Who Else Thinks Biology Teaching Methods are Wrong?

I shudder to think of the way I was taught about metabolic pathways as an undergrad. Lists of mysterious names connected by arrows – all to be memorized, with little reference to how the processes actually worked on a chemical basis.

Even worse – and perhaps embarrassingly for me – I was almost at the end of my first year as a biochemistry undergrad before I understood how functional proteins arose from DNA. Having already studied biology for 5 years I knew about the functions of some proteins, and I knew about transcription and translation as isolated processes, but the fact that proteins folded spontaneously and that they way they folded, and their consequent function, was dependent on their amino acid sequence had never been pointed out to me.

This sort of “top down” teaching is typical in biology, and it’s easy to see why. Traditionally, biology has involved the study of “black box” processes – processes whose fundamental basis was unknown. Early teaching had to be superficial since so little was known about the underlying mechanisms of the processes they described. In covering metabolism for example the names and arrows approach was valid since the chemical basis of the enzyme functions were unknown.

Over the years as our understanding of biological processes has evolved, basic teaching methods have not. Textbook and teachers still tend take the top-down approach that their predecessors had to, focusing on higher order processes and treating the underlying chemistry almost as an aside.

But this is not the best way to do things. Biology is just complicated chemistry so, where possible, the teaching of biology should start with the chemical basics and build on them logically to reach an understanding of higher order processes.

In a 1998 Journal of Chemical Education paper, Jakubowski and Owen suggested a new way of teaching biology that does just that. They call it the “chemical logical” approach and their online textbook delivers a first semester biochemistry course based on chemical logic as a demonstration.

Starting with lipids as a simple example of how small molecules can give rise to biological stuctures they build on this principle to explain how protein, nucleic acid, carbohydrate and glycoprotein structures arise. From structures they move to function, explaining it in terms of basic chemical principles such as binding, dynamic equilibria, reaction kinetics and reaction mechanism. Finally, they deal with enzymatic reactions, signal transduction and energy. The result is a more logical and comprehensive approach than any other textbook I’ve seen.

So will this be adopted in the future? Not being an educator, I don’t know, but a more logical approach to the teaching of biology is certainly warranted. My advice would be that when learning biology (and we are always learning) that you try to take a chemical logic approach yourself – and that means learning a bit of chemistry. Difficult if you don’t have much of a chemistry background, but well worth it.

Here’s a personal example: From my sketchy undergrad training in metabolism I now work in metabolic pathway engineering and I can tell you that reading the biological molecules section of a good organic chemistry textbook gave me a better fundamental understanding of the basis of metabolism than any biology textbook ever did.

So do you think that a change is needed in the teaching of biology? Yes or no, let me know.

Photo: Ntwobike