News Release

Class that mixes urban ecology and microbiology wins Science magazine prize

Approach helps high-school students delve into DNA barcoding

Grant and Award Announcement

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

High School Students

image: This image shows Belizean high school students participating in unit 1 (Ecological Methods) of the DNA barcoding curriculum. view more 

Credit: [Image courtesy of Marissa Bellino]

When science educators Stephen Harris and Marissa Bellino held weekend field research sessions around New York for public high-school students, every student in the class would show up, and even kids who performed poorly in other classes did excellent work.

"It was all about giving them the right space to work and getting them excited," says Harris, who explains that the students did actual scientific research, collecting biological samples locally and then subjecting them to microbiological research techniques. Those techniques allowed them to generate DNA barcode identifiers using short segments of DNA, and formulate their own research questions based on their DNA barcode analyses. "Sometimes the students who usually performed poorly academically did the best science in the group."

Because of its effectiveness at drawing in young students of all types and exposing them to the process of actual scientific research, the curriculum developed by Harris and Bellino, known as the Student Barcoding Project, has been selected to win the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction.

The Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction (IBI) was developed to showcase outstanding materials, usable in a wide range of schools and settings, for teaching introductory science courses at the college level. The materials must be designed to encourage students' natural curiosity about how the world works, rather than to deliver facts and principles about what scientists have already discovered. Organized as one free-standing "module," the materials should offer real understanding of the nature of science, as well as provide an experience in generating and evaluating scientific evidence. Each month, Science publishes an essay by a recipient of the award, which explains the winning project. The essay about the Student DNA Barcoding Project will be published on December 20.

"We want to recognize innovators in science education, as well as the institutions that support them," says Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief emeritus of Science. "At the same time, this competition will promote those inquiry-based laboratory modules with the most potential to benefit science students and teachers. The publication of an essay in Science on each winning module will encourage more college teachers to use these outstanding resources, thereby promoting science literacy."

Harris was first exposed to inquiry-based learning as a high-school student in Ohio, where he grew up. Already having discovered his own interest in biology after participating in a trip to an Ohio State University research station on an island in Lake Erie, he took a biology class in high school in which students studied a an outside plot of land, investigating its mammals and birds, and measuring different features of the plot. It was Harris' first exposure to student-directed inquiry-based learning, and he was hooked. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in molecular genetics from Ohio State and a Master's in science education from the City University of New York (CUNY). Harris is currently a PhD candidate in evolutionary biology at CUNY.

Although Harris worked for two years as a high-school teacher before starting his PhD, he was unable to implement the kind of inquiry-based learning he had been exposed to as a student until he became a National Science Foundation Graduate STEM Fellow in K-12 Education, a program that put him back in the classroom. He and Bellino, who teaches and runs the science research program at a New York City public school, decided to build a molecular lab space where students could do research starting with field ecology, and then employing the advanced molecular biology methods needed to produce and analyze DNA barcodes, such as extraction of minute amount of DNA using micropipets, amplification of the DNA via the polymerase chain reaction, and gel electrophoresis.

"They're working with DNA. They're doing molecular biology," Harris says. "Looking at DNA is now a part of nearly all biology, but there are PhD students who haven't worked with these techniques. We should be introducing all of this to students at an earlier age."

Science Associate Editor Melissa McCartney believes the interdisciplinary aspect of the curriculum adds to its value as a teaching tool. "This module empowers students within a creative interplay between molecular and ecological scales," she says. "Students not only learn 'real science,' but they learn that science does not have to be confined to a single field of interest."

Concentrating on the world they live in, the students in the classes conducted by Harris and Bellino are doing urban ecology, and looking into such topics as mislabeling of the species of fish sold in city markets and finding the biodiversity of bed bugs in New York City. The bedbug project had students begging exterminators for a few of the dead bugs they would otherwise use to train the bug-sniffing dogs who help locate infestations.

"It's all about getting students to ask questions," Harris says. "The questions often come from the students' own neighborhoods, and they're very interested in answering them."

The analysis of fish being sold was conducted, not only in New York, but in a field test of the program in Belize. There, college and Master's-level students discovered that 66% of fish filets that they sampled were mislabeled. The students presented their findings on a nationwide evening news broadcast.

Harris says one of the purposes of the Student DNA Barcoding Project is to encourage interest in the study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many students, he reports, get interested in environmental science because of the student barcoding curriculum, and general interest in the STEM fields is also generated. "I think there is a lot of interest that gets built up," Harris says.

For Harris, the ideal result of winning the IBI prize and having an essay published in Science would be for other schools to start their own DNA barcoding programs. Background materials for the course explain how schools can, even on a small budget, overcome the biggest obstacle: setting up a barcoding lab.

"It would be great is other educators at smaller colleges and high schools around the country and elsewhere contacted Melissa (Bellino) and myself for help in setting up their own curriculum," Harris says.

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