The next generation of life scientists are currently undergraduates—and the success of
this generation depends upon the quality of the education they receive. It is clear the
expectations for undergraduate education are changing (Collins et al. 2003). When the
National Research Council published its recommendations for changing the undergraduate
training of future life scientists, the BIO2010 report, access to student-based research
was a primary recommendation: “Colleges and universities should provide all students with
opportunities to become engaged in research …” (National Research Council 2003). As every
investigator knows, research begins in the literature, not in the laboratory. Therefore, an
unstated assumption of the BIO2010 report was that students need to have unencumbered
access to the research literature in order to engage in research and become scientific
leaders in the 21st century.
Early in my teaching career, I discussed graduate student preparation with a colleague
at MIT. He said new graduate students knew about the different methods, they could even
recite fine definitions—but if you asked them which method would be best to answer a
particular question, they were uncertain. This reinforced my attitude towards teaching and
testing. I realized that teaching science to students should be modeled on the way all
scientists learn new information: in the context of an interesting question and on a
need-to-know basis. This new style of teaching, “applied education,” would require me to
reorganize reading materials for students, since most textbooks are written by someone who
already knows all the information and has organized it accordingly. For example, describing
membrane structure, protein structure, and signal transduction in Chapters 5, 12, and 15,
respectively (spanning 227 pages) is not helpful for most students. It makes more sense to
cover these three topics in close succession.
Gradually, I converted all my courses over to this “applied education” format in which
students were learning new information the same way all other scientists do. I began by
asking questions that could be answered by learning the information provided by textbooks
or the literature. With time, I realized that published research papers are ideal teaching
tools because they cover information in the context of an interesting question and new
material is presented as needed. This led me to collect series of related papers to create
my own course materials (see
www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/Molbio/Publicschedule.html#anchor99574051). So, for example,
in my classes students first read the elegant paper by Munro and Pelham (1987) that
uncovered the tetrapeptide lysine–aspartic acid–glutamic acid–leucine (KDEL) retention
signal for proteins destined to remain in the endoplasmic reticulum lumen. Then, students
read four additional papers, one of which is composed of weak data and overinterpreted
analysis. Through this series of papers, students learn to trust their own assessment of
the data rather than the authors': this is a very substantial improvement in student
thinking and in their attitude towards the literature. I do not emphasize the particular
details of these paper, but I do want the students to gain higher-order thinking skills.
Therefore, my tests consist of figures from research papers that the students have never
seen before. They are asked to interpret the figures as they appear in the papers and/or to
design new experiments to answer a new question, given what they have learned from the
published figure. Testing them in this way, students very quickly understand that
memorizing details is not productive, but learning how to read scientific literature and
design well-controlled experiments is much more rewarding (see
www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/Molbio/molecular.html#2003exams). Based on this success, I
have designed my genomics course on the “applied education” principle (see below; see also
www.bio.davidson.edu/genomics).
Access to Information Changes Education
When I was a graduate student (in the late 1980s and early 1990s), PubMed was restricted
to those institutions that could afford the subscription fee; now PubMed is freely
available to all who have Internet access. This change in access to PubMed has
significantly improved undergraduate training by providing students with the opportunities
to do literature searches for their lab reports, papers, seminars, and of course original
research. Free access to information in the life sciences has continued to evolve with the
newest phenomenon in publishing—open-access journals. PubMed Central
(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/) is a rich repository of and portal to open access
articles, BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) publishes a growing number of
open-access journals, and there are a few new open-access education journals such as
Cell Biology Education (http://www.cellbioed.org) and the
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience
Education (http://www.funjournal.org). As the newest player in the open-access arena,
PLoS Biology has further enriched the growing espritdes-corps of
publishing and has already improved undergraduate education. My students now have equal
access to a growing portion of the literature that Nobel laureates and investigators at
wealthy institutions enjoy.
Interestingly, the push towards open access has led many subscription-based journals to
permit “free access” two to 12 months after publication. These time-delayed free-access
journals are helpful for course adjustments in the subsequent academic year, but not the
current semester. Unfortunately, owing to the high cost of subscriptions for many journals,
the library at my institution (like many other libraries) is forced to make difficult
choices about which journals we can afford. The number of journal subscriptions goes down
in proportion to the rise of subscription costs, but fortunately this loss is being offset
by the creation of new open-access journals.
The Promise of the Internet
I have been teaching undergraduates since 1993 and have noticed a trend in the way I
teach—increasingly, I have provided research papers to my students so they can learn to
read those papers and improve their critical thinking skills. One reason for my increased
use of research papers is the development of PDFs. When I first started using journal
articles in my molecular biology course, the class had to meet in the library so we could
pass around the bulky bound volumes to detect the important subtleties often lost in
photocopied versions of figures. Later, I learned how to scan the figures and generate Web
pages so that I could project the images in class and so that students could print
laser-quality versions of papers (see http://www.bio.davidson.edu/molecular). Now I use PDF
files for students to print and for me to display in class with no loss of information due
to reformatting or resolution problems (Figure 1).
With my increased confidence from using research papers in my molecular biology class, I
began experimenting with research papers for my introductory students. First-year students
are not ready to critically evaluate complex data, but they are beginning their first
forays into reading review articles and occasionally original research papers. When
introductory students make presentations of their findings in laboratory courses,
increasing numbers are utilizing PubMed and PDF reprints when they are available.
Students have been reading primary research papers since well before PDF files became
available, but the increased access to papers online and the improved quality of the format
has significantly enhanced the use of research and review papers in the undergraduate
curriculum. It is common for students in upper-level lecture and lab courses to read papers
(DebBurman 2002; Hall and Harrington 2003; Kitchen et al. 2003; Mulnix 2003), and seminar
courses are usually dominated by student presentations of literature (Wright and Boggs
2002; Hales 2003; Lom 2003).
It is worth noting that most colleges and universities are being told to reduce
expenditures, and one frequent target of money-saving measures is the ever-increasing costs
of library journal subscriptions. This fiscal reality will erode the pedagogical gains made
by faculty who are already meeting one of the goals of the BIO2010 report by immersing
students in the research literature. However, open-access journals are proving to be
virtual oases in a desert of pay-per-view journals that are available on a sliding scale
that favors the richest and biggest institutions.
Using Open-Access Resources for Creative Teaching …
During the past three years, I have taught an undergraduate course in genomics
(www.bio.davidson.edu/genomics) in which I capitalize on a confluence of two trends in the
field: public domain databases and open-access journals (Campbell 2003). In my genomics
class, students have three assignments for which they are required to mine databases for
sequence, transcriptome, and proteome information (see
www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/genomics/2003/cain/home.html). But genomics courses are not
the only beneficiaries, since other classes at many institutions (e.g., introductory
biology, biochemistry, cell development, genetics, microbiology, molecular biology [see
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/Molbio/standardsHP.html#anchor78181983], and
neuroscience) require students to mine public domain databases (Dyer and LeBlanc 2002;
Honts 2003). This year, we introduced genome database searching to our introductory biology
students (see www.bio.davidson.edu/people/macampbell/Hope/DQ/DQ9.html and
www.bio.davidson.edu/people/macampbell/Hope/DQ/DQ10.html). First-year students use Genome
Browser and BLAST to determine the molecular causes of cystic fibrosis and Huntington
disease, respectively. The benefit of public databases and open-access literature to
educators is obvious and immediate. Images can be used in lectures, and papers can be
distributed easily and on short notice for class use. There is no need to worry about
limited access due to subscription costs nor an obligation to obtain copyright permission
from publishers, which is a bothersome and sometimes expensive process for busy faculty
members. By reducing nonproductive busy work for faculty, open-access journals have already
created an environment that is improving undergraduate education today with long-term
benefits in creating research-ready graduate students.
Students who are exposed to publicly available literature through their coursework often
develop an expectation that all research papers will be freely available to them from any
computer and become frustrated if they do not have access to all the journal articles they
want and need to read. Increasingly, I have students sending me PDF files of open-access
journal articles they have read and want to share with me. Who would have guessed that free
access to journals would result in students mining the literature for relevant papers and
sending them to their instructors for consideration? In addition to papers related to their
own classes and research, students also enjoy learning about “hot topics” from scientific
publications and those stories that quickly reach the popular press. Examples include the
use of DNA microarrays and sequencing to identify the causative agent for SARS (Wang et al.
2003) and a good review article of small inhibitory RNA (Dillin 2003).
Two common educational goals are to encourage students to become skeptical of
unsubstantiated claims and to enable students to evaluate data critically. One way to
accomplish these goals is to capitalize on the natural curiosity of students and ask them
to compare topics in the popular press to that in the scientific literature (see
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/courses/genomics/2003/poulton/p21.html). Open-access journals
make these two educational goals much more feasible because students can utilize current
findings immediately without having to wait for interlibrary loans, which can take up to
two weeks, can cost up to $20 per article, and can result in poor-quality black-and-white
photocopies.
… and for Thought-Provoking Testing
If we want students to achieve higher levels of thinking (Bloom et al. 1956), we need to
model our courses so students can learn by examples and are rewarded for learning to
critically evaluate data and for inspecting evidence before believing claims made by
authors (Brill and Yarden 2003). Students quickly figure out what intellectual behaviors
are rewarded in exams. If exam questions simply require students to regurgitate factoids,
then higher levels of thinking are unlikely to be demonstrated by students. It is difficult
to create good exam questions that cover the course material and reward students who have
learned to read critically and to interpret data. Over the last few years, increasingly I
have turned to current literature to find raw data for my exam questions. For example, for
my genomics class in Fall 2003, I used a paper published in
PLoS Biology that utilized DNA microarrays to analyze the life cycle of
malaria-causing
Plasmodium (Bozdech et al. 2003). I asked students to interpret several
figures, using their own words (Figure 2). Owing to my choosing to use an open-access
journal, my students also had full access to the supporting information, which two students
utilized to enhance their answers. For this question, these two produced answers that were
better than mine. Another exam question required students to mine a database associated
with the Bozdech paper (see http://malaria.ucsf.edu/index.php). Students were asked to
combine what they learned from the paper and the course and choose new proteins (in
addition to the ones described in Bozdech et al. [2003]) that would make good candidates
for vaccines based on the timing of gene transcription. In order to answer this question,
students performed the first steps in real research, which rewards students for learning
higher-order thinking skills.
At the end of their exam, students were given an opportunity for extra credit points (a
maximum of three points out of 100 available on the exam) if they provided constructive
criticism directly to the database curators. About 70% of the students sent comments,
including this one: “In recently using your database, I found it difficult to search the
Plasmodium gene expression data with multiple constraints. For example,
it would be helpful if there were a way to identify all the genes within a certain
functional group that fell within certain time or amplitude constraints. Is this possible
in this database?” The curators very professionally responded to the students' suggestions,
which resulted in three new search capacities being added to the database, as can be seen
on the left side of the main page (see http://malaria.ucsf.edu/index.php). As a result of
these professional interactions, students became participants in a community of scholars,
interacting with investigators at the University of California, San Francisco, while taking
their exams.
The use of open-access journals for teaching and testing has already improved my
courses. I can provide exam questions that are more interesting, more educational, and more
current. Furthermore, I accomplish two tasks simultaneously: I keep abreast of new
developments in my field and I write exam questions. But what do students think? While I
have not formally assessed student attitudes, I have collected information from
end-of-semester course evaluations, including the following comments: “One of the best
parts of the entire course for me were the exams. The exams really gave me an opportunity
to show how I could work through real problems. This class definitely increased my critical
thinking skills. Each test presented me with new ideas and problems to work through. I
enjoyed the idea that each exam would be a learning experience.”
The Future
Teaching is a lot like raising children. Like parents, teachers provide learning
opportunities in part by modeling the behavior we want our students to learn. By choosing
the most current literature as testing material, my students realize that I read the
literature to stay current in my field and that there are always new opportunities to
learn, analyze, and design experiments, etc. By my choosing open-access papers such as
those published in
PLoS Biology , my students benefit from free access to published research
results. Free access to research literature enhances student learning and helps produce the
next generation of graduate students, who are then better trained. Open-access publishing
provides the right mix of benefits for educators and students alike.
