Intro to BioQUEST for INTEC Netcourses

What is The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium?

The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium is a unique curriculum project in which software development and use are unified by an explicit underlying educational philosophy regarding the teaching and learning of biology. The BioQUEST philosophy emphasizes what we call the 3 P's of science education: Problem-posing, Problem-solving and peer Persuasion.

Problem Posing: To understand science as it is practiced, rather than solving already well-formulated problems from a textbook, students must be engaged in problem-posing. To appreciate this, students must learn that they could stand in the field or laboratory forever and no problems would come to them pre-posed. In BioQUEST we try to help students understand the multiple issues involved in the posing of a problem, including "interestingness," significance, and feasibility, as well as the problems resulting when bias creeps into problem-posing.

Problem Solving: After having posed a problem, students need to experience open-ended problem-solving. Real scientific problems do not have answers at the back of the book. The scientist entertains multiple competing hypotheses and makes inferences over a long series of experimental observations. Scientists do not arrive at a final answer; research is abandoned for a variety of reasons, including time, resources, and most importantly when the scientific research team is "satisfied," i.e. when the solution is "useful" for some purpose. Students can, and must have this problem-solving experience to appreciate the nature of scientific answers and to develop heuristics for achieving closure to scientific problems.

Peer Persuasion: Research is not complete, no matter how many experiments have been conducted, no matter how many puzzles have been solved, until peers outside of a research team are persuaded of the utility of the answers. Persuasion is a social process and an essential one for students to experience in order to understand the nature of scientific theories and paradigm shifts. Therefore, they need to experience peer review as a professional activity. The modules in The BioQUEST Library allow student groups to easily transfer their data, graphics, working hypotheses, and analyses into word-processing, spreadsheet, and scientific graphics software to build scientific journal-style manuscripts which can be reviewed by other students and instructors.

We believe that if students are to understand how biologists think, they must have opportunities to experience science from the point of view of a practicing biologist. This 3 P's approach to the teaching of biology is vital to the laboratory research experience of a student and such experience is central to a deep understanding of how scientific knowledge is created, modified, and used. Our students must not only understand and appreciate the strengths of science, they must comprehend its limitations as well.

From its inception in 1986, the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium has strived to enhance existing wet labs and field labs by incorporating more open-ended problem-solving into them. Many "cookbook" labs are excused by citing the constraints of getting something to work well in two or three hours. Computer tools, when used as an integral part of a curriculum that includes laboratories, lectures, and collaborative group work can be used in the collection, storage, manipulation, and analysis of data with more efficient use of lab time. In the case of many large universities that have been forced to drop their lab component from some biology courses, computer simulations can provide students with at least some laboratory-like experience. Problem-solving can be a powerful way for teaching and learning the content of a discipline along with its working procedures. BioQUEST challenges students and professors alike to examine other areas in their studies in which memorizing could be replaced by problem-solving, so that both information and fundamental ideas about a discipline's methods of work are learned in an integrated and meaningful context.

The initial software development for The BioQUEST Library was concentrated in four areas of biology: genetics, ecology/evolution, physiology, and molecular biology; it has since expanded to include botany and developmental biology. In the 1st Edition, The BioQUEST Library included ten realistic simulations of professional laboratories, three tools, and a module on its curricular philosophy. In the 2nd Edition there were a total of 26 simulations, tools, text, and hypertext modules, as well as additional data sets and tools to support research-oriented learning. Each subsequent annual edition will include new software and tools, as well as revisions and upgrades to many of the existing modules. The original BioQUEST software was intentionally designed to run on minimum level Macintosh computers; recent editions of The Library have also included modules designed to run on IBM-compatible machines.

Unlike software games which typically reward users for managing to find THE right solution, we feel that it is important that students recognize the complexities of scientific problems and realize that it is possible for several models or explanations to account for observed phenomena. As instructors, we need to encourage and reward creative thinking, reflective assessment of problem-solving strategies, and a willingness to listen and diplomatically react to criticism and suggestions. Our experience is that students will request similar intellectually challenging problem-solving experiences if the focus is on the process of problem-solving and the justification of alternate conclusions.

The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium is a continuing project. We will continue to improve and expand The Library based on feedback and suggestions from users. Further development will occur in other areas of biology and possibly on other hardware systems. Like science itself, we do not feel that our curriculum development efforts will ever end. This is because biology and the ends to which society puts the results of biological investigations shift over time.