Course: Cell Physiology
Professor: Dean Fraga, Associate Professor of Biology
Librarian: Donna Jacobs, Science Librarian
Objective: We would like to receive support to better integrate the fundamentals of information literacy into Biology 305 Cell Physiology, expanding the definition of information to include the field of bioinformatics. This rapidly evolving field, which integrates molecular biology and computational methods, provides the tools that scientists need to access, evaluate, and integrate the enormous quantities of raw protein and gene sequence data being generated experimentally. These data become another type of search term to be used in searching bibliographic and other integrated databases. Learning to access and manipulate this expanded concept of information is essential for those working in the related fields of molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics.
Rationale: Cell Physiology is a writing-intensive (W) course designed to lay a strong foundation for both Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology students in what is often their first upper-level science course. Although Cell Physiology already has an information literacy component, we would like to strengthen that aspect of the course. We intend to teach students how the various bioinformatic databases are integrated with bibliographic information that allows researchers to quickly educate themselves on a topic. In addition, we will address the concepts of the organization of information, and evaluation and use of information in the context of the Information Literacy Standards set out by the Association for College and Research Libraries.
Current course structure. Currently, the course features a semester-long grant-writing assignment in which students are introduced to a recently cloned gene from Paramecium and asked to develop a short grant proposal designed to determine the physiological role of the encoded protein. Integral to this project is the requirement that students quickly become proficient in finding relevant information and evaluating its suitability. In the past, the science librarian has provided a one-to-two hour instruction session focusing on the organization of scientific information and the use of relevant tools for accessing bibliographic information in the library. While such instruction sessions help students with basic concepts, they are never as useful as one would like because there is too much information to cover in too short a time period. Furthermore, these sessions focused only on bibliographic information and did not address the access of protein and gene sequence data that has become so important to modern biology. More recently, the course instructor has handled informational literacy training. The focus of this instruction has been on the specific skills needed to search PubMed and has not attempted to address broader information literacy competencies such as the structure of bibliographic information, bioinformatic databases, or efficient search strategies.
Proposed changes: To address these shortcomings, we propose restructuring the grant-writing assignment, breaking it into different components, each of which focuses on specific bioinformatic, bibliographic, and general information literacy competencies. Our preliminary thinking is that we might structure the series of assignments as follows:
Combined these assignments will help students to determine the information needed, to develop skill in accessing different kinds of information, and to evaluate the items retrieved for applicability to their research. Students will be required to incorporate the relevant information into their knowledge base in order to complete the grant proposal.
Web-based Tutorial: We plan to create a web site with a simple interactive tutorial addressing the concepts of information literacy and directing students to resources that are specifically relevant to Cell Physiology. The foundation for this tutorial will be resources already developed by the Timken Science Library staff, such as the Guide to Library Research in Biology. In addition to revising existing tutorials to focus specifically on Cell Physiology, new modules will be developed to provide information about specific databases and analyses needed for the assignments. Some of the tutorials will involve free software that will be downloaded and burned on a CD for students. This CD will also contain pdf files that describe the exercises and provide useful background information to the grant writing exercise.
Beyond Cell Physiology: Information literacy skills, both bibliographic and bioinformatic, are developed and strengthened cumulatively, with repeated exposure. We hope to build upon this project in future years by applying similar concepts, and adapting web-based tutorials for other courses, such as Techniques in Molecular Biology, Genetics, Development, Biochemistry I and II, and Neurobiology. In addition, we would like to take simple elements from this model to use in the introductory biology course, Introduction to the Biology of Cells (Biology 220).
Assessment: Borrowing upon what has been done in Chemistry we will develop assessment tools necessary to determine what skills our students bring to the course and how their skills develop after taking this course. The grant assignment already involves weekly meetings which can be used as a means for monitoring students' progress as they complete each assignment. The completion of each assignment is a suitable form of class-embedded assessment since they will be performance based. And finally, the grant writing assignment is itself a great means for the assessment of student information literacy skills. However, it has not been evaluated for those aspects in the past. We will develop an appropriate scoring rubric for assessing the grant exercise for information literacy competencies.
Timeline: The development of the assignments and creation of supporting resources will occur primarily during the summer, with final revisions during the fall semester.