Navigating the "COVID hangover" in physiology courses.

Undergraduate educators and students must navigate lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic on education in the 2021-2022 academic year even as COVID continues to impact delivery of undergraduate science education. This article describes ongoing difficulties for undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students and educators and suggests strategies and easy-to-use resources that may help educators navigate the "COVID hangover" and ongoing COVID-related disruptions.

The Development of Core Concepts for Neuroscience Higher Education: From Beginning to Summer Virtual Meeting Satellite Session.

Neuroscience curricula vary widely across higher education institutions due to the lack of an accrediting body or a set of unified educational concepts or outcomes. Each institution has developed a unique set of fundamental knowledge, topical subdisciplines, and core competencies to be delivered in a neuroscience program. Core concepts would provide neuroscience departments and programs with a generally agreed upon set of overarching principles that organize knowledge and can be applied to all sub-disciplines of the field, providing a useful framework from which to approach neuroscience education. We set out to develop a consensus set of neuroscience core concepts to aid in higher education curricular development and assessment. Suggestions for neuroscience core concepts were solicited from neuroscience faculty in a nationwide survey and analyzed using an inductive, independent coding model to identify eight core concepts based upon survey responses. Accompanying explanatory paragraphs for each core concept were developed through an iterative process. We presented the resulting core concepts to 134 neuroscience educators at a satellite session of the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience 2020 Summer Virtual Meeting (SVM). Individuals and groups of faculty provided feedback regarding the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and clarity of each concept and explanatory paragraph, as well as the structure of the document as a whole. We continue to refine the core concepts based upon this feedback and will distribute the final document in a subsequent publication. Following publication of the finalized list of core concepts, we will develop tools to help educators incorporate the core concepts into their curricula.

"Understanding Checkpoints" Followed by Self-Evaluation to Assess Students' Scientific Literacy and Mastery of Content and Techniques.

An Understanding Checkpoint (UC) presents students with previously-unseen figures from published scientific studies accompanied by questions about the study methods, results, and implications. The UCs incorporate content, concepts, and techniques previously discussed in class, although the figures and study from which they are taken are new to students. They are in-class, open-note, time-limited assessments that simultaneously assess course learning goals related to: neurobiology principles and content; process of scientific investigation, including neurobiological research tools and data interpretation; and reading and analyzing primary research literature. After students submit their work, they are provided the full publication and are asked to grade their own work, providing rationale for their evaluation. The self-evaluative portion of the assignment incentivizes students to identify and remediate ongoing weaknesses. It also provides spaced retrieval practice to enhance learning. The final grade for the UC incorporates the student's original answers and the accuracy of the self-assessment rationale. Student and instructor feedback indicates that the self - evaluative requirement develops a deeper understanding of the course material and enhances metacognitive effort, in addition to providing an opportunity to improve the UC grade. This strategy was originally presented as a teaching demonstration at the 2017 Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Workshop.

The BRAIN Initiative Provides a Unifying Context for Integrating Core STEM Competencies into a Neurobiology Course.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative introduced by the Obama Administration in 2013 presents a context for integrating many STEM competencies into undergraduate neuroscience coursework. The BRAIN Initiative core principles overlap with core STEM competencies identified by the AAAS Vision and Change report and other entities. This neurobiology course utilizes the BRAIN Initiative to serve as the unifying theme that facilitates a primary emphasis on student competencies such as scientific process, scientific communication, and societal relevance while teaching foundational neurobiological content such as brain anatomy, cellular neurophysiology, and activity modulation. Student feedback indicates that the BRAIN Initiative is an engaging and instructional context for this course. Course module organization, suitable BRAIN Initiative commentary literature, sample primary literature, and important assignments are presented.

Community-Derived Core Concepts for Neuroscience Higher Education.

Core concepts provide a framework for organizing facts and understanding in neuroscience higher education curricula. Core concepts are overarching principles that identify patterns in neuroscience processes and phenomena and can be used as a foundational scaffold for neuroscience knowledge. The need for community-derived core concepts is pressing, because both the pace of research and number of neuroscience programs are rapidly expanding. While general biology and many subdisciplines within biology have identified core concepts, neuroscience has yet to establish a community-derived set of core concepts for neuroscience higher education. We used an empirical approach involving more than 100 neuroscience educators to identify a list of core concepts. The process of identifying neuroscience core concepts was modeled after the process used to develop physiology core concepts and involved a nationwide survey and a working session of 103 neuroscience educators. The iterative process identified eight core concepts and accompanying explanatory paragraphs. The eight core concepts are abbreviated as communication modalities, emergence, evolution, gene-environment interactions, information processing, nervous system functions, plasticity, and structure-function. Here, we describe the pedagogical research process used to establish core concepts for the neuroscience field and provide examples on how the core concepts can be embedded in neuroscience education.

Role of intrinsic properties in Drosophila motoneuron recruitment during fictive crawling.

Motoneurons in most organisms conserve a division into low-threshold and high-threshold types that are responsible for generating powerful and precise movements. Drosophila 1b and 1s motoneurons may be analogous to low-threshold and high-threshold neurons, respectively, based on data obtained at the neuromuscular junction, although there is little information available on intrinsic properties or recruitment during behavior. Therefore in situ whole cell patch-clamp recordings were used to compare parameters of 1b and 1s motoneurons in Drosophila larvae. We find that resting membrane potential, voltage threshold, and delay-to-spike distinguish 1b from 1s motoneurons. The longer delay-to-spike in 1s motoneurons is a result of the shal-encoded A-type K(+) current. Functional differences between 1b and 1s motoneurons are behaviorally relevant because a higher threshold and longer delay-to-spike are observed in MNISN-1s in pairwise whole cell recordings of synaptically evoked activity during bouts of fictive locomotion.