Students Propose Genetic Solutions to Societal Problems

Abstract

The Genetic Engineering Proposal Project, an IBI prize-winning module, teaches biology students to devise innovative bioproducts or solutions to environmental or health problems. A team plans their project poster (top); team members at the poster presentations (bottom).

Biosensors Show Promise as a Measure of Student Engagement in a Large Introductory Biology Course

“…Despite initial significant pretest performance differences, with the active-learning group scoring lower, there were no differences in posttest performance at the end of the semester. As such, the active-learning class section made strides to close the content knowledge gap and "level the playing field," an outcome also noted with such teaching approaches in similar studies (Derting and Ebert-May, 2010;Deslauriers et al, 2011;Wick et al, 2013;Freeman et al, 2014;Theobald et al, 2020).…”

“…The concept inventories included a focus on molecular and cell biology ( Klymkowsky, 2010 ; Shi et al. , 2010 ) and genetics ( Wick et al. , 2013 ).…”

“…We selected a total of 37 items from three existing biology concept inventories that best matched the content taught in the introductory biology course offered in this study. The concept inventories included a focus on molecular and cell biology (Klymkowsky, 2010;Shi et al, 2010) and genetics (Wick et al, 2013). Because we selected questions from each assessment and then combined them into a new assessment that better fit the content taught in the course, we reanalyzed the reliability of the new assessment and obtained a Cronbach's alpha score of 0.6, an acceptable reliability score (See Supplemental Material for the pre-post concept inventory used in this study).…”

The Tyranny of Content: “Content Coverage” as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It

“…Throughout the term, course material is related to required components of the poster, which include addressing societal need and the ethical considerations of the proposed project. The quality of the final products provides the instructors with evidence of the effectiveness of this approach ( Wick et al. , 2013 ).…”

“…For example, in the introductory biology course in which student teams work on genetic engineering proposals, the students do not actually perform the genetic manipulations. Rather, they describe the need for the project and propose how the genetic manipulations would be done, including the proposed gene editing and transgenic organism selection and screening processes ( Wick et al. , 2013 ).…”