An integrated and projected-based laboratory course was described, integrating interconnected knowledge points and biochemistry and molecular biology techniques on a research project-based system. The program, which served as an essential extension of theoretical courses to practice, was conducted with a sophomore of basic medical science who had…

Developing and exploring new tools to engage students in the learning process have been major foci of chemistry education research. Creative exercises are one such tool that has drawn increasing interest from researchers over the past decade. While studies have reported the impact of creative exercises on learning and types of student responses…

Digestion is a fundamentally important process for an individual's life. However, the physical process of digestion is hidden inside the body, making it challenging to understand and a particularly difficult topic for students to learn in the classroom. Traditional approaches to teaching body processes include a mixture of textbook teaching and…

Biochemistry is an important curriculum for all medical students but has long been considered obscure and of very little or indirect relevance to medical or clinical practice, which markedly diminishes the enthusiasm and motivation of medical students in learning. Biochemistry teachers always face a tremendous challenge to deliver an attractive…

Active learning is a technique used to help transfer passive knowledge into true learning of material, which can be very beneficial when learning challenging topics. The endocrine system is a complex series of topics that can be challenging to tackle in the short amount of time allotted to it in the medical school curriculum or an undergraduate…

For many students biochemistry is a demanding course because they are expected to apply previously learned foundational concepts to new biological contexts. These foundational concepts serve as a scaffold onto which to build threshold concepts such as the physical basis of interactions. Unfortunately, many students possess misconceptions or gaps…

Project-based (research-driven) laboratory courses stimulate student involvement, improve critical thinking and initiate cooperative learning. To this end, a 7-week laboratory project was designed for a sophomore cell biology course to reinforce the fundamental relationship between genotype and phenotype using yeast alcohol dehydrogenase I (ADH1).…

Retrosynthetic analysis is a topic that presents significant conceptual challenges to students. To enable a more active learning of introductory retrosynthesis, we implemented a flipped approach, delivered over a 4 year period, to a class size of between 18 and 29 biochemistry students per year. This provided more time for in-class peer group…

In-class activities that use a collaborative learning approach were developed for a one-semester biochemistry course as a way to achieve higher student engagement. The redesign of this course from a traditional lecture to a format that incorporated a significant active learning component without reducing the amount of content is described. These…

A course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) is a teaching approach aimed at developing students' ability to conduct novel research. Although students' perceptions of their learning during CUREs may not reflect actual student learning, such surveys provide a convenient and useful metric for course evaluation. Instructors can use survey…

Contemporary research suggests an urgent need for educators to improve the quality of STEM teaching and learning. We developed a semester-long model curriculum for STEM teaching and learning. The overarching goal of this study was to establish an authentic inquiry approach to advanced laboratory courses that is interdisciplinary, collaborative,…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

Scientific articles have been explored as a didactic resource in the teaching of Biochemistry, as well as in other areas of science. This teaching strategy contributes to the learning and understanding of specific concepts, and development of the skills, necessary for the research training of students. The present study investigated the use of…

Although research and new technologies have introduced different ways of observing microorganisms, including scanning and electron microscopy, these methods are expensive and require equipment that is typically not found in a middle school classroom. The transmission-through-dye technique (TTD; Gregg et al., 2010), a new optical microscopy method…

One of the most urgent matters in current medicine is the preservation of antibiotic treatment options due to an increasing threat of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic microorganisms. Therefore, increasing awareness by adapted science education and communication regarding this topic is of the utmost importance. This article shows that an…