Neuroscience Graduate Program Curriculum: From Fundamental Knowledge & Skills to Integrative, Critical Thinking

Neuroscience Graduate Program Curriculum: From Fundamental Knowledge & Skills to Integrative, Critical Thinking

Grant:
Gilbert Whitaker Fund for the Improvement of Teaching
Academic Year:
2012 - 2013 (June 1, 2012 through May 31, 2013)
Funding Requested:
$10,000.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
rseidler
aseashol
esterm
Overview of the Project:
Several years ago we created and charged our curriculum committee with reviewing our existing Neuroscience didactic classroom approach. In addition to other coursework outside of the program, we have students take a "boot camp" laboratory class during two weeks in August (Neurosci 623), followed by a year-long sequence of courses which survey the current state of knowledge in various areas of Neuroscience (Neurosci 601 (fall), 602 (winter)), accompanied by Neuroanatomy lecture and lab (Neurosci 570, 571) in the winter semester. The curriculum committee came up with a specific plan to reorganize this sequence, with the overall vision of: a) Building upon and taking advantage of best teaching practices, such as problem-based and active learning approaches, and becoming a world-wide leader in graduate Neuroscience education (Neurosci 623). b) Providing our students with an initial foundation of knowledge in the broad, multidisciplinary field of Neuroscience (Neurosci 601, 570, 571). c) Promoting transition to integrative and critical thinking skills which will help students to create and evaluate new knowledge in this rapidly expanding field (Neurosci 602). This will leave them well poised to begin their scientific careers as they settle on their home laboratory at the end of their first year in the program. Achieving this vision required our efforts and attention in three areas: curricular reform, faculty development, and assessment of the effectiveness of our changes.
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:

1) Extend the boot camp to include tightly integrated lectures and labs, providing students with an initial problem-based and active learning exposure to Neuroscience. Posing problems that students can solve with collaborative experiments in the course laboratory will boost their problem solving skills, introduce them to the self-directed learning that is so important to graduate study, and enhance their intrinsic motivation. This will leave them well-poised for success in their first semester of a laboratory rotation in a faculty member’s laboratory because they will have gained both hands on lab skills and experience with learning by doing. 2) Moving our Neuroanatomy coursework (Neurosci 570, 571) back from the winter to the fall semester (pushing an elective course from the fall to the winter) will allow us to avoid duplication between this course and Neurosci 602. Neurosci 602 is billed as covering integrative neuroscience, but this is difficult to accomplish when students are still learning about brain pathways, neurotransmitters, and other fundamentals of neuroscience. This new sequence will allow us to cover the fundamentals of neuroscience in the summer boot camp and fall coursework, allowing us to expand on exercises that promote integration of knowledge across diverse topics and critical thinking in the winter semester.

Project Achievements:

We had two faculty workshops with Dr. Rachel Niemer of CRLT to help us to revamp our boot camp course. She assisted with planning of active learning experiences, integration of lectures with laboratory activities, syllabus preparation, and provided advice on debriefing of both faculty and students about our revised coursework. We believe that our bootcamp reform was a rousing success! Students appreciated the integration of lecture and laboratory activities. In particular our lecture instructor, Dr. Michael Sutton, took the time to come to the afternoon laboratory experiences and discussed with students relationships between his lecture content and laboratory exercises. We also added a problem solving / trouble shooting component to the laboratory class in 2013. Student feedback indicated that students enjoyed this component of the course and learned a lot from it, but felt unprepared and very stressed about a problem solving evaluation that we implemented that year. For 2014 we made additional modifications and preparation of students for such problem based learning evaluations. Focused interviews with the several faculty who teach this course indicated that they found students to have more confidence in trouble shooting their equipment and experimental preparations in the past two years, but faculty wished they had more time to continue these new developments. We will continue to focus group and debrief both the faculty and students in this course, and will refine the course as appropriate each year. It took us some time to gain approval for and to implement the change in semester for our Neuroanatomy course offerings (lecture and laboratory sections). 2014 is the first year in which we are offering the course in the fall instead of the winter. We hope that this will leave students more prepared for our integrative neuroscience core course in winter 2015, but this remains to be seen.

Continuation:
We are continuing with the changes that we have implemented under this award. Moreover, we are applying for a Phase II award to enhance other aspects of our doctoral student preparation (presentation and critical evaluation skills; to be submitted by Dr. Audrey Seasholtz).
Dissemination:
We have approximately 130 University of Michigan faculty and ~60 doctoral students that participate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. We have highlighted our curricular improvements for them at our program’s annual retreat and at our faculty and director / associate director – student meetings. It is our sincere hope that these efforts will spur curricular reform in our faculty members’ home departments, and that our faculty will continue to be inspired to integrate best teaching practices into the Neuroscience Graduate Program curriculum.
Advice to your Colleagues:
Curricular reform takes an extensive amount of work and expertise. We advocate funding support for faculty investing their time in these important efforts, and we strongly advocate seeking input from CRLT for both implementing and evaluating changes.
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