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PCR and Gel Electrophoresis: Moving Beyond the Techniques
This college biology curriculum unit from the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching helps students learn key molecular biology techniques in the context of a real-world issue (genetically modified organisms, or GMOs). It provides a set of novel exercises that integrate the biological concepts of DNA structure and replication with the techniques of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and gel electrophoresis. These topics, the developers say, are often taught as protocol-based techniques without a direct tie to theory—an approach that makes it hard for students to analyze results or troubleshoot problems. After doing exercises and completing worksheets that help students visualize each step of PCR and analyze a DNA-fingerprinting gel, students develop a data-driven argument to support their position in a mock trial that concerns the presence or absence of GMOs in a particular food product. The exercises, which use the “5E Instruction Model” (the “Es” stand for engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate), can be adapted to a variety of biology topics. Developed by participants in the Teaching Fellows Program of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, the unit employs scientific teaching—an approach that encourages students to actively seek, interpret, and synthesize information rather than to passively memorize facts. The unit contains all exercises, answer keys, rubrics, and surveys of student knowledge. Other curriculum units in the areas of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and molecular biology are also available from the Scientific Teaching Program’s digital library. Two articles in the spring 2008 edition of CBE Life Sciences Education provide further information about and an analysis of this curriculum unit.
HHMI Professor: Jo Handelsman, Ph.D.
Award Years: 2002, 2006
Summary: Jo Handelsman, Ph.D., is an HHMI Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies the communications networks of microbial communities. Her HHMI-funded initiatives include:
- The Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, which trains scientists to bring the same creativity and rigor to their teaching as they bring to their research through two initiatives:
- The HHMI Teaching Fellows Program, which gives graduate students and postdoctoral fellows opportunities to learn the principles of scientific teaching and mentoring through course work, practical experience, and the development of curricula; and
- The annual HHMI-National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology, which selects some 40 faculty to participate in a five-day workshop in which they develop instructional materials for introductory biology courses.
- The HHMI Undergraduate Research Scholars program, which improves the research experience for students from groups underrepresented in the sciences. The students, selected from a national pool to work in labs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, meet weekly with Dr. Handelsman to discuss their research, interactions with mentors, and careers in biology.
- The creation of a course on the influence of human diversity on the way students learn and are treated by their instructors. The goal is to educate future teachers about the role diversity plays in the classroom and to create teaching materials to help instructors address diversity issues in biology courses.
- The development of a “cohort model” for summer research programs that will attempt to ease the transition of undergraduates who are members of minority groups to graduate school at predominantly majority-serving universities; and
- The creation of materials for a capstone undergraduate seminar, Science and Technology in Society.