Disease Projects: Histology (BIOL 315)
Date: Fall 2007
Reflection written July 3, 2008
Standard: National Science Education Standard E. This standard states that science teachers will develop communities of science learners that reflect the intellectual rigor of scientific inquiry and the attitudes and social values conducive to science learning.
Student Sample: In addition to the directions for the disease projects, I have included a sample student paper.
Describe: Oral and written communication are both important in order to share scientific discoveries with the rest of the science community. Therefore, my courses have a significant writing component, as this is a useful way to learn the intricacies of science writing.
In order to allow the students more control over their learning, I recently began using short, focused writing assignments in several of my courses. These short writing assignments are called “disease projects” because the student has to write a short research paper on a specific disease. Following a brief overview of the disease, the student provides an in-depth examination of the course-specific aspects of the disease. Each student must write three papers and create one poster. One of the papers must be presented to the class – using any audio-visual support that the student desires – and the poster is presented to the entire department during an end-of-semester poster session. (This poster session often coincides with the end-of-semester party, allowing the students to socialize with their classmates while presenting science information.) Students may choose any applicable disease or medical condition for their papers or posters.
Using these short papers and posters gives the students enormous flexibility in choosing how to complete the assignment. In addition to choosing the disease of interest, students choose which paper to present to their classmates, and which audio-visual resources should be used. This encourages personal creativity as well as student ownership. Furthermore, allowing students to choose which paper to use for their oral presentation permits students to select their strongest piece, which increases their confidence level during the presentation. As the students build their confidence in this way, they will be more likely to succeed in the future.
Analyze: I have included this artifact in my teaching portfolio as an example of how I am developing a community of science learners that reflects the intellectual rigor of scientific inquiry and the attitudes and social values conducive to science learning. By providing the students with options, I am encouraging them to take control of their learning. Then, during the oral presentations, the students are sharing their knowledge with their science community; in this way they learn to share and critique science knowledge.
Appraise: The disease papers have been well-received by the students, since the assignment allows them a great deal of control. Furthermore, the projects have been successful in developing a community of learners as the students share the information that they have gathered.
Transform: I have now used the disease projects in two courses. Part of the flexibility of the project is that it can be used in many different courses, since the same disease can be studied from several points of view; e.g. a student in different courses can examine the histological, pharmacological, molecular, or cellular mechanisms of a disease. This is advantageous because it shows the interconnected nature of science knowledge, while allowing the student to further their content knowledge. However, the disease projects would not be appropriate in every course. The ability to write an in-depth formal research paper is also an important skill for a student to develop, and contributes to their growth in the learning community. The disease projects simply provide an alternative that encourages the student to take control of their learning in a unique way.
Although students in Histology, and Cell and Molecular Biology, all wrote disease papers in 2007-2008, the project worked best in the Histology course. This was partly due to the fact that it was easier for the students to isolate the specific histological mechanisms of a given disease or medical condition. It was more difficult for students to limit themselves to a specific cellular or molecular aspect of a disease. The students in Cell and Molecular Biology tended to either oversimplify or focus too narrowly.
To address this problem, in the future I will more explicitly involve the students in defining the parameters of the assignment. In the Cell and Molecular Biology course, the students created their own grading rubric. As previously mentioned, this increased their ownership of the project. However, since they were using teacher-defined terminology, it was still unclear for many students that I wanted them to focus on specific cellular or molecular disease mechanisms. This could be dealt with during the rubric-creation phase, as the students decide on the specific content questions to address. At this stage, the students should discuss exactly how to determine the molecular or cellular mechanism of a given disease. Alternatively, a “pre” writing assignment could be included. In this assignment, the students would focus only on a specific cellular or molecular mechanism (without the accompanying description of the disease). The students would then critique each other’s writing to determine whether their classmates were successful in explaining the specific cellular or molecular mechanism. Both the rubric and the pre-writing assignment could be modified for other courses as well.
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For directions for the disease projects for Histology (BIOL 315), click here.
To view a sample disease paper, click here.