Here are a couple of my former students, mid- brain lab in 2010. Fun story, both Kayla Brooks (front) and Nick Petersen (background) ended up working in my thesis lab. Nick worked with me directly, wrote an award-winning thesis, and is an author on one of my papers! Here were our goals:
We did our best to accomplish these goals through a few methods. First, we created a lab as a kind of self-guided tour through the sheep brain. Students could follow simple, step-by-step instructions to successfully dissect out what they needed and when. Of course, in practice, there are still the occasional mishap, and this protocol by no means precluded the need for a great instructor. This way, students didn't have to worry about what to do next, they would just have to worry about what we wanted to worry about--the content. Specifically, we directed students to stop and think about what they were doing by infusing a series of questions throughout the lab. These questions required them to think, make hypotheses and/or do a bit of research to figure out the answers. Some questions had straightforward answers (look up the function of this or that), but others were open for interpretation, and some didn't even necessarily have correct answers. Here is an example to highlight what we were trying to accomplish, regarding the cranial nerves: How do you use anatomical information to infer the function of a nerve? Here are a few factors you may or may not find helpful to consider. Does it help to know:
Explain whether or not you can answer these questions about an individual nerve from gross anatomy (looking at and dissecting the brain from the body as you are doing today). What other information would you need? As you can see, rather than just telling students to identify as many nerves as they could, we took the opportunity to ask students to think about structure, location, and think about how that relationship lends itself to function. Like most questions we posed, they were not necessarily tough to answer, nor did they require essays to answer, but they did require a bit of thought. I did a bit of testing to see how students reacted to the new format. The brain lab lasted two weeks, so I used the second week as a rough comparison group. The first week, where we used this refurbished walk through, included the removal of the dura mater, identification of external structures, and cutting the brain in half and looking at the mid-sagittal structures. In the second week, students were instructed to do a blunt hippocampal dissection to uncover the hippocampus and parts of the midbrain, as well as make slices to identify and find structures like those in the basal ganglia. In this second week, we used our previous methods of giving them a standard sheep brain dissection manual and locating structures, without giving them a more specific walk through instructions or thought questions. Although the two weeks were different in many ways and the comparison is by no means definitive, I found it heartening that students found the first week both more enjoyable and more effective than the second week. To take the above data, I got approval from Cornell's Institutional Review Board! I enjoyed making this lab, and have gotten a lot of positive feedback from it. I'd be more than happy to talk anyone who might want to try this out, and again, please let me know if you want me to send you more resources!
1 Comment
Irene Ballagh
3/23/2018 06:00:25 pm
I agree it’s super heartening to see that big ‘highly enjoyable’ bar for our new rewrite of the brain dissection! One of the things I was happiest about what we did with this is to try to get the students thinking of the lab not as a series of facts they just had to learn and memorize, but instead as scientists do in daily life at lab, asking questions and trying to think about how to find things out. Really glad to think the students respond positively to that (& I love that you have the foresight to actually try and measure whether they do! ❤️).
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