Workshop: Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry - Addressing University Students’ Learning Difficulties

Wed 20 Jul 2016   10.00am - 12.00pm

Abercrombie Business School H70 Seminar Room 3110

Join Associate Professor Paula P. Lemons from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia, USA for this workshop where she will share intervention strategies to improve students' understanding of key concepts in biochemistry.

Background: My research focuses on problem solving about threshold concepts in biochemistry as described by Loertscher and colleagues (2014 CBE-LSE). In particular, my group looks at student thinking about three concepts: the physical basis of interactions, the thermodynamics of macromolecular interactions, and metabolic pathway dynamics and regulation. We are about 2 years into a 5 year study of how problem solving develops within this domain over the career of a life sciences university student. We have developed a number of problems that include visual representations of biochemical phenomena, such as protein folding, and ask students to make predictions. In a recent study, we found that experts solved biochemistry problems more quickly and in fundamentally different ways than students. Among students, some completed expert-like solutions, but they did so much less efficiently. However, several students did not successfully solve the problem, and this lack of success occurred among beginning and advanced biology students.


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