to represent different processes throughout the textbook, and often, arrow styles were used inconsistently within sections, or even within a single figure.

Could the inconsistent use of arrow styles be contributing to students’ confusion? The authors conducted surveys and interviews with undergraduates, concluding that, yes, students are often uncertain about the meanings of the arrows. They found that most arrow styles don’t have any intrinsic meaning to students, and while some individuals correctly make inferences from context, many end up being unnecessarily confused by the use of arrows.

This study highlights a common problem in life sciences education: ideas that seem intuitive for experts can be problematic for novices. For a professor who has been up to their neck in biology for decades, it can seem obvious that a “bouncing” arrow represents phosphorylation, but for students at the start of their education, it’s far from intuitive. The authors recommend that instructors take the time to work with students on increasing their visual literacy and discuss the common representations used in their fields to maximize understanding.

CITATION

Arrows in Biology: Lack of Clarity and Consistency Points to Confusion for Learners 

L. Kate Wright, Jordan J. Cardenas, Phyllis Liang, and Dina L. Newman

CBE Life Sci Educ March 2018 17:ar6; doi: 10.1187/cbe.17-04-0069

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Steven Farber and Jamie Shuda are the recipients of the 2018 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education for their extraordinary contributions to genetics education. Farber is a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Shuda is Director of Life Science Outreach at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Left: Jamie Shuda. Right: Steven Farber.

Farber and Shuda are recognized for their creation of an outreach program called BioEYES, which provides K–12 students with hands-on biology experience using live zebrafish. The flagship program brings fish—and the tools to study them—into the classroom for an entire week, during which time students observe much of the fish’s life cycle, from mating to the hatching of larvae.

The selection of zebrafish for the program is a key factor behind its success. Farber recognized that the zebrafish, in addition to being an important model organism in genetics, has several other traits that make it ideal for the classroom. Students are captivated by working with live, moving animals, and it reassures the students that, because the fish are clear, they can be studied with the provided microscopes without harming them. Also, as vertebrates, zebrafish have many body parts in common with humans, and their development can easily be compared to human development. Once the larvae hatch, students can even observe their beating hearts.

In addition to Project BioEYES, the program has expanded to include a new project called Your Watershed, Your Backyard, in which middle-school students grow zebrafish embryos in water samples from their own local watershed to test the effects of pollution. Although this new program is only available in the Baltimore area, Project BioEYES itself is also available in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Melbourne. Recently, BioEYES reached its 100,000^th student, and the program continues to grow.

“BioEYES is an innovative program that harnesses the powerful fascination most of us feel when observing living, behaving organisms and developing embryos,” says Allan Spradling, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “It works well with students from all types of economic and cultural backgrounds because interest in and curiosity about life and reproduction is universal.”

GSA named the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education in honor of the first GSA Excellence in Education Awardee, Elizabeth W. Jones (1939–2008). The Award recognizes a person or group whose efforts have made a “significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level.” The prize will be presented to Farber and Shuda at the 59^th Annual Drosophila Research Conference, which will take place from April 11^th–15^th, 2018 in Philadelphia.