Papers by Michael Klymkowsky
Frontiers in Genetics, Jun 8, 2023
Designing effective curricula is challenging. Content decisions can impact both learning outcomes... more Designing effective curricula is challenging. Content decisions can impact both learning outcomes and student engagement. As an example consider the place of Hardy-Weinberg equilibria (HWE) and genetic drift calculations in introductory biology courses, as discussed by . Given that population genetics, "a fairly arcane speciality", can be difficult to grasp, there is little justification for introducing introductory students to HWE calculations. It is more useful to introduce them to the behavior of alleles in terms of basic features of biological systems, and that in the absence of selection recessive alleles are no "weaker" or preferentially lost from a population than are dominant alleles. On the other hand, stochastic behaviors, such as genetic drift, are ubiquitous in biological systems and often play functionally significant roles; they can be introduced to introductory students in mechanistic and probabilistic terms. Specifically, genetic drift emerges from the stochastic processes involved in meiotic chromosome segregation and recombination. A focus on stochastic processes may help counteract naive bio-deterministic thinking and can reinforce, for students, the value of thinking quantitatively about biological processes.
2022 IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC), Mar 26, 2022
For ensuring students' continuous achievement of academic excellence, higher education institutio... more For ensuring students' continuous achievement of academic excellence, higher education institutions commonly engage in periodic and critical revision of its academic programs. Depending on the goals and the resources of the institution, these revisions can focus only on an analysis of retention-graduation rates of different entry cohorts over the years, or survey results measuring students level of satisfaction in their programs. They can also be more comprehensive requiring an analysis of the content, scope, and alignment of a program's curricula, for improving academic excellence. The revisions require the academic units to collaborate with university's data experts, commonly the Institutional Research Office, to gather the needed information. The information for departments' faculty and decision makers should be presentable in a highly-informative yet easily-interpretable manner, so that the review committee can quickly notice areas of improvement and take actions afterwards. In this study, we discuss the development and practical use of a visual that was developed with these key points in mind. The visuals, referred by us as "Students' Progress Visuals", are based on the Sankey diagram and provide information on students' progress and mobility patterns in an academic unit over time in an easily understandable format. They were developed using open source software, and recently began to be used by several departments of our research intensive higher-ed institution for academic units' review processes, which includes members of the campus community and external area experts. Our discussion includes questions these visuals can address in Higher-Ed, other relevant studies, the data requirements for their development, comparisons with other reporting methods, and how they were used in actual practice with actual case studies.
F1000Research, Sep 30, 2019
Cytoplasmic intermediate filaments (IFs) surround the nucleus and are often anchored at membrane ... more Cytoplasmic intermediate filaments (IFs) surround the nucleus and are often anchored at membrane sites to form effectively transcellular networks. Mutations in IF proteins (IFps) have revealed mechanical roles in epidermis, muscle, liver, and neurons. At the same time, there have been phenotypic surprises, illustrated by the ability to generate viable and fertile mice null for a number of IFp-encoding genes, including vimentin. Yet in humans, the vimentin ( ) gene displays a high probability of intolerance to VIM loss-of-function mutations, indicating an essential role. A number of subtle and not so subtle IF-associated phenotypes have been identified, often linked to mechanical or metabolic stresses, some of which have been found to be ameliorated by the over-expression of molecular chaperones, suggesting that such phenotypes arise from what might be termed "orphan" effects as opposed to the absence of the IF network , an idea per se originally suggested by Toivola . and Pekny and Lane. et al Keywords intermediate filament proteins, chaperones, stress response, phenotypes, mutation, background effects Reviewer Status
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Jun 6, 2022
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Apr 24, 2023
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Feb 14, 2013
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Feb 7, 2012
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Apr 4, 2022
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Mar 14, 2022
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, Mar 15, 2022
Science & education, Apr 13, 2022
Developmental Biology, Aug 1, 2021
Evaluating learning outcomes depends upon objective and actionable measures of what students know... more Evaluating learning outcomes depends upon objective and actionable measures of what students knowthat is, what can they do with what they have learned. In the context of a developmental biology course, a capstone of many molecular biology degree programs, I asked students to predict the behaviors of temporal and spatial signaling gradients. Their responses led me to consider an alternative to conventional assessments, namely a process in which students are asked to build and apply plausible explanatory mechanistic models ("PEMMs"). A salient point is not whether students' models are correct, but whether they "work" in a manner consistent with underlying scientific principles. Analyzing such models can reveal the extent to which students recognize and accurately apply relevant ideas. An emphasis on model building, analysis and revision, an authentic scientific practice, can be expected to have transformative effects on course and curricular design as well as on student engagement and learning outcomes.
Principles of Medical Biology, 1995
ABSTRACT
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature
Faculty Opinions ā€“ Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature, 2018
F1000 - Post-publication peer review of the biomedical literature, 2017
F1000 - Post-publication peer review of the biomedical literature, 2012
F1000 - Post-publication peer review of the biomedical literature, 2015
F1000 - Post-publication peer review of the biomedical literature, 2014
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Papers by Michael Klymkowsky