Major Workshops
Yogurt Making – How Does Carbohydrate Type Affect Yogurt Chemistry?
This is an inquiry-based lab intended to be used in a majors or non-majors introductory biology course. There are several published and commercial examples of laboratory activities for biology courses that involve making yogurt or culturing the bacteria isolated from yogurt; however, these labs are typically completely directed or demonstration labs that do not allow for hypothesis generation or experimentation by the students. The main goal of this lab is to allow students to generate hypotheses about what chemical changes will occur to various substrates (different types of milk) during the process of lactate fermentation with Lactobacillus and related microbes. Students are provided with a basic yogurt making protocol and use test strips to measure pH and glucose concentration. Students devise their own methods for measuring yogurt consistency. This is a two-session lab exercise that requires students (or lab staff) to remove yogurt from incubators after 18-24 hours. The materials are inexpensive, and this lab can be scaled to large enrollment laboratory courses.
Building Rubrics for Graded Lab Assignments: A Helping Hand up a Steep Slope
Assessment of student comprehension and performance in the biology teaching laboratory is often accomplished through the use of rubrics. This exercise explores what a rubric is (and what it is not), the benefits and pitfalls of using them, and best practices for building rubrics. A universally approachable problem, the judging of chocolate chip cookies, is employed to model the rubric development process and promote discussion of issues to consider when building rubrics for lab assignments.
Exploration and Hypothesis Testing of Population Genetics Principles Through Computer Simulations
Adequate coverage of population genetics is difficult due to the ever-increasing breadth of content in most genetics courses. Yet, this field is becoming increasingly important in areas as diverse as anthropology, forensics, ecology, conservation biology and medical genetics. Educators also face the challenge of teaching students to understand stochastic processes, the importance of modeling and to develop and test hypotheses. I present an approach to teaching population genetics that allows students to gain an appreciation for the breadth of the field, while also developing and testing specific hypotheses. This approach uses computer simulation (available online) group exercises and individual projects to introduce students to basic concepts in population genetics. It also provides the opportunity to discuss the importance of modeling in scientific research and for student interaction with stochastic processes.
Bringing About a Change: Studying Enzyme Activity
This three-hour lab is intended to be used in a non-majors or majors introductory biology course. It was designed to allow students to manipulate variables and observe the effects on enzyme activity. Enzyme experiments commonly use variations in temperature and pH to study enzyme action and students can already predict what will happen. This exercise takes a look at the importance of cofactors that many enzymes need to catalyze a reaction. It requires the students to do some pre-lab research to understand cofactors and chelating agents used to bind to the cofactors and render the enzyme inert. The potato enzyme being studied is catecholase. It participates in the plant’s response to injury. Students work together to generate a hypothesis to test which cofactor is required for catecholase to function. Chelating agents that bind to cofactors are provided. Data is collected and students work on a lab report to discuss their findings.
The WildCam Project: Inquiry and Data Analysis Labs Using Trail Camera Data from Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique
The wildlife of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was decimated during a decades-long civil war. Scientists are now using trail cameras deployed throughout the park to better understand how species are recovering, as efforts to protect them have been put into place. Using WildCam, an online interactive platform, citizen scientists (such as students) can identify species in trail camera photos to help researchers document their distribution in Gorongosa. This hands-on workshop will focus on activities that use WildCam data to help students propose and test their own hypotheses, while developing data analysis and graphing skills using Excel. Participants will learn about Gorongosa National Park, practice inquiry-based teaching, and share ideas on how to implement trail camera data to engage their students in scientific thinking.
Medium Workshops
AIMS: Analyzing Images to Learn Mathematics and Statistics
Many of the pedagogical reforms in biomathematics and biostatistics focus on already quantitatively strong students (e.g., biocalculus or computational biology courses), or require intense per-capita investment of resources (e.g. research experiences in biomathematics). Instructional materials and approaches that can be used across the spectrum of student aptitude/preparedness, and at institutions with fewer resources, are needed to bridge the national gaps of interest and aptitude in quantitative skills. This project seeks to meet that need by creating modules that actually allow real scientific exploration but require only a computer. In the AIMS (Analyzing Images to learn Mathematics and Statistics) modules, students are presented with image and video sets from visually fascinating biological contexts, and prepared with enough background to ask their own questions, collect their own data via image analysis, and then learn new mathematical or statistical tools to understand their data. By choosing visually fascinating topics and adding contextual understanding, mundane data exercises (e.g., conduct an ANOVA with the data at the end of the text chapter) become answers to questions posed by the students themselves (e.g., Do all predators induce similar morphological change in their tadpole prey?). Four learning modules (leaf-cutter ant foraging in rainforests, breast cancer tissue 3D reconstruction, phenotypic plasticity among tadpoles facing predators, and dendroclimatology) are available now, each with image/video sets, instructor resources, and student instructions/labs.
The Write Stuff: A Stations-Based Activity to Teach Scientific Reading, Writing, and Revision
How do we induct our students into the culture of scientific reading and writing? In this session, participants will perform part of a lab activity in which students move through stations to work on each component of a lab report, some through peer review of their own writing and some through analyzing primary sources. This lab activity has not yet been used with students, so participant feedback will be vital in helping to refine it. The activity will be followed by a discussion focused on teaching writing in the laboratory setting, including grading, revision cycles, peer review, rubrics, and logistics. Participants are encouraged to bring writing-related resources to share.
From Cookbook to Guidebook: Turning a Traditional Diffusion Exercise into Active Inquiry
There is ample evidence that active, inquiry-oriented learning produces deeper and longer lasting learning outcomes. That said, lab designers and instructors face significant implementation challenges. One of these is lack of personal experience as a student. Older faculty and even recent graduates with a STEM degree are more likely to have experienced mostly “cookbook” labs, and have little direct experiential memory to call on. Absence of any generalizable design guidelines is a second challenge. Innumerable studies describe individual active learning exercises, semester-long project-oriented labs, and even models of active instruction to replace traditional lecture (PBL, TBL, POGIL, etc.). Yet there are comparatively few generic strategies for designing active, inquiry-oriented labs.
In this workshop, participants will learn how we use a standard design process for re-building existing cookbook labs or designing new ones so they are active, inquiry-oriented experiences. They will learn a 5-step general strategy for revising lab exercises. This general design model is essentially the same one we have used for >10 years to design inquiry labs. Using it they will deconstruct a classic cookbook exercise (“Diffusion Through a Membrane”) to determine how it might be improved.
Genome Annotation Using the Gene Ontology in an Intercollegiate Competition Setting
Motivating students to read and analyze scientific literature remains an outstanding challenge in undergraduate science education. This workshop explores the use of a web-based inter-collegiate competition on Gene Ontology annotation (CACAO) to perform functional annotation of gene products in bacteriophage genomes in the context of a Phage Hunters genome annotation course. Students learn about the structure of the Gene Ontology and its importance for the interpretation of high-throughput biological data. They receive specific instruction on the process of Gene Ontology annotation and in the use of bioinformatics tools to reliably assess orthology as the means to transfer existing Gene Ontology annotations to genes in the genome they are analyzing. Working in teams, students compete with students from the same and other colleges in the CACAO competition, organized in alternating, bi-weekly innings dedicated to annotation and challenge. To perform annotations, students must read original articles and specifically describe the experiments in those articles supporting their conclusions. Their claims can be assessed and challenged by other teams who have read the article, and students must address those challenges by revisiting the literature source and revising their annotations accordingly. Students and their teams are given credit for accurate annotations and challenges, prompting them to carefully read and assess the experiments reported in the articles they use as sources for their annotations. As a result of the a peer-competition scheme, students perceive the reading of scientific literature as a competitive challenge, rather than an obligation, and discuss the interpretation of the findings in each article with their team, thereby bolstering the learning experience associated with the reading of primary literature.
Making Manipulative Models to Describe Difficult Cell Biology Concepts
Despite the abundance of computer-aided graphics and videos to display the complexities of certain biological systems at the molecular level, concern over retention of materials presented in this passive manner has led me to create a number of kinesthetic models that require active student participation. In this workshop, you will have the opportunity to use some of these classroom models and complete activities that have been used in an upper-level cell biology course to demonstrate concepts, including: transcription initiation, translation in the presence/absence of mutations, electron transport chains of the thylakoid during photosynthesis, and cytoskeleton protein assembly. Of note, some of these models may also work well for introductory-level biology courses, especially with minor modifications and/or simplifications. Materials used to create these models are fairly inexpensive and easily accessible, although they do require varying degrees of artistic/skill level. In addition to providing low-cost options, most of these models were developed because no commercial models were available. Participants will be provided with detailed descriptions and designs for these models in addition to activity worksheets.
Something’s Fishy: Aging Fish Using Scales and Otoliths
The fish dissection is one of the core vertebrate body plan dissections that students do in introductory organismal laboratories. This exercise is sometimes included in upper level vertebrate biology labs as well. However, there is a part of the fish that is often overlooked in these exercises: the head, or more specifically, the brain cavity. The exercise in this workshop was originally designed for an upper level vertebrate natural history lab at Virginia Commonwealth University to demonstrate different methods for aging fish. The exercise guides students through a non-lethal method and a lethal method for fish aging – both of which utilize the same basic concept seen in dendrochronology. The non-lethal method entails removing a scale from the exterior of the fish and then aging it via counting the annuli (or “rings”) on the scale. The lethal method requires the students to cut off the head and remove the brains from the brain cavity so they can access the otoliths (literally Greek for “ear stones”). They will then inspect the otoliths for annuli. The students can then compare the ages they determine for the same fish via the two methods. The lab also includes a fish measurement portion in which students carry out different measurements for fish size. The lab lends itself to different uses: for introductory labs, it makes a basic dissection seem a bit more interesting; for upper level labs students can explore the pros and cons of aging methods, the purpose and diversity of otoliths, and the applicability of certain fish measurements to different scenarios. For all levels, the results from the students’ measurements can also be used for analyzing correlations between fish length and age. During this workshop we will use preserved fish as those are most commonly available for laboratory courses. However, we may also have fresh fish available so that instructors may observe the effects of preservation on otoliths and be able to see the diversity of otoliths across different species.
The Game of Parasitism: A New Approach to Presenting Life Cycles
Life cycles have been a standard in introductory biology instruction, but are met with less than enthusiastic responses from students. In a field such as Parasitism, life cycles are integral to understanding disease transmission and discovering methods of prevention. Life cycles tend to be complex, often requiring multiple hosts, stages, and environments. To address the concept of life cycles in way that uses active learning approaches, I assigned students to create a board game based on a specific parasitic life cycle. In small groups, they developed a game proposal and a materials list. They created a prototype of the game, including a board, playing pieces, playing cards, and instructions. In addition to presenting their game to the class, the games are played and evaluated by their classmates. This assignment is a multi-stage project that is integrated into the second half of the semester with final presentations and game evaluation occurring during the last week. The assignment is evaluated based on scientific accuracy and depth, division of labor, and quality of the final product. Examples of student projects will be presented and participants will have the opportunity to evaluate (play) them. This assignment incorporates active learning, team building, creativity, and peer evaluation to produce a finished product that demonstrates an understanding of the importance of life cycles in the field of parasitism.
Schedule
| Time | Event |
| 8:00 – 9:00 am | Arrival, Breakfast – Sponsored by MiniOne |
| 9:00 am – 12:00 pm | Major Workshops |
| 12:00 – 1:30 pm | Lunch – HHMI sponsored movie and lunch |
| 1:30 – 3:00 pm | Medium Workshops #1 |
| 3:00 – 3:30 pm | Break – Drawing for Carolina
Biological gift certificate |
| 3:30 – 5:00 pm | Medium Workshops #2 |
| 5:00 – 5:15 pm | Directions downtown for dinner (optional) |
Please send all questions to Laurel Rodgers, conference host at rable2016@ableweb.org.