Learning in the Laboratory with Evolutionary Tree‐thinking about Blood Parameters from Model Biomedical Research Organisms

Abstract

Health care is based upon the basic sciences, and one of those basic sciences is evolutionary biology. In fact, the use of model organisms is justified because of common origins from a shared ancestor. Different types of biologists interpret phenomena using data and the research tools informed by a theoretical framework acquired through years of education and practice specific to each discipline, however we do not know how to promote student learning about interdisciplinary approaches to investigations such as evolutionary tree‐thinking in the context of physiology research. Data from the learning sciences suggest that framing a research problem within a disciplinary perspective will promote stronger reasoning about the evidence so here we investigated how to integrate evolution into a physiology laboratory investigation for first year undergraduate biology students. To test this idea from the learning sciences, a lab was designed to help students understand how biological research is informed by data from various levels of biological organization that suggest a historical path by which different organisms came to be the way they are, viewed most simply from the perspective of evolutionary tree‐thinking. In one treatment, the lab instructor prompted students to consider their knowledge of biology in drawing an evolutionary tree for 10 animals based on blood parameters (pH, sodium, chloride, bicarbonate, urea nitrogen, glucose, protein, and blood cell counts) as a data source. In another treatment, the instructor prompted students to draw an evolutionary tree for 10 animals considering generalizable (not discipline‐specific) evidence from blood parameters (see Figure with Questions about Evidence ‐ Theory relationships). In both treatments, students were asked how they would use blood parameter data to identify sister taxa and an outgroup clade, by deciding which blood parameter data was most useful. Findings show that students tended to perform better with general evidence scaffolds than with biology disciplinary evidence scaffolds, but the difference was not significant. Pre‐ and post‐test comparison reveals that their reasoning about evidence for evolutionary tree‐thinking improved with both treatments. However, students focused on the need for more and more evidence rather than considering their assumptions and the quality and accuracy of data they used as evidence. Results provide a starting point for further investigating how to help students learn to use evidence to more deeply apply evolutionary tree‐thinking in a laboratory research context, but more work is needed to integrate evolutionary biology into physiology labs to reveal the basic science roots of medical practice, and to improve biology lab instruction for future health care professionals.Support or Funding InformationNSF#1661124 Exploring Biological Evidence: Helping Students Understand the Richness and Complexity of Research Evidence in Biology Questions about Evidence‐Theory relationshipsThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.