Mission-driven, Manageable and Meaningful Assessment of an Undergraduate Neuroscience Program.

Academia has recently been under mounting pressure to increase accountability and intentionality in instruction through development of student "intended learning outcomes" (ILOs) developed at multiple levels (e.g., course, program, major, and even institution). Once these learning goals have been determined, then classroom instruction can be purposefully designed to map onto those intended outcomes in a "backward design" process (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). The ongoing challenge with any such process, however, is in determining one's effectiveness in achieving these intended learning goals, so it is critical that efficient tools can be developed that enable these goals to be assessed. In addition, an important requirement of any ILOs is that they are mission-driven, meaningful and parsed in such a way that they can be used to obtain evidence in a manageable way. So how can we effectively assess these outcomes in our students? This paper describes key factors to consider in the planning and implementation of assessment for an undergraduate neuroscience program.

Assessing development of an interdisciplinary perspective in an undergraduate neuroscience course.

Neuroscience is an intrinsically interdisciplinary (ID) field yet little has been published regarding assessment of ID learning in undergraduate neuroscience students. This study attempted to empirically assess the development of an interdisciplinary perspective in 25 undergraduate neuroscience students in a neuroscience program core course. Data were collected using two simple assessment instruments: 1) written responses to the open-ended question "What is neuroscience?" and 2) a term-discipline relevance survey in which students indicated all disciplinary perspectives to which terms (such as electrode, taste, dx/dt) were relevant. Comparison of student responses early in the course (week 1 or 5) and at the end of the course (week 15) showed evidence of development of an interdisciplinary perspective, with students using significantly more integrative terms in their responses and demonstrating an increased awareness of the complexity of the field of neuroscience.

Disruption of the head direction cell signal after occlusion of the semicircular canals in the freely moving chinchilla.

Head direction (HD) cells in the rat anterodorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN) fire relative to the animal's directional heading. Lesions of the entire vestibular labyrinth have been shown to severely alter VIIIth nerve input and disrupt these HD signals. To assess the specific contributions of the semicircular canals without altering tonic VIIIth nerve input, ADN cells were recorded from chinchillas after bilateral semicircular canal occlusion. Although ADN HD cells (and also hippocampal place cells and theta cells) were identified in intact chinchillas, no direction-specific activity was seen after canal occlusions. Instead, "bursty" cells were observed that exhibited burst-firing patterns similar to normal HD cells but with firing unrelated to the animal's actual head direction. Importantly, when pairs of bursty cells were recorded, the temporal order of their firing was dependent on the animal's turning direction, as is the case for pairs of normal HD cells. These results suggest that bursty cells are actually disrupted HD cells. The present findings further suggest that the HD cell network is still able to generate spiking activity after canal occlusions, but the semicircular canal input is critical for updating the network activity in register with changes in the animal's HD.

Facilities Planning for the Neuroscience Curriculum at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution: St. Olaf College's Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences.

Planning for new science facilities at your institution is an exciting, challenging, and rewarding endeavor. Perhaps most significantly, it also embodies a rare opportunity to provide new infrastructure to support a programmatic vision for the future. Here, we describe St. Olaf's new Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, beginning with an outline of the planning/design process, then an overview of the features of the building - with particular regard to the Neuroscience Program facilities - and finally a discussion of lessons learned. We hope our experiences may benefit those engaged in the facilities planning process at their own institutions.

Using Extracellular Single-unit Electrophysiological Data as a Substrate for Investigative Laboratory Exercises.

Desirable objectives for laboratory-based science courses include fostering skills in problem solving and reasoning, enhancing data fluency, and encouraging consideration of science as an integrative enterprise. An effective means of reaching these objectives is to structure learning experiences around interesting problems in our own research. In this article, we explore the idea of using extracellular single-unit electrophysiological data as a substrate for student investigatory exercises as a means of achieving many of these objectives. In the article, we provide an overview of extracellular single-unit recording techniques and discuss the organization of single-unit data files. In addition, we describe a multi-week module recently administered in an intermediate-level laboratory course and provide suggestions both for more limited exercises and for more advanced projects. Finally, we describe a companion website that provides to instructors considering implementing similar exercises access to a variety of resources, including software, sample data, and additional information.

The neural correlates of navigation: do head direction and place cells guide spatial behavior?

Head direction (HD) and place cells are thought to represent the neural correlates of processes underlying navigation. At present, however, a large gap exists in our knowledge as to how the firing characteristics of HD and place cells relate to performance in a navigational task. The purpose of this review is to evaluate critically the current evidence that such a relationship exists by examining the studies that have directly addressed this issue. The results of these studies are consistent with the notion that behavior and perceived orientation (as represented in the firing of HD and place cells) can be independently controlled by different cues but, under certain conditions, are controlled by the same cue(s). Much work, however, remains to be done to clarify the role of the HD and place cell systems in the neurobiology of spatial cognition and navigation.

Head direction cell activity and behavior in a navigation task requiring a cognitive mapping strategy.

Head direction (HD) cells fire in relation to an animal's directional heading. To examine how these cells may be involved in spatial behavior, HD cells were recorded while animals performed a navigation task requiring the use of a cognitive mapping strategy. Results showed no relationship between performance on the task and the directional stability of the HD cell activity. The HD cell signal, therefore, appears to not always be used by the animal to guide its behavior during all navigation tasks.

Passive movements of the head do not abolish anticipatory firing properties of head direction cells.

Neurons in the anterior dorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN) of the rat selectively discharge in relation to the animal's head direction (HD) in the horizontal plane. Temporal analyses of cell firing properties reveal that their discharge is optimally correlated with the animal's future directional heading by approximately 24 ms. Among the hypotheses proposed to explain this property is that ADN HD cells are informed of future head movement via motor efference copy signals. One prediction of this hypothesis is that when the rat's head is moved passively, the anticipatory time interval (ATI) will be attenuated because the motor efference signal reflects only the active contribution to the movement. The present study tested this hypothesis by loosely restraining the animal and passively rotating it through the cell's preferred direction. Contrary to our prediction, we found that ATI values did not decrease during passive movement but in fact increased significantly. HD cells in the postsubiculum did not show the same effect, suggesting independence between the two sites with respect to anticipatory firing. We conclude that it is unlikely that a motor efference copy signal alone is responsible for generating anticipatory firing in ADN HD cells.

Theta- and movement velocity-related firing of hippocampal neurons is disrupted by lesions centered on the perirhinal cortex.

The hippocampus is critically involved in spatial memory and navigation. It has previously been proposed that, as part of this process, the hippocampus might have access to self-motion information. The possibility that some of this information may originate from the perirhinal cortex, a region involved in high-order multimodal processing, was tested in the present study by recording the responses of hippocampal complex-spike (place cells) and theta cells (putative interneurons) to movement velocity and to the movement-related theta rhythm EEG while rats with bilateral ibotenic acid lesions centered on the perirhinal cortex (n = 5), or control surgeries (n = 5), foraged in a rectangular environment. Perirhinal cortex lesions altered several characteristics of place and theta cell firing. First, the proportion of theta cells recorded was significantly lower in perirhinal lesion animals (8/39 units) compared to controls (22/53 units). Second, the firing of place cells recorded from lesion animals was phase-shifted so as to occur significantly earlier during the theta rhythm cycle than in place cells from controls (mean difference = 48.73 degrees). Third, the firing rates of a significantly lower proportion of place cells from lesion animals were modulated by the movement velocity of the animal compared to place cells from controls. These results indicate that the perirhinal cortex contributes to the responses of hippocampal CA1 place cells by providing information about self-movement and by controlling the timing of firing of these cells. This information may normally be utilized by the hippocampus during spatial memory and navigation processes.