Attendees: Jenny, Scott, Jill, Ross, Mark, Anne-Marie, Rosa, Andrea, John, Mary Anne, Karen
There were some technology issues with Jill running and recording the meeting. Jenny sent out a
new invitation and the meeting started a few minutes late.
The bulk of the meeting consisted of Jenny walking us through the questions that she and Scott
will be using when interviewing students.
Frameshift question
Jenny and Andrea worked on the frameshift question and arrived at two new variations of the
question. This question needed heavy revision to remove jargon, and they added a TATA box to
the coding sequence because they felt the students would have an easier time understanding
the question. The main difference between the two versions is that one version shows both
strands of DNA while the other shows only one strand that is labeled the coding strand.
Jenny thinks this is a good question for her genetics course because there are no questions
about gene regulation in the AACR database. This course is set up for the second semester of
the intro bio students at CU-Boulder. Anne-Marie asked what level of student this question was
for, and Jenny thinks that it is more suited to some upper level courses, such as genetics or
molecular biology. She was concerned that students would be confused by the double-stranded
version.
John asked Jenny’s advice about the term ‘coding strand’ because it is actually the complement
of the DNA strand that is involved. The coding strand isn’t involved in the mechanism. He is
concerned that his students wouldn’t know the hidden meaning of ‘coding strand,’ because he
emphasizes that the strand that matters is the template. He wondered if he is setting up his
students to have a misunderstanding in the future. Jenny thinks it is really important to know
what the coding strand is because the template strand is almost never considered when
scientists work with DNA. She emphasizes to her students that the genetic information is in the
coding strand while the template serves to be copied in the mechanism. Anne-Marie wondered
if this should be an interview question, such as “what do you understand about the coding
strand” and “what do you understand about the template strand.” Jenny said absolutely, they
could even start the interviews off with asking students for the differences between the coding
and template strand. Unfortunately, most of the students will be coming from Jenny’s class, so
they are well set up to succeed, however she does know they find it confusing so it could be
illuminating.
John pointed out that the goal of the question isn’t to find out what the students know about
coding sequences. He thinks it would be best to use the version that has the two strands,
because the students know where the promoter is. John is more comfortable with this version
because he doesn’t like the term coding strand. Jenny offered that they do interviews with both
versions because it will be interesting to see what students say about the coding and template
strands. Ross said that the language in which students are educated could impact their answers.
This could cause a problem later for the machine learning given that multiple answers could be
correct. Jenny is hoping that by conducting interviews with both of these, we can learn what can
be left out of the question.
Anne-Marie’s primary concern with version 2 is that students succeeding relies on students
understanding the difference between the coding and template strand. Jenny said that the
question is really about whether or not an insertion outside of the coding region, so it shouldn’t
actually matter if the students confuse the coding and template strands. All they have to
recognize is that the insertion is outside of the promoter region and the sequence itself
shouldn’t matter.
Rosa asked about the size of the insertion in the new version of the question. In the original
question, students often saw that the insertion wasn’t a multiple of three and thought that a
frameshift mutation would occur if it were to happen in the coding region. Some of the students
got distracted by the size of the insertion and she wondered if it was important. Jenny said that
is in part the point of the question; she changed the insertion from five bases to one base but
kept the “non multiple of three” rule. The question is testing if students understand that the
location of a mutation is important. Rosa agreed.
Cell membrane question
In changing these questions, Jenny and Scott tried to use “biological question” rather than “how
would a biologist explain” to avoid answers like “the biologist would use a model.” The second
question was altered slightly to prompt for the characteristics of molecule that can pass through
a membrane without the aid of a transport protein. Jill said that she and Paula had concerns
that students would resort to “like dissolves like” as a simple answer, but it’s probably worth
doing interviews because students may surprise us. John also agreed because he thinks the
interviews could be illuminating, and Scott said he would keep both versions and do interviews
on them.
Nondisjunction question
These two questions were revised with prompting for mechanisms by which nondisjunction
could occur. At this point, Mark asked how the interviews will actually be conducted. Jenny
plans to ask one group of students one version and another group the other version.
Occasionally, it can work well to ask a student who is particularly talkative and/or insightful
about a different version to see if they have advice on preferring one version over the other.
John brought up that version 2 of this question is a problem because a key word is present in the
answer. Jenny agreed and changed it to say “mistake in the separation of chromosomes” rather
than nondisjunction.
Mutation vs. Mutant
Previously, the majority consensus was that this question wasn’t necessary. Students were
tending to give a correct thorough answer in the first sentence and then provide unnecessary
details. They added the term “in one sentence” to version 2. John and Mark were concerned
with this question because it is more of a memorization question and not something that will
produce rich responses. Karen wondered if it was worth exploring the idea that mutations are
always negative in a different version of the question. Mark wondered if there was another way
to phrase it to get at the idea of whether or not students always go to negative when talking
about mutations. Jenny and Scott will consider changing it in the future but will not pursue this
question at this time.
Recessive Inheritence
The consensus was that this question may be too simplistic to elicit rich student answers. Jenny
and Scott edited the question to try to probe for more student ideas. Andrea noticed in the
preliminary analysis that most students were able to say “recessive” as a way of completely and
correctly answering the question, although there was no indication that students truly
understood what that meant. Jenny was wondering if it would be best to get students to talk
about what is going on at the molecular level and the prompts are too open-ended as is. Jenny
and Scott are not going to pursue this question now.
Calvin cycle
Anne-Marie and Karen worked on this a bit, but they are still unsure about the underlying
concepts that this question is trying to address. Is it how molecules pass from one process to
another, or how energy transfer occurs? Jenny agrees; she doesn’t teach this topic and doesn’t
feel comfortable weighing in. John thinks that this question gets at systems thinking, or inputs
and outputs of a process to get students thinking of an entire system. We know that students
tend not to think of the entire system and instead focus on small pieces. Jill and Anne-Marie
agreed that this question is really valuable. Jenny said she can interview on the new version A
but perhaps if other people with more knowledge on this could work on it and develop it more,
we could wait. Anne-Marie thinks this might be a good “how and why” question to get students
thinking about the system. John thinks that a few interviews could help, although others should
feel free to contribute to refining the question. Jenny will ask a few interviews on the simpler
version to see what students are thinking; perhaps that will help know what direction to go in.
Sex chromosomes vs. autosomes and Genetic code questions
These two questions were asked at CU-Boulder although the student responses haven’t been
analyzed yet. Andrea said if Jenny would resend the data they’d be happy to do the analysis.
Jenny is fine with interviewing on them before that analysis is complete but will also send the
data along.
Interview protocol
Some of the questions may be asked of students who will participate in the interviews from
their courses, although Jenny is not planning to show them an answer and ask them about their
previous experience. She prefers to ask students open-ended questions about them and see
what they get. Mary Anne asked how many students will be interviewed, and Jenny said that it
depends on the question. They will interview as many students as necessary until they are no
longer learning anything interesting. Mark asked if they would be asking students if there is
anything confusing about the question and she said absolutely yes.
AAAS Meeting
Mary Anne asked if anybody had heard of acceptance to the conference. Mark and John
registered and got confirmation so they said to go ahead and register if you are interested in
attending. Although the initial deadline for notification was Feb 7th, nobody has heard anything
about whether or not they were accepted to present. Keep watching!