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The Problem with Traditional Undergraduate Biology Education

00:00:22.16 For me, it came from kind of a strange realization.
00:00:26.13 I went to a school where the classes were large,
00:00:29.15 the teaching was more traditional.
00:00:33.23 Typical lecture, where you go into the room.
00:00:36.03 The professor stands in the front of the room
00:00:37.24 and talks at you for 50 minutes or 75,
00:00:40.00 however long the class is.
00:00:41.16 And that's pretty much the end of it.
00:00:44.01 My experiences in undergraduate classrooms
00:00:45.22 did not prepare me to ask questions, make hypotheses,
00:00:51.03 read literature, synthesize ideas...
00:00:53.00 all the things that I was supposed to be good at as a graduate student.
00:00:56.13 The way that we're teaching, and the way most undergraduates are still being taught,
00:01:00.29 what they get out of their coursework,
00:01:03.08 in no way resembles the process of research.
00:01:05.21 And it's almost antithetical to research.
00:01:08.28 These are kids who got A's in our core courses,
00:01:11.13 and they're coming in and they don't understand that...
00:01:15.10 they don't understand that genes encode proteins.
00:01:18.26 They don't understand that there are two copies of every gene.
00:01:22.09 I mean, they could probably repeat that fact back to you,
00:01:24.16 but they don't really understand that.
00:01:26.25 If all you're capable of is knowledge
00:01:29.23 and a little bit of understanding,
00:01:32.03 then you'll be most successful as a game show contestant,
00:01:37.18 but you won't be able to do very much else.
00:01:40.00 So, it's very perplexing that we aspire
00:01:43.29 to have people who graduate from a biology degree
00:01:46.12 go out and become researchers,
00:01:48.23 become healthcare professionals,
00:01:50.15 become teachers.
00:01:52.11 And all those jobs will require those folks
00:01:54.08 to be creative with the biology they know,
00:01:56.09 talk with other people about it,
00:01:58.00 come up with new ideas, make predictions,
00:02:00.03 make decisions with lack of total information...
00:02:03.03 all the things we aspire for people to be good at after they graduate
00:02:06.15 are not necessarily what we train them to do in our classes.
00:02:09.12 Part of the problem is we're setting the bar too low.
00:02:12.06 We have low expectations for our students,
00:02:14.25 and they meet them, right?
00:02:17.13 You know, we... we talk at them,
00:02:19.10 and all we expect them to do right is to absorb a bunch of information
00:02:23.02 and repeat it back to us.
00:02:25.02 And if those are our expectations,
00:02:26.26 that's what our students do.
00:02:29.05 We know from studies that when you memorize facts,
00:02:31.14 you could do very well on an exam,
00:02:34.22 once you've crammed for it.
00:02:36.03 But if you give the same exam, unannounced,
00:02:39.00 to the same people a year later,
00:02:41.10 very little of what they memorized is known.
00:02:43.29 So, is that education, the fact that you were able to spit it back
00:02:47.18 after cramming?
00:02:48.29 I would say it's not really education
00:02:50.19 unless it sticks a year later.
00:02:55.29 They're gonna be there four years.
00:02:57.21 How much information are they gonna remember when they graduate?
00:03:00.27 Not a lot.
00:03:02.15 But what they will remember is how to think their way out of a problem,
00:03:05.04 and that's...
00:03:07.04 I think that is most of our goals as teachers.
00:03:09.24 I mean, there's some things you have to know -- don't get me wrong --
00:03:12.28 but it's, can you think?
00:03:15.05 I don't remember my teachers...
00:03:17.06 a word that came out of their mouths,
00:03:18.14 but I remember the ones that I liked the most
00:03:20.05 because they probably changed the way I thought.
00:03:22.18 What's your goal for the class?
00:03:25.03 Do you want students to be able to
00:03:27.22 parrot back what you've said?
00:03:30.14 Or could you actually go beyond that?
00:03:34.01 Could you go beyond the content
00:03:36.03 and ask students to predict the next experiment,
00:03:39.04 or predict the results of what would happen
00:03:42.05 if you perturbed a system.
00:03:47.17 We want them to be able to synthesize ideas, okay?
00:03:57.01 That's hard to do by the Socratic method, because you're doing all the synthesis.
00:03:59.13 I would send them,
00:04:01.20 and I would say, "Think about it in this way when you study tonight."
00:04:04.09 And it wouldn't happen,
00:04:07.15 because I wasn't giving them an opportunity to practice.
00:04:09.11 That's how you learn.
00:04:10.27 You learn through practice and trial-and-error.
00:04:15.14 The people who do the learning in a classroom
00:04:18.02 are the people who are doing the work.
00:04:20.03 So, in class,
00:04:22.24 we should be giving our students opportunities to practice those skills:
00:04:25.09 answering questions, collecting data,
00:04:28.08 evaluating data,
00:04:30.14 separating the relevant data from the irrelevant.
00:04:32.14 And they're very good at going out and finding information on their own
00:04:36.20 and interpreting it.
00:04:38.10 They're really good at it.
00:04:39.24 And again, we just set the bar so low
00:04:41.22 that that's never even been part of the class.
00:04:48.09 When we want to hire a new teacher,
00:04:51.10 we hire someone who's been in school for 25 years,
00:04:54.17 oftentimes with no training to teach.
00:04:57.07 So, that would be like saying,
00:04:58.25 "Okay, I've been flying on the airlines for a long time.
00:05:01.09 I'm ready to be a pilot."
00:05:03.12 Most faculty teaching today
00:05:06.05 were taught by the traditional lecture method when they were in school.
00:05:09.09 And so some of them tend to argue that
00:05:11.27 "It worked for me, and it worked for my colleagues.
00:05:15.04 Look around.
00:05:17.01 All my academic colleagues were taught this way too,
00:05:18.25 and look where we are. We're doing fine.
00:05:21.18 So, why should we... why should we change?"
00:05:23.10 Sometimes it's been referred to as instructional selection.
00:05:25.14 The people who survive in biology classes in the undergraduate years
00:05:29.14 are those people who learn really well by lecture.
00:05:32.06 But in reality, you know,
00:05:34.11 that might be selecting against people
00:05:37.01 that have phenomenal scientific thought process in their head,
00:05:40.08 or their capable of phenomenal thought processes in their head,
00:05:43.20 but, you know, they can't listen, memorize, write down, and take a test,
00:05:48.08 and sort of go to the next level.
00:05:49.20 Or they find that boring, almost, dare I say it?
00:05:52.21 Boring, when science is really not boring, right?
00:05:56.29 It's... it can be so exciting.
00:05:58.12 Not everyone is gonna learn from a professor who stands in front of a classroom
00:06:00.27 and just dictates notes -- even if he's entertaining, right?,
00:06:06.03 and eloquent and so on.
00:06:07.29 And it's not their job to figure out how to get it.
00:06:10.18 It's my job to figure out how to deliver it.
00:06:12.18 It's your job as an educator
00:06:15.13 to motivate them and to figure out how to reach them.
00:06:19.11 There's a big difference between teaching and learning.
00:06:21.29 And what I had been focusing on was teaching,
00:06:24.17 and forgetting that the real goal is learning, student learning.
00:06:27.16 It doesn't mean everyone's going to become a research scientist.
00:06:31.02 But it means everyone gets the exposure necessary
00:06:34.19 to become a scientific thinker,
00:06:37.07 or become more of a scientific thinker.
00:06:39.06 And if we do that... if we do that,
00:06:41.24 we've really done our job.
00:06:48.06 So, at this point, you may be wondering,
00:06:50.18 "Well, how can I do these things?
00:06:52.08 How can I incorporate active learning into my classes?"
00:06:55.15 Well, let's think about this.
00:06:57.12 If you wanted to run a protein gel,
00:06:59.21 you wouldn't start from scratch, say,
00:07:01.27 "Wow, I need some sort of matrix, a polymer maybe, maybe electricity."
00:07:05.28 You would go to the experts. You'd see what others have done.
00:07:09.02 Many, many people have been working on active teaching over the years.
00:07:11.12 We have some great examples.
00:07:13.12 You can learn from masters.
00:07:15.18 You can learn from their mistakes so you don't have to make them yourself.
00:07:18.19 So, we will show you some of the great ways that you can engage students
00:07:22.20 without getting a PhD in education,
00:07:25.02 just applying what works in your classroom
00:07:27.29 to meet your goals.

This Talk
Speakers: Omar Quintero, Abby Dernburg, A. Malcolm Campbell, Bruce Alberts
Audience:
  • Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
  • Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
  • Educators
Recorded: July 2014
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Talk Overview

What are the issues with traditional undergraduate biology education? What is the role of an educator in a 21st century college classroom? What is missing in the way we currently teach science in college?

Educators featured in this video: Bruce Alberts, University of California, San Francisco; Chantilly Apollon, City College of San Francisco; Teaster Baird, Jr., San Francisco State University; A. Malcolm Campbell, Davidson College; Abby Dernburg, University of California, Berkeley, LBNL, HHMI; Sabrice Guerrier, Millsaps College; Latanya Hammonds-Odie, Georgia Gwinnett College; Mary Miller, Rhodes College; Mark Peifer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; George Plopper, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Omar Quintero, University of Richmond; Kimberly Tanner, San Francisco State University; Sue Wick, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Michael Wolyniak, Hampden-Sydney College; Bill Wood, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Speaker Bio

Omar Quintero

Omar Quintero

Dr. Omar Quintero is an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where he combines research and undergraduate education. His lab studies the genes and proteins involved cellular motility. It has taken him a few tries to find an institution that fits his research and teaching goals. He has been faculty… Continue Reading

Abby Dernburg

Abby Dernburg

Abby Dernburg is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Senior Scientist in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dernburg has studied different aspects of chromosome biology for many years, beginning with her PhD studies in… Continue Reading

A. Malcolm Campbell

A. Malcolm Campbell

A. Malcolm Campbell is a Professor of Biology at Davidson College where he has worked for eighteen years. He has been involved in many projects outside of the classroom including being co-editor of CBE Life Sciences Education and founding the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT). Continue Reading

Bruce Alberts

Bruce Alberts is currently the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine (2008-2013), President of the National Academy of Sciences (1993-2005), and United States Science Envoy (2009-2011). Alberts, who has dedicated his career to promoting science education and international… Continue Reading

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