Design and Implementation of a Tool to Assess Students' Understanding of Metabolic Pathways Dynamics and Regulation.

Metabolic systems form the very foundation of life and as such are broadly taught in the molecular life sciences. Here, we describe the biochemistry educator community-based development and use of an assessment instrument designed to evaluate students' ideas about metabolic pathway dynamics and regulation in undergraduate biochemistry courses. Analysis of student responses showed that most students were able to interpret visual representations in an unfamiliar metabolic pathway and that many could make basic predictions about how the system would be expected to respond to changes. However, fewer students generated nuanced responses that accounted for both microscopic changes at the protein level and macroscopic changes in pathway product outputs. These findings identify some of the challenges of meaningfully assessing students' understanding of metabolic pathways and could inform how instructors think about teaching and assessing metabolism in undergraduate biochemistry and beyond. The results also suggest future avenues for biochemistry education research.

Innovative teaching knowledge stays with users.

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, survey, and social network analyses revealing that faculty who use innovative teaching practices preferentially talk to each other, suggesting that greater steps are needed for information about innovative practices to reach faculty more broadly.

Developing a conversation: A strategy to engage faculty in pedagogical change.

Personal interviews were conducted with biochemistry faculty during which they were presented with student performances on a content survey. From these interviews, four themes that reflect faculty responses to the surveys emerged: awareness of student understanding, self-reflection on teaching practice, planned collaboration with colleagues, and emotional reactions. Here, we discuss these themes and their implications for creating conversation designed to promote reflection on biochemistry teaching. © 2018 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 46:382-389, 2018.

Small Changes: Using Assessment to Direct Instructional Practices in Large-Enrollment Biochemistry Courses.

Multiple-choice assessments provide a straightforward way for instructors of large classes to collect data related to student understanding of key concepts at the beginning and end of a course. By tracking student performance over time, instructors receive formative feedback about their teaching and can assess the impact of instructional changes. The evidence of instructional effectiveness can in turn inform future instruction, and vice versa. In this study, we analyzed student responses on an optimized pretest and posttest administered during four different quarters in a large-enrollment biochemistry course. Student performance and the effect of instructional interventions related to three fundamental concepts-hydrogen bonding, bond energy, and pKa-were analyzed. After instructional interventions, a larger proportion of students demonstrated knowledge of these concepts compared with data collected before instructional interventions. Student responses trended from inconsistent to consistent and from incorrect to correct. The instructional effect was particularly remarkable for the later three quarters related to hydrogen bonding and bond energy. This study supports the use of multiple-choice instruments to assess the effectiveness of instructional interventions, especially in large classes, by providing instructors with quick and reliable feedback on student knowledge of each specific fundamental concept.

Design and testing of an assessment instrument to measure understanding of protein structure and enzyme inhibition in a new context.

Assessment instruments designed to measure student conceptual understanding and skills proficiency related to biochemistry are important to transform undergraduate biochemistry education. The purpose of this study was to develop an assessment instrument to measure student understanding of protein structure and enzyme inhibition in a new context, that of saturable binding. A community of biochemistry educators was involved in an iterative process of designing and testing of this assessment, which consists of true/false and open-ended questions that map to low and high levels in Bloom's taxonomy. A total of 188 students' responses were collected from seven different institutions and were graded by two independent raters using a rubric. Results from this administration indicate that most students were able to answer the questions related to lower-levels in Bloom's taxonomy; however for higher-level questions, students had more difficulty. The results from this assessment can give instructors insight into the ways in which persistent incorrect or incomplete ideas related to protein structure and binding events can hinder knowledge application. Also, the use of a community of practice to develop assessment instruments of this type and the format of the instrument itself could be a useful model for development of assessment instruments in the future.

Identification of threshold concepts for biochemistry.

Threshold concepts (TCs) are concepts that, when mastered, represent a transformed understanding of a discipline without which the learner cannot progress. We have undertaken a process involving more than 75 faculty members and 50 undergraduate students to identify a working list of TCs for biochemistry. The process of identifying TCs for biochemistry was modeled on extensive work related to TCs across a range of disciplines and included faculty workshops and student interviews. Using an iterative process, we prioritized five concepts on which to focus future development of instructional materials. Broadly defined, the concepts are steady state, biochemical pathway dynamics and regulation, the physical basis of interactions, thermodynamics of macromolecular structure formation, and free energy. The working list presented here is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather is meant to identify a subset of TCs for biochemistry for which instructional and assessment tools for undergraduate biochemistry will be developed.

Probing and improving student's understanding of protein α-helix structure using targeted assessment and classroom interventions in collaboration with a faculty community of practice.

The increasing availability of concept inventories and other assessment tools in the molecular life sciences provides instructors with myriad avenues to probe student understanding. For example, although molecular visualization is central to the study of biochemistry, a growing body of evidence suggests that students have substantial limitations in their ability to recognize and interpret basic features of biological macromolecules. In this study, a pre/posttest administered to students at diverse institutions nationwide revealed a robust incorrect idea about the location of the amino acid side chains in the protein α-helix structure. Because this incorrect idea was present even after a semester of biochemistry instruction at a range of institutions, an intervention was necessary. A community of expert biochemistry instructors collaborated to design two active learning classroom activities that systematically examine α-helix structure and function. Several participating faculty used one or both of the activities in their classrooms and some improvement of student understanding of this concept was observed. This study provides a model of how a community of instructors can work together using assessment data to inform targeted changes in instruction with the goal of improving student understanding of fundamental concepts.

Development and analysis of an instrument to assess student understanding of foundational concepts before biochemistry coursework.

Biochemistry is a challenging subject because student learning depends on the application of previously learned concepts from general chemistry and biology to new, biological contexts. This article describes the development of a multiple-choice instrument intended to measure five concepts from general chemistry and three from biology that are considered prerequisite for biochemistry learning. This instrument is specifically designed with a factor structure that includes three multiple-choice items for each of the eight concepts and the most common incorrect ideas that students could have as distractors. It can be used as a pretest to identify students' incorrect ideas about those concepts and to determine if instruction helps students overcome those incorrect ideas when used as a posttest. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis support a very good fit for an eight-factor solution. This manuscript represents a report on the current state of instrument development. We seek to share our methods and instrument design principles with the broader community.

Menstrual cycle hormones induce changes in functional interactions between lymphocytes and decidual vascular endothelial cells.

During the secretory phase of the menstrual cycle, a natural killer (NK) cell subset expressing cluster of differentiation (CD)56bright appears in the decidualizing uterus and remains until onset of menses. If pregnancy occurs, decidual NK cells increase to become the predominant uterine lymphocytes of early pregnancy. To elucidate mechanisms of CD56bright cell recruitment to the uterus, an in vitro adhesion assay was used to assess the effect of the menstrual cycle, as well as cycle-associated hormones on adhesive properties of human lymphocytes. Adhesion of human peripheral blood lymphocytes to pregnant mouse lymph nodes and Peyer's Patches tissue sections was constant throughout the cycle. When uterine tissue was used as the substrate, adhesive CD56+ cells were found only in decidua basalis. Adhesion increased at the LH surge. Adhesion was mediated through both L-selectin and alpha4-integrin-dependent mechanisms. Furthermore, we observed increased adhesive function in CD56+ cells from male donors which had been cultured with estradiol or LH compared with cell aliquots cultured without additives. Lymphocytes adherent to mouse uterine tissue were predominantly CD56bright, suggesting that peripheral NK cells may be actively recruited to the uterus in an important, brief endocrine-regulated fashion at the time of ovulation to establish the decidual NK population of early pregnancy.