Teaching how to bridge neuroscience, society, and culture.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Frazzetto G
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3201915 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Teaching how to bridge neuroscience, society, and culture.
PLoS biology 20111025 10
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Project description:Neuroscience as a discipline is rarely covered in educational institutions in Puerto Rico. In an effort to overcome this deficit we developed the Bridge to Neuroscience Workshop (BNW), a full-day hands-on workshop in neuroscience education. BNW was conceived as an auxiliary component of a parent recruitment program called Bridge to the PhD in Neuroscience Program (BPNP). The objectives of BNW are to identify promising students for BPNP, and to increase awareness of neuroscience as a discipline and a career option. BNW introduces basic concepts in neuroscience using a variety of educational techniques, including mini-lectures, interactive discussions, case studies, experimentation, and a sheep brain dissection. Since its inception in 2011 BNW has undergone a series of transformations that continue to improve upon an already successful and influential educational program for underrepresented minorities. As of Fall 2018, we have presented 21 workshops, impacting 200 high school and 424 undergraduate students. BNW has been offered at University of Puerto Rico (UPR)-Arecibo, UPR-Cayey, UPR-Humacao, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ponce, and Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico-Arecibo. A pre-and post evaluation was given to evaluate material comprehension and thus measure effectiveness of our one-day interactive workshop. Our results suggest that both high school and undergraduate students have little prior knowledge of neuroscience, and that participation in BNW improves not only understanding, but also enthusiasm for the discipline. Currently, our assessment has only been able to evaluate short-term effects (e.g. comprehension and learning). Therefore, our current focus is developing methods capable of determining how participation in BNW impacts future academic and career decisions.
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Project description:In this completely digital teaching module, students interpret the results of two separate procedures: a restriction endonuclease digestion, and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The first consists of matching restriction endonuclease digest protocols with images obtained from stained agarose gels. Students are given the sequence of six plasmid cDNAs, characteristics of the plasmid vector, and the endonuclease digest protocols, which specify the enzyme(s) used. Students calculate the expected lengths of digestion products using this information and free tools available on the web. Students learn how to read gels and then match their predicted fragment lengths to the digital images obtained from the gel electrophoresis of the cDNA digest. In the PCR experiment, students are given six cDNA sequences and six sets of primers. By querying NCBI BLAST, students can match the PCR fragments to the lengths of the predicted in silico PCR products. The ruse posed to students is that the gels were inadvertently mislabeled during processing. Although students know the experimental details, they do not know which gel goes with a given restriction endonuclease digest or PCR-they must deduce the answers. Because the gel images are from actual students' experiments, the data sometimes result from mishandling/mislabeling or faulty protocol execution. The most challenging part of the exercise is to explain these errors. This latter aspect requires students to use critical thinking skills to explain aberrant outcomes. This entire exercise is available in a digital format and downloadable for free at http://mdcune.psych.ucla.edu/modules/gel.
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Project description:Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a puzzle and a problem. It is puzzling as to why more species have not adopted this manifestly beneficial strategy and problematic because the comparative methods of evolutionary biology are ill suited to explain unique events. Here, we develop a more particularistic and mechanistic evolutionary neuroscience approach to cumulative culture, taking into account experimental, developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence. This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.
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Project description:Active research-driven approaches that successfully incorporate new technology are known to catalyze student learning. Yet achieving these objectives in neuroscience education is especially challenging due to the prohibitive costs and technical demands of research-grade equipment. Here we describe a method that circumvents these factors by leveraging consumer EEG-based neurogaming technology to create an affordable, scalable, and highly portable teaching laboratory for undergraduate courses in neuroscience. This laboratory is designed to give students hands-on research experience, consolidate their understanding of key neuroscience concepts, and provide a unique real-time window into the working brain. Survey results demonstrate that students found the lab sessions engaging. Students also reported the labs enhanced their knowledge about EEG, their course material, and neuroscience research in general.
| S-EPMC5480837 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic pushed educators to engage in remote teaching out of necessity, but as our relationship with teaching technology grows, remote teaching has emerged as a suitable substitute for in-person education. In this manuscript, we detail a course design for remote teaching advanced topics in neuroscience at the undergraduate level. The course and its different features were designed to fulfill a set of learning goals that closely align with those put forth by the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Furthermore, these learning goals can be applied to any advanced neuroscience class, regardless of the topic material. To achieve these goals, we created a curriculum with distinct design features. These features included a synchronous lecture-discussion system, asynchronous lesson content videos, guest principal investigators, and deemphasized grading. Instead of traditional examination, the students participated in assignments designed to give them extensive science communication experience. At the end of the course, we indirectly assessed student outcomes using an Instructor Course Evaluation survey distributed by the university. From this survey, we were able to conclude that students' perception of the final course outcome was highly satisfactory, with strong indications that the students believed we met our learning goals. Thus, the course design described herein represents a tool for others wishing to utilize it for remote teaching advanced topics in science.
| S-EPMC10558230 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThere is a need to educate a range of professionals in caring for individuals with long-term mental disability who reside within our communities. Empathy alone is insufficient. The Kognus 4-Step Education Program was developed to achieve this goal.MethodThe program consisted of independent courses, including an 18-session basic course on psychiatric disability (on-site or online), advanced courses, and highly specialized training programs (Nidotherapy/Peer Consultation). Experts lectured together with clients with psychiatric disabilities. We first report Swedish reforms in which institutionalized patients were relocated to semi-independent individual households. We then describe the design and implementation of the education program. Approximately 50% of participants who were younger than 36 years old lacked any healthcare education. The participants' backgrounds, perceptions, participation in the education program, and costs are presented.ResultsBetween 2009 and 2014, 8959 participants attended the Kognus psychiatry courses online or on-site in Stockholm (basic on-site course, n = 2111; online course, n = 4480; advanced courses, n = 2322; highly specialized programs, n = 46). A total of 73% of the participants satisfactorily attended the basic sessions on-site compared with 11% of the online participants. The developers conducted the education program for the first 3 years. Thereafter, another course provider continued the program with other types of participants. The program was perceived to be equally interesting and meaningful to participants with low and high levels of education, demonstrating the generalizability of the program. The quality of the basic and advanced courses was rated as 4.4 and 4.3, respectively, on a 5-point Likert scale.ConclusionsPersonnel without appropriate education who work with people with psychiatric/intellectual disabilities can be educated in large numbers. The Kognus program represents a novel and successful way of training people who have no formal education about some essentials of good mental healthcare. Moreover, the model can be easily implemented elsewhere.
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Project description:Cannabinoids have recently gained a renewed interest due to their potential applicability to various medical conditions, specifically the management of chronic pain conditions. Unlike many other medications, medical cannabis is not associated with serious adverse events, and no overdose deaths have been reported. However, both safety and efficacy data for medical cannabis treatment of chronic, nonmalignant pain conditions are lacking. Therefore, representatives from the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience summarize the evidence, according to level and grade, for medical cannabis treatment of several different pain conditions. Treatment of cancer-related pain has prospective evidentiary support for the use of medical cannabis. Although 3 large and well-designed randomized controlled trials investigated cannabis treatment of cancer-related pain, the evidence yielded only a grade D recommendation. Neuropathic pain has been investigated in prospective studies, but a lack of high-quality evidence renders cannabis treatment for this indication a grade C recommendation. Both safety and efficacy data are lacking for use of medical cannabis to treat chronic nonmalignant pain conditions.
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Project description:In recent decades, Cognitive Neuroscience has evolved from a rather arcane field trying to understand how the brain supports mental activities, to one that contributes to public policies. In this article, we focus on the contributions from Cognitive Neuroscience to Education. This line of research has produced a great deal of information that can potentially help in the transformation of Education, promoting interventions that help in several domains including literacy and math learning, social skills and science. The growth of the Neurosciences has also created a public demand for knowledge and a market for neuro-products to fulfill these demands, through books, booklets, courses, apps and websites. These products are not always based on scientific findings and coupled to the complexities of the scientific theories and evidence, have led to the propagation of misconceptions and the perpetuation of neuromyths. This is particularly harmful for educators because these misconceptions might make them abandon useful practices in favor of others not sustained by evidence. In order to bridge the gap between Education and Neuroscience, we have been conducting, since 2013, a set of activities that put educators and scientists to work together in research projects. The participation goes from discussing the research results of our projects to being part and deciding aspects of the field interventions. Another strategy consists of a course centered around the applications of Neuroscience to Education and their empirical and theoretical bases. These two strategies have to be compared to popularization efforts that just present Neuroscientific results. We show that the more the educators are involved in the discussion of the methodological bases of Neuroscientific knowledge, be it in the course or as part of a stay, the better they manage the underlying concepts. We argue that this is due to the understanding of scientific principles, which leads to a more profound comprehension of what the evidence can and cannot support, thus shielding teachers from the false allure of some commercial neuro-products. We discuss the three approaches and present our efforts to determine whether they lead to a strong understanding of the conceptual and empirical base of Neuroscience.
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Project description:The earthworm is ideal for studying action potential conduction velocity in a classroom setting, as its simple linear anatomy allows easy axon length measurements and the worm's sparse coding allows single action potentials to be easily identified. The earthworm has two giant fiber systems (lateral and medial) with different conduction velocities that can be easily measured by manipulating electrode placement and the tactile stimulus. Here, we present a portable and robust experimental setup that allows students to perform conduction velocity measurements within a 30-min to 1-h laboratory session. Our improvement over this well-known preparation is the combination of behaviorally relevant tactile stimuli (avoiding electrical stimulation) with the invention of minimal, low-cost, and portable equipment. We tested these experiments during workshops in both a high school and college classroom environment and found positive learning outcomes when we compared pre- and posttests taken by the students.
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Project description:Understanding how neurons encode and compute information is fundamental to our study of the brain, but opportunities for hands-on experience with neurophysiological techniques on live neurons are scarce in science education. Here, we present Spikeling, an open source in silico implementation of a spiking neuron that costs £25 and mimics a wide range of neuronal behaviours for classroom education and public neuroscience outreach. Spikeling is based on an Arduino microcontroller running the computationally efficient Izhikevich model of a spiking neuron. The microcontroller is connected to input ports that simulate synaptic excitation or inhibition, to dials controlling current injection and noise levels, to a photodiode that makes Spikeling light sensitive, and to a light-emitting diode (LED) and speaker that allows spikes to be seen and heard. Output ports provide access to variables such as membrane potential for recording in experiments or digital signals that can be used to excite other connected Spikelings. These features allow for the intuitive exploration of the function of neurons and networks mimicking electrophysiological experiments. We also report our experience of using Spikeling as a teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate neuroscience education in Nigeria and the United Kingdom.
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