Bassler and handelsman: letters to the editor.

To the Editor, As an avid user of the Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education (JMBE), I’d like to comment on the tremendous contribution the Journal has made to the field of microbiology education. Articles in JMBE present ideas about teaching in many different formats, for diverse purposes. The offerings in 2010 included many “Tips and Tools” for teaching that provide practical exercises that can be incorporated into biology courses. One my favorites, Coliforms Everywhere! Using Microbiology to Teach the Scientific Method, by Cindy Cisar and John de Banzie, presented a simple problem about distribution of coliforms to engage students in developing and testing hypotheses and applying statistics to data. Another, “A Small Group Activity About Bacterial Regulation and Complementation,” by Merkel and colleagues, presents a paper activity that is likely as effective as a lab exercise in teaching principles of gene regulation. The exercise requires students to predict results from experiments and graph data. The “Research” section of the Journal presents articles that are full research studies that evaluate student learning and other outcomes. “The Use of Personal Narrative in Classroom Case Study Analysis to Improve Long-term Knowledge Retention and Cultivate Professional Qualities in Allied Health Students” evaluates students’ retention of knowledge after completion of a course, as well as their ability to empathize with patients after engaging in personal narrative in a case study. The book reviews are brief, pithy discussions of books on microbiology topics and have included books on these topics suitable for children. The lively and informative review by Elizabeth Emmert of “Germs Make Me Sick” by Melvin Berger, induced me to find the book and read it. I was not disappointed! The most unusual feature of JMBE is the varied format and requirements. The articles in “Tips and Tools” are tidbits that instructors have found useful but have not evaluated in a rigorous way. Certainly all teachers benefit from sharing these types of anecdotes about teaching. At the other extreme, there are rigorously tested ideas that involve controlled studies and demonstrate statistically significant differences in learning outcomes derived from use of a particular practice or material. Few journals offer both anecdotal and evidence-driven ideas, and this is exactly what is needed in teaching, which is necessarily based on both experience and data. Science education is undergoing rapid change, with a transition to more active, engaging teaching methods that address specific learning goals and rigorous assessment of learning. As college educators have begun to recognize the copious data indicating that traditional lecture-based teaching is woefully ineffective by itself, many have struggled to develop materials and exercises for their own courses. There is no need for each of us to design materials from scratch for courses that are taught at thousands of institutions. It is far more efficient and intellectually rigorous to exchange ideas and data about our successes in a common forum. JMBE provides that forum for microbiologists. The methods have been tested in the classroom, evaluation data are typically included, and tools such as grading rubrics and typical correct and partially correct answers are often in the Supplementary Materials. What a boon to other educators! Each of us must adapt and modify materials for our own courses, but how refreshing to take advantage of someone else’s work rather than starting at the very beginning. This is what we do in research, so why has it taken us so long to develop a parallel process for teaching?