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Teaching without a Textbook: Strategies to Focus Learning on Fundamental Concepts and Scientific Process

The Bioliteracy Project/Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0347

"The faster science and technology advance—the more important it is to teach and to learn the basics of math and science and the less important it is to teach and to learn the latest developments."

–Harari's Law of Science Education

"There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting ..."

–A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

	SUMMARY

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
Are textbooks useful, or are they an unnecessary expense or even an obstacle to robust conceptual understanding? Clearly, the answer depends upon course context—what are the goals of the course, how could the textbook be used to achieve these goals, does this use justify the cost of the textbook, and are there more educationally effective or cost-effective alternatives available? I discuss these questions from the perspective of a course I teach: Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB) 1111: Biofundamentals, an introductory lecture and virtual laboratory course that uses online materials rather than a textbook.

	INTRODUCTION

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
There is little research on the impact of textbooks on student learning. Carpenter et al. (2006) provide a description of publisher-funded studies on textbook use in Britain. They outline two key points worth recognizing. First, textbook publishers and authors seem to have little appreciation of how students learn. Second, students are often motivated more by the desire to attain a degree rather an inherent love of, or interest in, course subject matter. At the same time, both students and instructors value textbooks, even though "there is no correlation between textbook purchase and the grade achieved" (Carpenter et al., 2006). Similar results have been reported in U.S. chemistry and physics courses (Cummings et al., 2002; Smith and Jacobs, 2003; Podolefsky and Finkelstein, 2006). Given that students view textbooks as references rather than learning tools, it is curious why instructors do not assign books that are designed to be reference works, such as the Penguin (Thain and Hickman, 2004) or Oxford (Martin et al., 1996) dictionaries of biology, both of which cost less than $US20, compared with popular textbooks that can cost $120 or more.

Although publishers and textbook authors may argue that the rapid pace of discovery in biology necessitates constant revisions, and so high costs, there is also the obvious business logic that new editions act to suppress the used book market (see Committee on Undergraduate Science Education, 1997, and Fairchild, 2004, for a more dispassionate view). The argument for new textbook editions is based on two assumptions: that students need to learn the latest discoveries to have valid conceptual understanding of biological systems and that textbooks are the best way to provide such information. Both assumptions fly in the face of research into student learning: It is common to find that students lack an accurate and confident understanding of basic biological concepts, such as the random nature of diffusion; the continuous nature of molecular interactions; the distinction between the genetic code and genetic information; the concepts of homology, analogy, and convergence; and molecular bases of fundamental processes such as allostery, transcription, translation, RNA and polypeptide turnover, and gene expression (Klymkowsky, 2007; Garvin-Doxas and Klymkowsky, unpublished observations). For various reasons, there is a tendency to neglect rigorous presentation of basic ideas and processes and to concentrate on often trivial details. Introductory courses often focus on detailed catalogs of the molecular components of transcription and translation initiation complexes and replication forks, whereas students remain confused about basics of DNA, RNA, and protein structure and function.

	TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT A TEXTBOOK

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
Since 1983, I have taught courses ranging in size from Introduction to Molecular Biology (400 students), which used a textbook, to smaller (20- to 40-student) "critical-thinking" courses, some of which used no textbook. All the larger required lower-level undergraduate courses taught by other faculty in the department also use textbooks. Over the same period, through discussion with undergraduate students working in my lab, I amassed a substantial body of anecdotal evidence suggesting that students could pass through the MCDB curriculum without attaining a "working" understanding of the materials presented. In an attempt to help remedy this situation, I developed and taught an introductory course in molecular and cellular biology, MCDB 1111: Biofundamentals (http://www.colorado.edu/MCDB/MCDB1111), without a textbook. I conceived Biofundamentals as a "transformed" introductory course (more about that below), and because I was generally dissatisfied with available textbooks, I decided to develop my own Web-based materials. While an editor of The Dynamic Cell (Dawson et al, 2000), I began to think about teaching technologies, and I started work with Tom Lundy and Spencer Browne to develop Flash-based virtual laboratories (http://virtuallaboratory.net, http://bioliteracy.net).

	EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
After deciding that Biofundamentals would be Web-based, I set out to design and compose the course website (http://virtuallaboratory.net/Biofundamentals/), which includes both lecture and laboratory materials. After a probationary period, the course was accepted as an alternative to the traditional majors' lecture and lab courses. Over the 5 years that I have taught the course, it has evolved through the incorporation of learning assistants (LAs; see below), student response systems, tutorials, and redesigned exams, but it remains true to original design, namely, to engage students so that they can identify and work with basic biological concepts to analyze biological systems. Course learning goals are presented at http://www.colorado.edu/MCDB/MCDB1111/goals.html.

The use of LAs came about through my participation in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-teacher preparation program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The goal of this program is to encourage STEM majors to pursue careers in K–12 teaching (Otero et al., 2006). LAs are talented undergraduates who are given stipends, trained through a course in pedagogy offered by the College of Education (http://cosmos.colorado.edu/stem), and directly involved in undergraduate instruction.

At the same time, my colleague Kathy Garvin-Doxas and I have been working together on a National Science Foundation-funded project to build a Biology Concept Inventory (BCI). We have used a Web-based database system we developed called Ed's Tools (Garvin-Doxas et al., 2007).

The most important practical insight to emerge from the BCI project is that instructors, myself included, are often oblivious about student thinking on particular issues and ideas. Such an understanding requires listening to students talk freely about their assumptions when answering questions or solving problems. For example, students are often deeply confused about the role of random events in biological systems, and this confusion ranges from molecular motions as the basis of diffusion to the origin and nature of mutations and evolutionary processes, such as genetic drift. Such underlying and unrecognized confusion leads to what we term "destructive conceptual interference" that makes a nuanced understanding of biological processes extremely difficult to attain (Klymkowsky, 2007; Garvin-Doxas and Klymkowsky, unpublished data). In response to an in-class "clicker" question, and confirmed through analysis of 80 responses to the Ed's Tools question "What is the meant by genetic code?", it is clear that there was general confusion as to the distinction between the genetic code as an algorithm for reading information and as genetic information. This confusion seems to underlie students' difficulty in understanding the homologous nature of the genetic code. It also serves as a warning that ideas instructors take as obvious are often problematic for students.

	HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK?

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
Biofundamentals typically has an enrollment of 50–80 students. In addition to standard class times, students are required to attend a session run by an LA, during which they tackle tutorial problems and general concept maps of materials presented. From the course home page, students can jump to content materials (Figure 1) that can be read online or downloaded as PDF files, and to tutorial questions, which are answered before class through the CULearn Web-based support system. Some students feel a strong need for a textbook; I recommend that they purchase either one of the "dictionaries of biology" (Martin et al., 1996; Thain and Hickman, 2004) or access textbooks and reference materials available online, e.g., the National Center for Biotechnology Information Bookshelf (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=Books&itool=toolbar) or Wikipedia. Embedded within the course readings are questions for students to consider; in class, these questions (reviewed through the use of clickers) are the focus of small-group and whole-class discussions aimed at encouraging students to articulate their assumptions.

View larger version (30K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Course readings are presented along with the virtual labs at the Biofundamentals website. Within these readings, embedded "Here's a question" questions serve as the jumping-off point for in class discussion.

	TUTORIALS

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

View larger version (27K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 2. A tutorial (in need of further study, revision, and testing) from Biofundamentals; students submit their answers through the CULearn website.

	EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL CREDIBILITY

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

We have described the use of implicit, confidence-type, multiple-choice tests (Klymkowsky et al., 2006). In such exams, students pay a penalty for being confidently wrong, and they get the most points for being confidently correct. More recently, we have modified this exam format to allow students to qualify their responses by making their assumptions explicit (Figure 3). We find that this has a number of benefits; these exams include features of essay questions, but they are faster to grade, and they provide a more complete picture of student thinking than simple multiple-choice exams. In addition, questions can be made more ambiguous (i.e., realistic), and so avoid "telegraphing" the correct answer, something that occurs when one is trying to make the correct answer unambiguous. This type of exam encourages students to look beyond "right or wrong" and to approach questions in a manner similar to the approach used by scientists, i.e., can a specific question be answered unambiguously? If so, what information do I need to know or assume to arrive at an answer? How might my answer be confirmed?

View larger version (18K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 3. Example of a concept-centric multiple-choice question used in Biofundamentals.

	WHEN AND WHERE TO USE A TEXTBOOK

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
Clearly, the issue of whether to use a textbook is complex, and it is dependent upon course and curricular goals. Students (and colleagues) expect a textbook; yet often, the textbook is not used, except as a reference. Most textbooks are not written with current evidence about best teaching and learning practices in mind, so they may be difficult to integrate into the design and presentation of a course that is based on this evidence. Because many instructors provide detailed online or downloadable notes, it would be a worthwhile exercise to consider whether a textbook is required, or whether other materials could serve its purpose. In the end, the result may be a more thoughtful approach to what is taught, how it is taught, and how student mastery is assessed.

	ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 
I thank Kathy Garvin-Doxas and Isidoros Doxas for discussion and insight, and Diana Darnell for comments on the text. I thank the discipline-based education research group at University of Colorado, Boulder, for providing a stimulating environment, and the learning and research assistants (Sierra Hill, Rebecca Green, Laurie Wacker, Savannah Hill, John Wood, and Rachel Gheen, Linda Taylor, and Shana Spindler) who provided critical "student-centric" feedback. Research and development of the Biology Concept Inventory was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

	FOOTNOTES

 
Address correspondence to: M. W. Klymkowsky (klym{at}spot.colorado.edu)

	REFERENCES

TOP SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TEACHING WITH AND WITHOUT... EVOLVING BIOFUNDAMENTALS HOW DOES BIOFUNDAMENTALS WORK? TUTORIALS EXAMS AND PEDAGOGICAL... WHEN AND WHERE TO... REFERENCES

 
Carpenter, P., Bullock, A., and Potter, J. (2006). Textbooks in teaching and learning: the views of students and their teachers. Brooks eJournal Learn. Teach. 2, 1–10.

Committee on Undergraduate Science Education (1997). Science Teaching Reconsidered: A Handbook, Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Cummings, K., French, T., and Cooney, P. J. (2002, Physics Education Research Conference. Boise, ID, 2002 August 7–8. Paper presented at.

Dawson, K., Devlin, T., Klymkowsky, M. W., Rochev, U., Synder, M., Steer, M., and Widom, J. (2000). The Dynamic Cell: A New Concept for Teaching Molecular Cell Biology (CD-ROM for Windows), New York: Springer-Verlag.

Fairchild, M. (2004). Ripoff 101, How the current practices of the textbook industry drive up the cost of college textbooks. CALPIRG, 1–26.

Garvin-Doxas, K., Doxas, I., and Klymkowsky, M. W. (2007). Ed's Tools: a web-based software toolset for accelerated concept inventory construction. In: Proceedings of the National STEM Assessment of Student Achievement Conference. Washington, DC, 2006 October 19–21.

Klymkowsky, M. W. (2007). Conceptual interference in biology education: how jigsaw puzzle/lock and key models of molecular interactions impact understanding evolutionary change, New Orleans, LA: National Association for Research in Science Education.

Klymkowsky, M. W., Taylor, L. B., Spindler, S., and Garvin-Doxas, K. (2006). Two-dimensional, implicit confidence tests as a tool for recognizing student misconceptions. J. Coll. Sci. Teach. 36, 44–48.

Martin, E. A., Holmes, E., and Ruse, M. (1996). A Dictionary of Biology, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

McDermott, J., and Scaffer, P. S. (2003). Tutorials in Introductory Physics, Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Otero, V., Finkelstein, N., McCray, R., and Pollock, S. (2006). Professional development. Who is responsible for preparing science teachers? Science 313, 445–446.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

Podolefsky, N., and Finkelstein, N. (2006). The perceived value of college physics textbooks: students and instructors may not see eye to eye. Physics Teach. 44, 338–342.[CrossRef]

Redish, E. F. (2003). Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, San Diego, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Smith, B. D., and Jacobs, D. C. (2003). TextRev: a window into how general and organic chemistry students use text-book resources. J. Chem. Educ. Res. 80, 99.

Thain, M., and Hickman, M. (2004). The Penguin Dictionary of Biology, London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books.

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