The antagonist/agonist exam question: thinking like a scientist.

Abstract

Abstract The goal of my undergraduate immunology course is to teach students how to think like a scientist, specifically how to think like an immunologist. The course has 150 students enrolled each year and I use a variety of team-based, active learning strategies in the classroom and four exams with a similar format that reflect on the class activities. Each exam consists of 4 short answer questions. One question involves students designing their own graphs to represent data from a primary research article covered during the class, and then using labeled drawings to demonstrate how the data is connected to cellular/molecular interactions in an organism. The second question requires students to propose methods for identifying two test tubes containing different contents, such as IL-10 and IL-12, when the test tubes are unlabeled. The third question assesses the ability of students to use labeled drawings to demonstrate cellular interactions, such as the receptor/ligand interactions that would likely lead to a successful vs. unsuccessful pregnancy. Finally, the students are asked to create treatments for conditions such as allergies, transplant rejection, specific autoimmune diseases, and immunodeficiencies. One of the treatments must involve an agonist and the other must involve an antagonist. The student use graphs to demonstrate expected results when the treatments are effective or ineffective. When students were polled on which of the four questions addressed the goal of teaching them how to think like an immunologist, over ninety percent of the students chose the antagonist/agonist question. The use of the agonist/antagonist question promotes deeper understanding of the activating and inhibitory signals that control immune responses.