BioScholars Assessment 2015-2016
Michael J. Hanophy
St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn NY
- An abstract of your journey since leaving the training Institute last summer (up to 300 words). Include what has worked well; what has been a challenge, and what you still hope to accomplish as a Biology Scholar Alum;
- A table or a figure that helps to illustrate your past year’s work; and
- 1-3 references that have informed your past year’s work.
Activating Prior Knowledge in the Biology and Microbiology Classroom
Michael J. Hanophy, St. Joseph's College, Brooklyn, NY.
In an attempt to improve student outcomes in several of our courses for biology majors, deliberate efforts were made to introduce activities and teaching techniques that would help students to activate prior knowledge.
In a General Biology I class, lessons on cellular structure and function were supplemented with images and questions from New York State high school level examinations and pre-tests were administered as formative assessments. These activities helped students to develop a cognitive framework on which to organize and interpret new and more advanced concepts. In an upper level microbiology course, attempts were made to frame lessons on microbial biochemistry and metabolism in a way that tied new material directly to the basic biochemistry taught in our general biology course. This included modifying familiar images from the freshman biology text to introduce new concepts in microbiology. Additional tools like muddiest point assessments and brief instructor-produced video reviews helped to identify and review critical prior knowledge. Preliminary data indicates some improvements in student outcomes on topics where strategies to activate prior learning were utilized.
Because of a heavy teaching load and additional service responsibilities this past year, particularly in the spring semester, I was not able to consistently implement these new instructional strategies throughout either of my courses. I did a better job with my General Biology I class where I also modified my lessons on mitosis/meiosis and DNA replication. I intend to continue applying these strategies to more of my lessons in General Bio I and Microbiology. Also since I will begin teaching a new course, Microbiology for the Health Sciences, in the spring semester, I plan to create the course with these kinds of strategies built in from the outset.
Figure 1 – In order to introduce the idea of microbial metabolism in my Microbiology course, I began with an image from Campbell’s Biology that they had all been introduced to in their General Biology I course demonstrating the catabolic breakdown pathways for nutrients other than glucose. The image is located in the text on the last page of Chapter 9, almost as an afterthought, however with minor modifications it can be used to introduce concepts like central metabolism, the differences between respiration and fermentation, diverse mechanisms of fermentation and anaerobic respiration, and even carbon fixation pathways. Some of those modification are shown here.
References
Osman ME,Hannafin MJ. 1994. Effects of advance questioning and prior knowledge on science learning. The Journal of Educational Research88(1): 5-13.
vanKesterenMT, Rijpkema M, Ruiter DJ, Morris RG Fernández G. 2014. Building on prior knowledge: schema-dependent encoding processes relate to academic performance. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience26(10): 2250-2261.