What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory
TLDR
This paper details a graduate course designed to help biology students with limited math backgrounds understand theoretical papers using modern teaching methods.
Key contributions
- Developed a graduate course to bridge the gap between empirical and theoretical biology for students.
- Designed for biology grad students with limited math to understand complex theory papers.
- Incorporates modern teaching principles: backwards design, active learning, and just-in-time teaching.
Why it matters
This course addresses the critical disconnect between theoretical and empirical science. By equipping biology students with the skills to engage with theory, it fosters improved critical thinking and accelerates scientific progress.
Original Abstract
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help empirically-focused biology graduate students read and understand theory papers, despite little prior mathematical training. It uses several evidence-based principles of modern teaching: backwards design, active learning, and just-in-time teaching. We believe that this or similar curricular content, emphasizing the nature of evidence and the role of theory in science, will improve critical thinking and scientific progress.
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