LAUSR

This study hypothesized that student ability to connect course content and scientific papers to broader contexts and concepts in neuroscience (“big picture”) could be improved through implementation of a novel intervention that uses core concepts for neuroscience higher education (Chen et al., 2023) as an instructional tool. The intervention was enacted in two upper-division undergraduate biology courses–one at a liberal arts institution and one at a large public university. In both courses, open-ended student responses explaining how a scientific paper fit into the broader picture of neuroscience were collected before and after the intervention. The intervention asked students to explicitly connect that same scientific paper to specific core concepts in neuroscience. Responses from before and after the intervention were compared for depth and quality of connection to broader contexts and concepts. In order to examine the most effective pedagogical approach for the core concept intervention, it was deployed without prior instruction on neuroscience core concepts in one course while instruction on the neuroscience core concepts were integrated into class meetings prior to the intervention in the other course. Results indicate that the intervention was more effective when embedded in ongoing pedagogical use of core concepts rather than without prior instruction on core concepts. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.