Monthly Archives: December 2019

Backward planning of lab course to enhance students’ critical thinking
Zhiyong Cheng, PhD
Food Science and Human Nutrition Department
The University of Florida

Development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills hallmarks effective teaching and learning [1-2]. Physiology serves as a fundamental subject for students in various majors, particularly for bioscience and pre-professional students [1-8]. Whether they plan on careers in science or healthcare, critical thinking and problem-solving skills will be keys to their success [1-8].

Backwards course design is increasingly employed in higher education. To effectively accomplish specific learning goals, instructions are to begin course development with setting learning objectives, then backwardly create assessment methods, and lastly design and deliver teaching and learning activities pertaining to the learning objectives and assessment methods. In terms of development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, a lab course constitutes an excellent option to provide opportunities for instructors and students to explore innovative paths to their desired destinations, i.e., to accomplish specific learning goals.

In a traditional “cookbook” lab setting, detailed procedures are provided for the students to follow like cooking with a recipe. Students are usually told what to do step-by-step and what to expect at the end of the experiment. As such, finishing a procedure might become the expected goal of a lab course to the students who passively followed the “cookbook”, and the opportunity for developing critical thinking skills is limited. In a backwards design of a lab course; however, the instructor may engage the students in a series of active learning/critical thinking activities, including literature research, hypothesis formulation, study design, experimental planning, hands-on skill training, and project execution. Practically, the instructor may provide a well-defined context and questions to address. Students are asked to delve into the literature, map existing connections and identify missing links for their project to bridge. With the instructor’s guidance, students work together in groups on hypothesis development and study design. In this scenario, students’ focus is no longer on finishing a procedure but on a whole picture with intensive synthesis of information and critical thinking (i.e., projecting from generic context to literature search and evaluation, development of hypothesis and research strategy, and testing the hypothesis by doing experiments).

An example is this lab on the physiology of fasting-feeding transitions. The transition from fasting to feeding state is associated with increased blood glucose concentration. Students are informed of the potential contributors to elevated blood glucose, i.e., dietary carbohydrates, glycogen breakdown (glycogenolysis), and de novo glucose production (gluconeogenesis) in the liver. Based on the context information, students are asked to formulate a hypothesis on whether and how hepatic gluconeogenesis contributes to postprandial blood glucose levels. The hypothesis must be supported by evidence-based rationales and will be tested by experiments proposed by students with the instructor’s guidance. Development of the hypothesis and rationales as well as study design requires students to do intensive information extraction and processing, thereby building critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Students also need to make sound judgments and right decisions for their research plans to be feasible. For instance, most students tend to propose to employ the hyper-insulinemic-euglycemic clamp because the literature ranks it as a “gold standard” method to directly measure hepatic gluconeogenesis. However, the equipment is expensive and not readily accessible, and students have to find alternative approaches to address these questions. With the instructor’s guidance, students adjust their approaches and adopt more accessible techniques like qPCR (quantitative polymerase chain reaction) and Western blotting to analyze key gluconeogenic regulators or enzymes. Engaging students in the evaluation of research methods and selection helps them navigate the problem-solving procedure, increasing their motivation (or eagerness) and dedication to learning new techniques and testing their hypotheses. Whether their hypotheses are validated or disproved by the results they acquire in the end, they become skillful in thinking critically and problem solving in addition to hands-on experience in qPCR and Western blotting.

Evidently, students can benefit from backwards planning in different ways because it engages them in problem-based, inquiry-based, and collaborative learning — all targeted to build student problem solving skills [1-8]. For a typical lab course with pre-lab lectures; however, there is only 3-6 hours to plan activities. As such, time and resources could be the top challenges to implement backwards planning in a lab course. To address this, the following strategies will be of great value: (i) implementing a flipped classroom model to promote students’ pre- and after-class learning activities, (ii) delivering lectures in the lab setting (other than in a traditional classroom), where, with all the lab resources accessible, the instructor and students have more flexibility to plan activities, and (iii) offering “boot camp” sessions in the summer, when students have less pressure from other classes and more time to concentrate on the lab training of critical thinking and problem solving skills. However, I believe that this is a worthwhile investment for training and developing next-generation professionals and leaders.

References and further reading

[1] Abraham RR, Upadhya S, Torke S, Ramnarayan K. Clinically oriented physiology teaching: strategy for developing critical-thinking skills in undergraduate medical students. Adv Physiol Educ. 2004 Dec;28(1-4):102-4.

[2] Brahler CJ, Quitadamo IJ, Johnson EC. Student critical thinking is enhanced by developing exercise prescriptions using online learning modules. Adv Physiol Educ. 2002 Dec;26(1-4):210-21.

[3] McNeal AP, Mierson S. Teaching critical thinking skills in physiology. Am J Physiol. 1999 Dec;277(6 Pt 2):S268-9.

[4] Hayes MM, Chatterjee S, Schwartzstein RM. Critical Thinking in Critical Care: Five Strategies to Improve Teaching and Learning in the Intensive Care Unit. Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2017 Apr;14(4):569-575.

[5] Nguyen K, Ben Khallouq B, Schuster A, Beevers C, Dil N, Kay D, Kibble JD, Harris DM. Developing a tool for observing group critical thinking skills in first-year medical students: a pilot study using physiology-based, high-fidelity patient simulations. Adv Physiol Educ. 2017 Dec 1;41(4):604-611.

[6] Bruce RM. The control of ventilation during exercise: a lesson in critical thinking. Adv Physiol Educ. 2017 Dec 1;41(4):539-547.

[7] Greenwald RR, Quitadamo IJ. A Mind of Their Own: Using Inquiry-based Teaching to Build Critical Thinking Skills and Intellectual Engagement in an Undergraduate Neuroanatomy Course. J Undergrad Neurosci Educ. 2014 Mar 15;12(2):A100-6.

[8] Peters MW, Smith MF, Smith GW. Use of critical interactive thinking exercises in teaching reproductive physiology to undergraduate students. J Anim Sci. 2002 Mar;80(3):862-5.

Dr. Cheng received his PhD in Analytical Biochemistry from Peking University, after which he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cheng is now an Assistant Professor of Nutritional Science at the University of Florida. He has taught several undergraduate- and graduate-level courses (lectures and lab) in human nutrition and metabolism (including metabolic physiology). As the principal investigator in a research lab studying metabolic diseases (obesity and type 2 diabetes), Dr. Cheng has been actively developing and implementing new pedagogical approaches to build students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Building bridges: Medical physiology teaching in China
Ryan Downey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Co-Director, Graduate Physiology Program
Team Leader, Special Master’s Program in Physiology

Department Pharmacology and Physiology
Georgetown University Medical Center
Washington, D.C.

The Chinese Society of Pathophysiology hosted the 2019 Human Functional Experiment Teaching Seminar and the Second Human Physiology Experimental Teaching Training Course 25-27 October. Across two and a half days, educators from across China met at Jinzhou Medical University in the province of Liaoning to discuss and workshop the latest ideas in active learning and interactive teaching techniques. In many ways, especially in terms of the esteem in which this meeting is held by its attendees, this meeting was not dissimilar from the APS Institute on Teaching and Learning, which will hold its next biennial meeting this coming June in Minneapolis. For the 2019 meeting, the organizers decided to invite an international speaker, which is how I found myself on a plane headed to China. As part of my visit, not only did I get to attend the workshop hosted at Jinzhou Medical University, but also I was hosted by several of the meeting organizers at their home institutions to see their facilities. In this writeup, I will reflect on some of the observations that I made during the many different conversations that I had with the educators participating in the meeting.

The most common question that I got from my hosts was, “What kinds of technology do you use in your classrooms and labs and how do you use them?” What surprised me the most about this question wasn’t the actual question itself, but the perception that many of the educators at the meeting held that they were lagging behind in the implementation of using technologies as   teaching and learning tools. The large majority of teaching spaces that I visited were equipped with much the same technology as any classroom or lecture hall that I would find in an American university: computers, projectors, large-screen LCD displays, and power at every seat to accommodate student personal electronic devices. While there was the occasional technological oddity, such as a computer here or there that was still running Windows XP, the technology available to these educators was very much on par with the technology I would expect at any modern university, which is why I was surprised that the educators had the perception that they were behind in implementing different technologies. In my conversations with them, I discussed the use of audience response systems like iClicker and PollEverywhere as well as interactive elements like gamification through websites such as Kahoot!, but my emphasis in these conversations was exactly the same as I have with educators at home: we need to make sure that there is a sound pedagogical basis for any engagement we use with our students and that the technology doesn’t matter. I can use 3×5 colored  index cards to create an audience response system that functions as well as (or sometimes even better!) than clickers because no one has any problems with the WiFi while using a 3×5 card. The technology facilitates our instruction and should never drive it for the sake of itself.

A common thread of many discussions was the use of internet technologies in teaching. While there is much to be said about the limitations of the ‘Great Firewall’ of China and the amount of government regulation that occurs over their communications, it’s important to note how little these limitations affect the day-to-day activities of the majority of citizens. There are Chinese versions of almost every single internet convenience that we would take for granted that function at least as well as our American versions. Their social media system has grown to the point that many international users are engaging on their platforms. There are food delivery apps and the local taxi services have all signed on to a common routing system (at least in Beijing) that functions in a similar way to Uber or Lyft. In a side-by-side comparison between my phone and one of the other meeting participants, there is near feature parity on every aspect. From an educational standpoint, however, there are some notable differences. The lack of access to Wikipedia is a notable gap in a common open resource that many of us take for granted and there is not yet a Chinese equivalent that rivals the scope or depth that Wikipedia currently offers. Another key area in which internet access is limited is their access to scholarly journals. This lack of accessibility is two-fold, both in the access to journals because of restrictions on internet use as well as the common problem that we are already familiar with of journal articles being locked behind paywalls. The increasing move of journals to open access will remove some of these barriers to scholarly publications, but there are still many limits on the number and types of journal articles that educators and learners are allowed through Chinese internet systems.

The most common request that I received while attending the educators meeting was, “Tell me about the laboratories you use to teach physiology to your medical students.” I think this is the largest difference in teaching philosophy that I observed while in China. The teaching of physiology is heavily based on the use of animal models, where students are still conducting nerve conduction experiments with frogs, autonomic reflex modules with rabbits, and pharmacological studies in rats. These are all classic experiments that many of us would recognize, but that we rarely use anymore. One key area of the workshops were modules designed to replace some of these classic animal experiments with non-invasive human-based modules, such as measuring nerve conduction velocities using EMG. My response that the majority of our physiology teaching is now done through lecture only was met with a certain degree of skepticism from many of them because the use of labs is so prevalent throughout the entire country. Indeed, the dedication of resources such as integrated animal surgical stations runs well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per laboratory room set up, and to facilitate the entirety of students each year, there are multiple labs set up at each university. As the use of non-invasive human experiments expands, an equal amount of space and resources are being given to setting up new learning spaces with data acquisition systems and computers for this new task. In this area, I think that we have much to gain from our Chinese counterparts as many of the hardest concepts in physiology are more easily elucidated by giving students the space to self-discover in the lab while making physiological measurements to fully master ideas like ECG waves and action potential conduction.

Upon returning home, I have been asked by nearly everyone about my travel experiences, so I think it may be worth a brief mention here as well. I cannot overstate the importance of having a good VPN service setup on all of your electronic devices before traveling. Using a VPN, I had near-normal use of the internet, including Google and social media. My largest problem was actually trying to access local Chinese websites when my internet address looked like I was outside of the country. I have had good experience with NordVPN, but there are several other very good options for VPN service. Carrying toilet paper is a must. There are lots of public restrooms available everywhere in the city, but toilet paper is either not provided or available only using either social media check-ins or mobile payments. For drinking water, I traveled with both a Lifestraw bottle and a Grayl bottle. This gave me options for using local water sources and not having to rely on bottled water. The Lifestraw is far easier to use, but the Grayl bottle has a broader spectrum of things that are filtered out of the water, including viruses and heavy metals, which may be important depending on how far off the tourist track you get while traveling. My final tip is to download the language library for a translator app on your mobile device for offline use so that you can communicate with others on the streets. When interacting with vendors and others not fluent in English, it was common to use an app like Google Translate to type on my device, show them the translated results, and they would do the same in reverse from their mobile device.

One of the themes across the meeting was building bridges — bridges between educators, bridges between universities, bridges across the nation and internationally. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to participate in their meeting and contribute to their conversation on building interactive engagement and human-focused concepts into the teaching of physiology. Overall, the time that I spent talking to other educators was useful and fantastic. Everyone I met and interacted with is enthusiastic and excited about continuing to improve their teaching of physiology. I left the meeting with the same renewed energy that I often feel after returning from our ITL, ready to reinvest in my own teaching here at home.

Ryan Downey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Physiology at Georgetown University. As part of those duties, he is the Co-Director for the Master of Science in Physiology and a Team Leader for the Special Master’s Program in Physiology. He teaches cardiovascular and neuroscience in the graduate physiology courses. He received his Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center. His research interests are in the sympathetic control of cardiovascular function during exercise and in improving science pedagogy. When he’s not working, he is a certified scuba instructor and participates in triathlons