One key to student success in introductory and cell biology courses is a foundational knowledge of cellular respiration. This is a content area in which students often harbor misconceptions that make cellular respiration particularly challenging to teach. Conventional approaches presenting cellular respiration as a complex series of isolated steps creates a situation where students tend to memorize the steps but fail to appreciate the bigger picture of how cells transform and utilize energy. Instructors frequently struggle to find ways to motivate students and encourage deeper learning. The learning goals of this cellular respiration lesson are to understand energy transfer in a biological system, develop data analysis skills, practice hypothesis generation, and appreciate the importance of cellular respiration in everyday life. These goals are achieved by using a case study as the focal point. The case-based lesson is supported with student-centered instructional strategies, such as individual and group activity sheets, in-class group discussions and debate, and in-class clicker questions. This lesson has been implemented at two institutions in large enrollment introductory biology courses and in a smaller upper-division biochemistry course.

Cellular respiration, a common topic among introductory and cellular biology curricula, is a complex biological process that exemplifies core biological concepts, including systems, pathways and transformation of energy, and structure and function relationships. Unfortunately, many students struggle to understand cellular respiration and its associated concepts. To help students with their understanding of cellular respiration, we developed a lesson that uses computational modeling and simulations through an on-line modeling platform, Cell Collective (learn.cellcollective.org). Computational models and simulations allow students to observe and influence the dynamics of complex biological systems not observable in static diagrams from textbooks. In our lesson, students explore different aspects of cellular respiration by making changes to the system. For each perturbation, students investigate the underlying mechanistic causes by iteratively predicting the mechanism, testing their prediction with simulations, interpreting and reporting on their findings, and reflecting upon their prediction until they can accurately describe the underlying mechanism. Because the lesson is self-contained and requires little guidance from the teacher, the lesson can be implemented in a wide-variety of settings without the need for many changes to existing curricula.

Cellular respiration, a common topic among introductory and cellular biology curricula, is a complex biological process that exemplifies core biological concepts, including systems, pathways and transformation of energy, and structure and function relationships. Unfortunately, many students struggle to understand cellular respiration and its associated concepts. To help students with their understanding of cellular respiration, we developed a lesson that uses computational modeling and simulations through an on-line modeling platform, Cell Collective (learn.cellcollective.org). Computational models and simulations allow students to observe and influence the dynamics of complex biological systems not observable in static diagrams from textbooks. In our lesson, students explore different aspects of cellular respiration by making changes to the system. For each perturbation, students investigate the underlying mechanistic causes by iteratively predicting the mechanism, testing their prediction with simulations, interpreting and reporting on their findings, and reflecting upon their prediction until they can accurately describe the underlying mechanism. Because the lesson is self-contained and requires little guidance from the teacher, the lesson can be implemented in a wide-variety of settings without the need for many changes to existing curricula.

While there are several available lessons for teaching introductory biology students about diffusion, facilitated diffusion, and active transport, fewer materials exist to support upper-division students' understanding of the proteins that mediate these forms of transport. In the 1970s, mitochondrial pyruvate carrier (MPC) proteins were predicted to import pyruvate from the cytoplasm into mitochondria for cellular respiration. Yet it was not until 2012 that the identity of the proteins responsible for this transport was confirmed in two seminal publications. In this Lesson, students will use their background knowledge of transport mechanisms to analyze data from those papers to determine which of the predicted MPC proteins are actually part of the mitochondrial pyruvate transporter. Student will also learn how scientists test whether a protein is necessary and sufficient. The Lesson is written in the style of process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL). POGIL is a teaching approach that requires students to work collaboratively in small groups to answer a set of questions based on scientific data. Questions in the POGIL activity, called the problem set, are structured so that each question leads to the next, helping to guide students to a deeper understanding of the content. During this Lesson, the instructor acts as a facilitator to guide student learning. Several forms of assessment are included within the Lesson, allowing instructors to assess learning gains. This Lesson has been used multiple times by over 10 faculty in an upper-division Cell Biology course and can also be used in other upper-division biology courses.

Students use published scientific data to determine which types of nanoparticles would be best to use to deliver cytotoxic drugs directly to cancer cells. Then they learn about the scientist who generated the data.