An instructional definition and assessment rubric for bioinformatics instruction

Abstract

The lack of an instructional definition of bioinformatics delays its effective integration into biology coursework. Using an iterative process, our team of biologists, a mathematician/computer scientist, and a bioinformatician together with an educational evaluation and assessment specialist, developed an instructional definition of the discipline: Bioinformatics is “an interdisciplinary field that is concerned with the development and application of algorithms that analyze biological data to investigate the structure and function of biological polymers and their relationships to living systems.” The field is defined in terms of its two primary foundational disciplines, biology and computer science, and its interdisciplinary nature. At the same time, we also created a rubric for assessing open‐ended responses to a prompt about what bioinformatics is and how it is used. The rubric has been shown to be reliable in successive rounds of testing using both common percent agreement (89.7%) and intraclass correlation coefficient (0.620) calculations. We offer the definition and rubric to life sciences instructors to help further integrate bioinformatics into biology instruction, as well as for fostering further educational research projects.

HITS: Harnessing a Collaborative Training Network to Create Case Studies that Integrate High-Throughput, Complex Datasets into Curricula

“…HT cases in the laboratory setting can also provide learning resources for HT computational biology and bioinformatics-centric experiments. Over recent decades, computational biology has shifted from being a set of tools used to support biological studies to its own discipline that often drives research programs, with physical experiments and field research playing an equal or supporting role (Yanai and Chmielnicki, 2017;Tapprich et al, 2021). This interdisciplinary (e.g., life science, computer science, mathematics, statistics) nature of HT cases promotes multidisciplinary knowledge within the classroom, providing students with practice synthesizing ideas in the context of the collaborative nature of science.…”

Transdisciplinary Approach for Bioinformatics Education in Southern Brazil

“…Different strategies to consolidate bioinformatics as part of the main curriculum of different courses, especially in the biological sciences, have been proposed through the years. These include the definition of its core competencies (Welch et al, 2014), its defining elements (Tapprich et al, 2021), the inspection of successful teaching cases in the US and United Kingdom (Hack and Kendall, 2005), the need to go beyond traditional classroom short courses (Atwood et al, 2019), and the analysis of a dedicated learning module of bioinformatics for biology students (Madlung, 2018). The frequently mentioned transdisciplinary nature of the field, however, remains observational rather than practical in most of these propositions, with disciplines borrowing techniques from each other, but without forming a single, major area of knowledge.…”

“…Nonetheless, such definition is not as clear cut as it seems, with some authors being much more detailed in their description, e.g., "Bioinformatics is conceptualizing biology in terms of macromolecules (in the sense of physical chemistry) and then applying "informatics" techniques (derived from disciplines such as applied maths, computer science, and statistics) to understand and organize the information associated with these molecules, on a large-scale" (Luscombe et al, 2001). More recently, a definition of bioinformatics has been proposed as "an interdisciplinary field that is concerned with the development and application of algorithms that analyze biological data to investigate the structure and function of biological polymers and their relationships to living systems" (Tapprich et al, 2021). Contrasting with its array of definitions, there is no contending that bioinformatics has been steadily growing, both in its use and as a research field, at least since the early 2000s (Hodcroft et al, 2021;Wilson Sayres et al, 2018;Brusic, 2007;Perez-Iratxeta et al, 2007).…”

Investigating the epidemiological factors responsible for malaria transmission dynamics

“…However, several bioinformatics approaches have being used to investigate these factors in other recent studies for different regions but not in the study area of this work [5,18,19]. Bioinformatics is the application of statistical, mathematical and computational methodologies and tools to analyze clinical data of infectious diseases such as malaria among others [20]. Hence, this study employed the use of descriptive statistical bioinformatics approach to investigate the factors…”