“The writing I primarily do right now is in the service of teaching, particularly writing assessment questions at high levels of cognitive thinking. I’m always looking for inspiration so I’ll often start by reading something in the research literature. I teach Molecular Biology (Bio201L) and there are a lot of fun molecular mechanisms to get students to think about and there is a lot of logic that goes into thinking about those mechanisms. The questions I write tend to be based on that logic and being able to put multiple things together to answer a question.
For example, I’ll read about a human disease that is understood at the molecular level – a disease that students haven’t seen before – and make a question out of that. I’ll give students the background information about the molecular mechanism and then ask: If this component of this mechanism were to be deleted, then what would be the outcome? That’s how people do experiments in genetics, and our students get really good at thinking this way!”
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“The writing I primarily do right now is in the service of teaching, particularly writing assessment questions at high levels of cognitive thinking. I’m always looking for inspiration so I’ll often start by reading something in the research literature. I teach Molecular Biology (Bio201L) and there are a lot of fun molecular mechanisms to get students to think about and there is a lot of logic that goes into thinking about those mechanisms. The questions I write tend to be based on that logic and being able to put multiple things together to answer a question.
