Confusion and misconception on the part of the student may arise from misuse of tools that are not designed with the learning objectives in mind or from tools where the idealized or simplified representation of concepts is interpreted literally. Moreover, the tools available to instructors to supplement lecture and lab are not necessarily well suited to the task at hand. Rather, greater emphasis is placed on factual recall than on depth of understanding ( Momsen et al., 2010). Unfortunately, undergraduate learning environments, which are often characterized by lecture-based courses with high enrollment, are not always conducive to higher-order learning of complex subject matter. In addition, many of the difficulties associated with teaching and learning molecular biology are linked to the emerging interdisciplinarity of the field, which demands an understanding of complex systems at several different levels of organization. These results suggest that, in select learning contexts, increasingly complex representations may be more desirable for conveying the dynamic nature of cell binding events.Īn understanding of molecular biology at the undergraduate level is dependent on a student's ability to assimilate dynamic and increasingly complex cellular and molecular processes. Overall, the most complex animation was the most effective at fostering students' understanding of the events depicted. Each group completed a pretest, viewed one of four variants of the animation, and completed a posttest and, at 2 wk following the assessment, a delayed posttest. Stem cell factor ligand and cKit receptor tyrosine kinase were used as a classical example of a ligand-induced receptor dimerization and activation event. Visualization media were developed in the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School. Students ( n = 131) were recruited from the undergraduate biology program at University of Toronto, Mississauga. Increasingly complex versions of the same binding event were depicted in each of four animated treatments. In this study, we examined the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional visualization techniques for learning about protein conformation and molecular motion in association with a ligand–receptor binding event. Subject areas that are particularly difficult to understand include protein conformational change and stability, diffusion and random molecular motion, and molecular crowding. Undergraduate biology education provides students with a number of learning challenges.
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