Search for: All records

An Open educational Resource guide for instructors in using molecular visualization in their teaching. 

A comprehensive understanding of biochemistry and molecular biology should empower students to address today's most pressing global challenges (GCs). However, the common types of assessment questions in biochemistry texts do not provide the context or training to encourage students to apply concepts broadly to world issues. The typical end-of-chapter problems presented are not often summative across chapters and are less likely to focus on research findings. Moreover, most do not help students read and analyze the scientific literature, an arguably difficult task that is critical to understanding and approaching solutions to GCs. To address these shortcomings, we have developed a new approach for assessment questions and incorporated them in the online, multivolume Open Educational Resource (OER), Fundamentals of Biochemistry LibreText. These Literature-based Guided Assessments (LGAs) are linked to the primary literature and designed to guide students in reading and understanding research papers. Most of the LGAs are also linked to the leading GCs that face the world today. We highlight an LGA on the Voltage-gated Sodium Channel that was developed through a summer workshop sponsored by BioMolViz and used in a classroom setting in the following fall semester. We describe the development and implementation of the activity, along with preliminary data from an introduction to protein modeling course. We also have written LGAs that focus on Trauma and Health as well as Carbon Capture Using Carbonic Anhydrase (centered on the GCs of Trauma and Climate Change, respectively), and two on Visual Images and Data (focused on Information Integrity). Importantly, these topics encourage students to think past the typical biomedical questions that can become the focus of courses targeted to premedical students. We invite members of the community to use these LGAs in their classrooms and propose GCs of interest for future modules. NSF 1920270: RCN-UBE: Development of an Inclusive Community for the Instruction of Visualizing Biomolecules. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project. 

While visual literacy has been identified as a foundational skill in life science education, there are many challenges in teaching and assessing biomolecular visualization skills. Among these are the lack of consensus about what constitutes competence and limited understanding of student and instructor perceptions of visual literacy tasks. In this study, we administered a set of biomolecular visualization assessments, developed as part of the BioMolViz project, to both students and instructors at multiple institutions and compared their perceptions of task difficulty. We then analyzed our findings using a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analysis was used to answer the following research questions: (1) Which assessment items exhibit statistically significant disparities or agreements in perceptions of difficulty between instructors and students? (2) Do these perceptions persist when controlling for race/ethnicity and gender? and (3) How does student perception of difficulty relate to performance? Qualitative analysis of open-ended comments was used to identify predominant themes related to visual problem solving. The results show that perceptions of difficulty significantly differ between students and instructors and that students’ performance is a significant predictor of their perception of difficulty. Overall, this study underscores the need to incorporate deliberate instruction in visualization into undergraduate life science curricula to improve student ability in this area. Accordingly, we offer recommendations to promote visual literacy skills in the classroom. 

Biochemistry relies heavily on the use of images and diagrams to make the abstract tangible. Yet, as biochemistry instructors, how do we know whether our students see the same things we instructors see? BioMolViz (biomolviz.org) is a community of practice dedicated to the instruction and assessment of biomolecular visual literacy. To this end, BioMolViz created the Biomolecular Visualization Framework, an assessment tool that identifies more than 200 learning objectives clustered under twelve overarching themes, such as StructureFunction and Alternate Renderings. The team is currently assembling a searchable repository to host assessment instruments for each of these learning objectives. To aid in its construction, BioMolViz is recruiting participants to help write, revise, and pilot these instruments in the classroom. Here, we introduce the Framework, share various BioMolViz projects, and invite likeminded individuals to work with us to build students’ biomolecular visual literacy.