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#618, v1.0 Published:
#1937, v1.0 Published:

Title

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1Figure of the Day 1(Online) Figure of the Week: Skills for Interpreting Comparative Genomics Figures

Authors

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1Arietta Fleming-Davies (University of San Diego) 1Robert E Furrow ()
2Jeremy M Wojdak (Radford University) 2Robert E Furrow ()
3Hayley Orndorf (University of Pittsburgh)   

Description

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1<p>Math anxiety can prevent students from engaging with and solving problems even when they have the requisite knowledge or skills.&nbsp; Interpreting graphs in particular can be difficult for many students because understanding visual data is not a formulaic process - there isn&rsquo;t a single set of steps that always work, like there might be for solving a quadratic equation.</p>  1<p><meta charset="utf-8" /></p>
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3<p>&ldquo;Figure of the Day&rdquo; is a clever approach to help students learn to interpret graphs that avoids inducing anxiety in students by establishing from the outset that students will not have all the information necessary to be 100% correct. Graphs are presented without axes labels or legends, and interpretation is turned into a puzzle, where any observation about the data is potentially helpful.&nbsp; What results is that students look much more carefully at all the details of a graph - the colors, sizes, shapes, arrangement, magnitude, and try to piece together a story.&nbsp; This is exactly what experienced scientists do, much more often than starting with a figure legend, for example.&nbsp; Different students will notice different features, and the value of multiple student voices is often really evident - small groups or a class can together often uncover the meaning of a graph even without the axes labels!</p>  3<p dir="ltr">This resource is an adaptation of the QUBES <a href="https://qubeshub.org/qubesresources/publications/618/1">Figure of the Day module by Flemming-Davis and Wodjak </a>(2018), with the structure of the activity based on a <a href="https://qubeshub.org/qubesresources/publications/1856/1">newer adaptation by Raisa Hern&aacute;ndez-Pacheco</a>&nbsp;(2020). The goal of this module is to provide a repeated student activity that helps students learn to interpret scientific figures in a low-stakes environment. By offering &ldquo;incomplete&rdquo; figures that don&rsquo;t include full axes, captions, and legends, students are free to propose a creative diversity of potential interpretations of the figure. With no single correct answer, students can focus without anxiety on the process of how you use the structure and information types within a figure to put together a potential interpretation.&nbsp;</p>
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5<p>Figure of the Day can be used at the beginning of each class period, taking 5 minutes or less. Professional scientists didn&rsquo;t learn how to interpret data in an afternoon, but instead from reading 100s of papers. Students need the same repetition.&nbsp; Figures in the collection are roughly ordered by difficulty. The notes section for each figure gives the instructor some ideas for potential student responses or interesting features of the graphs. Also see our<a href="https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/biomaap/collections/figure-of-the-day" target="_blank"> collection of community-contributed </a>Figures of the Day on various biology and quantitative themes, and please contribute your own favorite figure!</p>  5<p><br />
6  6This module was implemented during Spring 2020, in a class that was fully online due to shelter-in-place restrictions to reduce COVID-19 transmission. The course was a CURE (course-based research experience) focused on comparative genomic analyses of novel genomes generated from student-cultured salt-living microbes. Because we wanted to build classroom cohesion, we adapted this module to be a fun, low-stakes weekly online forum post. We specifically developed this adaptation using the <a href="http://udlguidelines.cast.org/">Universal Design for Learning guidelines from CAST</a>, aiming to optimize this module for this online learning environment and for the diversity of students in the class.</p>
7<p>Do you want to know more about implementing this material? Have a question for the author? Used the material and have feedback? As a&nbsp;featured <a href="https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/quant_bio_online/teachertalk" target="_blank">Resource Walk-Through</a> in the <a href="https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/quant_bio_online/">Teaching Quantitative Biology Online group</a>, you can learn more about the module and participate in a discussion:&nbsp;</p>    
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9<p><a class="btn btn-primary" href="https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/quant_bio_online/teachertalk#figofweek" target="_blank">Resource Walk-Through</a></p>   

Attachments

1 file — ./Figure of the Day/BIOMAAPfiguresoftheday1.2.pptx 1 file — RobFurrow/FigureOfTheWeek_CompGenom_LessonOverview.pdf
2 file — ./Figure of the Day/card_figure_of_the_day.jpg 2 file — RobFurrow/FigureOfTheWeek_CompGenom_slides.pptx
3 file — RobFurrow/heatmap.csv
4 file — RobFurrow/plots_code.R
5 file — RobFurrow/scatterplot.csv
6 file — RobFurrow/sliding_window.csv
7 file — RobFurrow/sliding_window.png
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