Department of Chemistry, Indiana University, 800 E. Kirkwood Ave. Bloomington, IN 47405. afeig@indiana.edu
[ Home | Course Goals | Assignments | Course Content | Teaching Methods | Assessments | Student Evaluations | Self-Evaluation | Discussions | Appendices ]
COURSE CONTENT AND
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER. C484
is a prerequisite for 3 additional courses in the biochemistry
major. Hence, there are certain elements of the course content
that students must master if they are to be prepared to continue
within the major. Most importantly, understanding the differences
between and the properties of the major macromolecules is
essential for the laboratory course (C487) and biophysical
chemistry (C481). Furthermore, if the students fail to grasp the
concepts that underlie enzyme catalysis, they will be relegated
to rote memorization throughout the coverage of metabolism in the
second semester of biochemistry. My personal belief is that if I
succeed in obtaining the higher order goals for student
development in the course discussed below, the knowledge transfer
process takes care of itself.
CONCEPTUAL LEARNING
AND ACTIVE INQUIRY. I
find this course challenging to teach for several reasons.
Although the class is nominally all Biochemistry majors, many of
the students are not particularly interested in the subject
matter. Instead, they view the biochemistry major as a vehicle
for entry into medical school and they are more interested in a
their grade (student perception of optimal performance) than in
actual learning (my perception of high performance). Toward that
end, they want to be told exactly “what to learn” (read
“memorize”) and often strive to avoid conceptual or
active learning. Because it is atypical of science courses taught
at IU, I find many of these students have a severe aversion
toward exploring outside the narrow box of multiple choice and
short answer questions. It was one of my major goals for the
semester, therefore, to breakdown the perception that learning =
memorizing facts. I am particularly interested in teaching the
students to think effectively about biochemical problems and work
through them without the need for rote memorization of endless
tables of biochemical factoids.
A prime example of this problem occurred on the second mid-term
exam. Question 4c asked the students to design an experiment that
might differentiate facilitated transport from passive diffusion
across a biological membrane and describe the predicted result
for each model. Almost every student remembered the shape of the
curves for the two modes of transport, but because it was
associated with a rate, more than half said that the X-axis of
their plot was time. In fact, the X-axis in question should have
been the analyte concentration. The students had memorized the
figure without taking the time to understand it. The exam
question accurately identified those students using passive and
superficial approaches to learning conceptual material. Following
the exam, I used this example in class to illustrate the need for
many in the class to become more active participants in their
learning.
UNDERSTANDING OF
BIOCHEMICAL INFORMATION AND ENHANCED COMPUTER LITERACY. Many students enter my class having never used the
Internet for serious scientific work. Instead, they see it as a
tool for recreation and finding cheap airline tickets. In this
post-genomic era, computers are essential tools for studying
biochemistry and I use my course as a vehicle for teaching them
about the databases and resources that I use on a daily basis to
do my research. Students learn not only where to find
information, but also how to use the tools that parse and filter
the flood of data and how to evaluate the significance of output
that is returned from any database search. In the process, they
also have to integrate concepts from various facets of the course
to understand the bioinformatics projects. Each student performs
these assignments on an individual “pet protein”
assigned the first day of class. These projects promote
open-ended inquiry and help the student place the course material
into a broader context.
MOLECULAR
VISUALIZATION. Biological
molecules tend to be exceedingly complex. It is extremely
important for students of biochemistry to learn how to look at
these structures and understand them. Computer visualization
tools are now readily available to assist us in the process both
in the classroom and on any personal computer. I strive to give
the students the wherewithal to use these resources to gain
insight into the biomolecules we study. The culmination of the
visualization exercises is a 200-word prose description of their
unknown protein accompanied by one or more figures to illustrate
it. Students were then given the opportunity to rewrite their
paragraphs and respond to my comments after looking more closely
at their proteins.