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Cutting-Edge Microscopy Systems as Remote Teaching and Research Tools for Undergraduate Students.

ABSTRACT: Whether due to illness, weather, safety, or other concerns, it is very difficult for biology students to gather meaningful and timely data without access to campus. This has been especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which most laboratory exercises have been conducted as a simulation. Simulated experiments provide a stopgap for certain courses, but for upper-level and research courses, they are often insufficient. Many new microscopy tools now on the market can be adapted to allow students to generate and analyze novel data with little aid from instructors. Remote brightfield-based systems like the CytoSMART Lux2 can be used to gather real-time insight into the progression of cell growth, cell migration, and cell viability over time. The data from these systems can be viewed via the Internet or downloaded for later analysis. Confocal microscopy also offers unique remote-learning opportunities. Because these fluorescence-based microscopes are controlled almost exclusively by a computer, free "remote desktop" software can allow students to learn how to use this cutting-edge technology and can also allow for the generation and analysis of novel data. While these systems can be expensive, they offer a variety of benefits for undergraduate students and researchers, whether they are in the laboratory or working remotely.

SUBMITTER: Thompson CR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8046660 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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PILOTing Undergraduate Students to Hands-On Teaching and Research Skills.

Project description:Undergraduate research can make a positive impact on science education. Unfortunately, the one student-one mentor paradigm of undergraduate research generates a wide range of variability in the student's experience and further limits its availability to a select few students. In contrast, a single faculty member can offer multiple undergraduate teaching positions that provide a consistent experience for the student. We attempted to combine the undergraduate research and teaching experiences in an internship practicum called Peer Instruction and Laboratory Occupational Training (PILOT). Students enrolled in PILOT served as teaching assistants for the upper division Quantitative Biological Methods (QBM) laboratory course. In addition, PILOT students worked on an independent lab project that provided them with hands-on training and supported the QBM course. The development of presentation and teaching skills was also emphasized in PILOT. These activities were designed to improve student communication skills, lab skills, and knowledge of molecular biology content. Here, we describe the PILOT curriculum and report the results of an anonymous assessment survey administered to 75 students who had completed PILOT in the previous five semesters. Our data indicate that PILOT provides an effective format to expand undergraduate opportunities for research and teaching experiences.

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Perceptions, satisfactions, and performance of undergraduate students during Covid-19 emergency remote teaching.

Project description:Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the education system worldwide faced sudden and unforeseen challenges. Many academic institutions closed their doors, forcing both educators and students to transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) for the remainder of the semester. This transition eliminated hands-on experiences, increased workload, and altered curricula. However, these aspects, as well as students' perceptions, study habits, and performance in response to ERT remain poorly documented. This contribution describes changes in the curriculum of an undergraduate cadaver-based laboratory, and explores students' performance, self-perceived learning, and overall satisfaction during this educational crisis. Online content delivery for this course included both asynchronous instruction and synchronous discussion sessions. While formative assessments remained the same, online spotter examinations included short answer, multiple choice, multiple answer, ordering, and true and false questions. Despite examination grades improving 20% during ERT, students reported lower levels of learning, confidence, and engagement with the course materials when compared to the face-to-face portion of the class. The most prevalent challenges identified by students were those related to the loss of access to cadaver-based learning, including difficulty identifying and visualizing structures in three dimensions, and the loss of context and sensorial cues. Flexibility in taking examinations and learning the material at their own pace were recognized as positive outcomes of the ERT transition. While the resulting student perceptions and performances are unsurprising, they offer insight into the challenges of fostering a productive learning environment in a future threatened by epidemic outbreak and economic uncertainty.

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| S-EPMC6036191 | biostudies-literature

A Teaching Strategy with a Focus on Argumentation to Improve Undergraduate Students' Ability to Read Research Articles.

Project description:The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach-based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory-means that we teach students to read research articles by teaching them which rhetorical moves occur in research articles and how they can identify these. Because research articles are persuasive by their very nature, we focused on the rhetorical moves that play an important role in authors' arguments. We designed a teaching strategy using cognitive apprenticeship as the pedagogical approach. It was implemented in a first-year compulsory course in the life sciences undergraduate program. Comparison of the results of a pretest with those of the posttest showed that students' ability to identify these moves had improved. Moreover, students themselves had also perceived that their ability to read and understand a research article had increased. The students' evaluations demonstrated that they appreciated the pedagogical approach used and experienced the assignments as useful. On the basis of our results, we concluded that students had taken a first step toward becoming expert readers.

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