Theme: 7BB Approaches to teaching and learning |
Unexpected Difficulties In Cell Biology Revealed By Drawings Of First Year Medical Students | ||||||
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A challenge inherent to learning cell biology is the interpretation of representational illustrations and understanding the spatial organization of cells.
The process of drawing cells, i.e. producing “a learner-generated external visual representation depicting any type of content, whether structure, relationship, or process, created in static two dimensions in any medium” can facilitate learning. By drawing, students create external representations which illustrate their mental images (internal representations) of the invisible cellular entities, processes and concepts.
It is important that students develop awareness of their own internal representations, as students use them as foundations for new knowledge and, as such, potential misconceptions based on incorrect representations may be perpetuated and contribute to learning difficulties and misunderstandings.
Our goals were:
i. to identify first year medical student difficulties related to the structure of a cell;
ii. to evaluate whether those difficulties would differ between two countries;
iii. to characterize the origin of such difficulties.
What was done in class:
A surprise in class assignment asked students to draw: 1. an eukaryotic cell representation; 2. an epithelial cell under the microscope.
Participants and methods:
Participants were 386 first year medical students from one school in Portugal and another in Brazil. Drawings were anonymized and mistakes were coded by 2 pairs of experts using a consensus criteria list as a reference. Conducted interviews were semi-structured and with 17 purposefully selected participants.
There were four main groups of mistakes: 1. scale; 2. general structure; 3. intracellular structure; and 4. odd representations.
Portugal and Brazil displayed identical mistakes, except for scale issues, which were more common in students from Brazil. The most likely mistake origins identified in interviews were textbooks schemes and the lack of hands-on laboratory experience.
The cell drawings created by first year medical students contained mistakes which pointed to inaccurate knowledge about the cell structure and to difficulties in understanding the limits of microscopic observations. The student interviews revealed that, in some cases, the mistakes reflected misconceptions which had endured over pre-university education. Identical mistake categories were prevalent across 3 cohorts in 2 countries, which suggest that such mistakes and misconceptions could be cross-cultural.
Drawing may be a useful teaching strategy to reveal otherwise unnoticed misconceptions.
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