Making authentic science accessible—the benefits and challenges of integrating bioinformatics into a high-school science curriculum

Briefings in Bioinformatics, 18(1), 2017, 145–159 doi: 10.1093/bib/bbv113 Advance Access Publication Date: 22 January 2016 Paper Yossy Machluf, Hadas Gelbart, Shifra Ben-Dor and Anat Yarden Corresponding author. Yossy Machluf, The Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, 234 Herzl St. Rehovot, P.O. box 26, 7610001, Israel. Tel.: þ972-8-9342273; Fax: þ972-8-9342681; E-mail: Abstract Despite the central place held by bioinformatics in modern life sciences and related areas, it has only recently been integrated to a limited extent into high-school teaching and learning programs. Here we describe the assessment of a learning environment entitled ‘Bioinformatics in the Service of Biotechnology’. Students’ learning outcomes and attitudes toward the bioinformatics learning environment were measured by analyzing their answers to questions embedded within the activities, questionnaires, interviews and observations. Students’ difficulties and knowledge acquisition were characterized based on four categories: the required domain-specific knowledge (declarative, procedural, strategic or situational), the scientific field that each question stems from (biology, bioinformatics or their combination), the associated cognitive-process dimension (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) and the type of question (open-ended or multiple choice). Analysis of students’ cognitive outcomes revealed learning gains in bioinformatics and related scientific fields, as well as appropriation of the bioinformatics approach as part of the students’ scientific ‘toolbox’. For students, questions stemming from the ‘old world’ biology field and requiring declarative or strategic knowledge were harder to deal with. This stands in contrast to their teachers’ prediction. Analysis of students’ affective outcomes revealed positive attitudes toward bioinformatics and the learning environment, as well as their perception of the teacher’s role. Insights from this analysis yielded implications and recommendations for curriculum design, classroom enactment, teacher education and research. For example, we recommend teaching bioinformatics in an integrative and comprehensive manner, through an inquiry process, and linking it to the wider science curriculum. Key words: bioinformatics education; secondary school; domain-specific knowledge; Bloom’s taxonomy; assessment Introduction Bioinformatics, an emerging interdisciplinary field, applies principles of computer sciences and information technologies to make the vast, diverse and complex life sciences data more understandable and useful, and to help realize its full potential [1]. Bioinformatics education can be broadly defined as the teaching and learning of the use of computer databases to gather, store, organize and index biomedical data, and of Yossy Machluf is a Senior Intern in the Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science. He is a researcher, science educator, curriculum developer and teachers’ trainer in the fields of bioinformatics and biotechnology. Hadas Gelbart is an Associate Director of International research at the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education (RAMA). Shifra Ben-Dor is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Bioinformatics Unit, Weizmann Institute of Science. In addition to research, she has extensive experience teaching at the graduate school level. Anat Yarden is an Associate Professor, Head of the Department and head of the Life Sciences Group in the Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science. Submitted: 28 September 2015; Received (in revised form): 19 November 2015. Accepted: 11 December 2015 C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. V This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact 145 Making authentic science accessible—the benefits and challenges of integrating bioinformatics into a high-school science curriculum 146 | Machluf et al. development [42] and teaching [43–45] of bioinformatics training courses, which can also be applied at the high-school level. Nevertheless, only a fraction of high-school students are exposed to these materials, in part owing to the limited integration of bioinformatics into science curricula [17], and the major challenges involved [16, 46–48]. Research in bioinformatics education is often labeled as being in its infancy. Consistent with this idea, recent studies identified the need to clearly define the bioinformatics curriculum and the content that should be taught together with suitable pedagogical approaches, to appropriately orchestrate the desired learning outcomes, to identify the evidence of the learning, to pinpoint the pedagogical approaches of delivery, and to assess the impact on students [16]. Assessment of cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning targets was previously reported (reviewed in [15]). However, recent survey studies have raised concerns on both the assessment and actual impact of most bioinformatics programs: not only a minority of bioinformatics education research papers reported on assessment, but also the focus of assessment and the quality of evidence provided have revealed weaknesses, as assessment in many of these papers focused on curricular change and students’ perceptions and attitudes, rather than on their learning gains. Moreover, instruments that mostly do not provide any reliability or validity evidence were used in many studies [15, 16]. Nevertheless, bioinformatics education in high school revealed a positive effect on students’ knowledge and confidence in the bioinformatics domain [33], expansion of students understanding of certain genetic concepts [32, 49] and increased motivation and interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers [48]. On the other hand, students’ difficulties were less investigated. These complementary aspects of evidence-based cognitive (learning gains and comprehension difficulties) and affective (attitudes and perceptions) outcomes are crucial to both assessing the impact of bioinformatics modules and curricula, and to drawing recommendations for effective modes of instruction and for integration of bioinformatics into science curricula. To make steps toward this end, we aim in this study to assess the cognitive and affective outcomes of bioinformatics education in high school. We previously reported on the introduction of a bioinformatics learning environment, entitled ‘Bioinformatics in the Service of Biotechnology’ into the Israeli national biotechnology curriculum [47]. We also proposed a framework for characterizing bioinformatics teaching units, based on three criteria [47]: the type of domain-specific k (...truncated)