Biology is frequently talked and thought of as the field of science for those who are inclined to do science but are turned off by math and physics. This is a serious problem that not only impacts the quality of education, but also the preparedness of students for adapting throughout their careers. Possibly the most unfortunate side effect of this is that it renders biology as a difficult and inaccessible science to people from other disciplines.
I say this not as an outsider but as a biologist (although a non-traditional one admittedly). As someone that is transitioning away from traditional biological research and is embracing the possibilities in interdisciplinary efforts I am frequently amazed when I’ve had to go back and teach biological classes or catch up with my peers. I can more clearly see how our undergraduate education and the notions that we have concerning biology are affecting everything that comes afterwards. Frankly, one of the most glaring ones is the fear, distrust, and lack of experience with math, and by extension using computers in a non-trivial way to solve biological problems.
A biology degree doesn’t require much in the way of math or physics at most institutions. At my home institution (Arizona State University) there was only a requirement for calculus, elementary statistics, and algebra-based physics for Newton’s laws of motion. While this may not necessarily be a problem, students are getting biology not math or physics degrees after all, this heavily influences how biology itself is taught. Instead of focusing on the broad concepts and fundamentals of cellular life lectures instead narrow in on the minutia of biological processes with importance placed on individual protein or gene names.
The result of this learning process is that students never truly learn how to abstract biological processes and understand how these abstract patterns can be applied and reused in understanding other biological processes. The cell is an extremely complex system but as we continue to do large-scale research on its features we find more and more of these repeating patterns and features that help us understand how it works.
Far worse is the fact that students have no framework of how biology works upon which to hang new knowledge and interpret it given previous knowledge. Instead every new pathway or process creates a new branch that is memorized and understood independently of all the others. It can take years for students to create their own understanding that is deep enough so that new information can truly be analyzed and digested instead of incorporated through rote memorization.
In math or physics this way of teaching would not be accepted at all. It doesn’t make any sense to teach a student independently that in the equation:
4 = x + 2
that x equals 2 and then in the equation:
5 = x + 2
that x equals 3. We instead teach students methods to solve these types of problems, where all of the non-variable terms are moved to one side of the equation and then solving for the variable of interest. This is the reason that concepts are taught, because understanding them is far more useful than knowing the answer for specific instances.
Admittedly, biology is not nearly as clear cut as simple equations and it is not as simple to identify concepts to teach but I do have one idea that I feel is the most important. Instead of purely instructive lectures start out with some group problem solving. Give a milestone paper’s conclusions or a techniques output as a result and ask students to figure out how they could achieve that. Instead of simply absorbing information the focus shifts to creative problem solving with an emphasis on understanding how pieces of biology fit together. This changes the focus to understanding biological components as a system instead of memorizing names, which should produce more capable students in the end.
—Adam Pah