International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 5, Number 2, July 2011
Return to current issues pageResearch Article
Excerpt
Revealing Student Thinking aboutExperimental Design and the Roles of Control Experiments
Well-designed "controls" distinguish experimental from non-experimental
studies. Surprisingly, we found that a high percentage of students had
difficulty identifying control experiments even after completing three
university-level laboratory courses. To address this issue, we designed
and ran a revised cell biology lab course in which students participated
in weekly "experimental control exercises." To measure student
understanding of control experiments, we developed a set of assessment
questions; these were given to students prior to and...
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Full ArticleBios
Jia ShiUniversity of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado, USA
jia.shi@colorado.edu
After completing medical school in China, I received my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology from Brandies University and Boston University, respectively. Subsequently, I completed my postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. My early work experiences included knowledge acquisition at a start-up company (Ingenuity) and teaching biological courses at community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am currently a science teaching fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My research interests include effective science teaching and learning in higher education. My current research focuses on science process-oriented curricula and remediation of common biological misconceptions.
Joy M. PowerUniversity of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Joy.power@colorado.edu
I have been a Laboratory Coordinator for the Molecular Cell Biology Lab at the University of Colorado for almost twenty years. My main interests lie in undergraduate science education. I have been recently traveling to Tanzania and to Ghana as part of a team of scientists, funded by a grant to the American Society for Cell Biology from the Carnegie Corporation, offering two-week intensive courses in Cell Biology to young scientists in those and other countries. I am currently working on plans to directly involve my undergraduate students with research being performed in Ghana as an attempt to aid the Ghanaian scientists while providing my students with the opportunity to contribute to ongoing health related research.
Michael W. KlymkowskyUniversity of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado, USA
michael.klymkowsky@Colorado.edu
I am a professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and co-director of Boulder's Science/Mathematics teacher recruitment and certification program. I received a B.S. in Biophysics (Pennsylvania State University) and a Ph.D. in biology (CalTech). After competing a post-doctoral training (University College London and Rockefeller University), I have been working on the regulation of early embryonic patterning and teaching a range of courses. I have also become increasingly involved in the design, delivery and evaluation of learning (arXiv:1012.4501) Most recently, I have been working with Melanie Cooper (Clemson University) to build a coherent and effective introductory chemistry curriculum, Chemistry, Life, the Universe, and Everything (CLUE) and graphic-based learning and assessment system, BeSocratic. I received the 2009 Best Should Teach gold award.