Mary Pat Wenderoth

• PhD
• Teaching Professor Emerita at University of Washington

We sought to identify which aspects of our professional development program, the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate STEM Education (CAUSE), were most useful for the participants. CAUSE was designed to support STEM faculty as they implement evidence-based teaching practices. We interviewed six faculty participants (Fellows) to address t...

Pressure gradients serve as the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology (e.g., blood, air, phloem sap). However, students often struggle to understand the mechanism that causes these fluids to flow. To investigate student reasoning about bulk flow, we collected students' written responses to assessment items and interviewed student...

The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients is a major concept in physiology as pressure gradients are the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology. However, students struggle to understand this principle is foundational to the mechanism governing bulk flow across diverse physiological systems (e.g., blood flow, phloem sap fl...

The basis for mastering neurophysiology is understanding ion movement across cell membranes. The Electrochemical Gradients Assessment Device (EGAD) is a 17-item test assessing students' understanding of fundamental concepts of neurophysiology, e.g., electrochemical gradients and resistance, synaptic transmission and stimulus strength. We collected...

The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients is a major concept in physiology as pressure gradients are the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology. However, students struggle to understand that this principle is foundational to the mechanisms governing bulk flow across diverse physiological systems (e.g., blood flow, phloem...

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K‐12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge...

We have developed and tested a dynamic approach to assist positive, department-wide change at institutions of higher education. Here we describe a workshop strategy designed to empower faculty as agents of change. This strategy incorporates tools and concepts including systems thinking, visual facilitation, and action planning to drive transformati...

Background There is overwhelming evidence that evidence-based teaching improves student performance; however, traditional lecture predominates in STEM courses. To provide support as faculty transform their lecture-based classrooms with evidence-based teaching practices, we created a faculty development program based on best practices, Consortium fo...

Evidence-based teaching practices are associated with improved student academic performance. However, these practices encompass a wide range of activities and determining which type, intensity or duration of activity is effective at improving student exam performance has been elusive. To address this shortcoming, we used a previously validated clas...

Recent calls in biology education research (BER) have recommended that researchers leverage learning theories and methodologies from other disciplines to investigate the mechanisms by which students to develop sophisticated ideas. We suggest design-based research from the learning sciences is a compelling methodology for achieving this aim. Design-...

The Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) is a national organization that supports department‐level efforts to transform life sciences programs to align with the recommendations of Vision and Change (V&C). With support from the NSF, a team of PULSE fellows from the Pacific Northwest region created a program consisting of (1)...

To gain expertise in a field is to recognize, understand, and effectively use underlying disciplinary principles. Too often students rely on rote memorization to solve problems rather than apply the appropriate principles of physics that governs biological phenomena, that is, use principle‐based reasoning. Student who rely on memorization can stude...

Vision and Change challenged biology instructors to develop evidence-based instructional approaches that were grounded in the core concepts and competencies of biology. This call for reform provides an opportunity for new educational tools to be incorporated into biology education. In this essay, we advocate for learning progressions as one such ed...

Constructed responses can be used to assess the complexity of student thinking and can be evaluated using rubrics. The two most typical rubric types used are holistic and analytic. Holistic rubrics may be difficult to use with expert-level reasoning that has additive or overlapping language. In an attempt to unpack complexity in holistic rubrics at...

This poster shows our work developing a learning progression that describes how students' ideas about mass balance/pools and flux/accumulation in physiological systems gains sophistication.

The basis for understanding neurophysiology is understanding ion movement across cell membranes. Students in introductory courses recognize ion concentration gradients as a driving force for ion movement but struggle to simultaneously account for electrical charge gradients. We developed a 17-multiple-choice item assessment of students' understandi...

The basis for understanding neurophysiology is understanding ion movement across cell membranes. Students in introductory courses recognize ion concentration gradients as a driving force for ion movement but struggle to simultaneously account for electrical charge gradients. We developed and validated a 17-multiple-choice item assessment of student...

Peer-reviewed paper for Challenges in developing computerized scoring models for principle-based reasoning in a physiology context. Paper Set: Measuring complex constructs in science education: Applications of automated analysis.

Using scientific principles to reason about biological phenomena is an essential part of scientific thinking. However, students frequently view biology as a discipline full of facts to be memorized without recognizing the fundamental principles that bring coherence to biological phenomena. This can cause students to develop fragmented, superficial...

Practice exams are a type of deliberate practice that have been shown to improve student course performance. Deliberate practice differs from other types of practice, because it is targeted, mentally challenging, can be repeated, and requires feedback. Providing frequent instructor feedback to students, particularly in large classes, can be prohibi...

Learning progressions (LPs) are frameworks which outline cognitive paths of students and can provide reference points for student progress. LPs are built using evidence about student reasoning collected by a complex and iterative routine of LP development, assessment item and rubric development, data collection, human coding and re-alignment of LPs...

Test anxiety is a widespread problem that negatively impacts student performance. The mechanism proposed to explain the deleterious effect is that anxious thoughts occupy space in working memory, thus diminishing cognitive capacity. Expressive writing is an intervention shown to decrease the impact of test anxiety. For this intervention, students r...

We have created and validated a conceptual framework for the core physiology concept of "cell-cell communication." The conceptual framework is composed of 51 items arranged in a hierarchy that is, in some instances, four levels deep. We have validated it with input from faculty who teach at a wide variety of institutional types. All items making up...

We present the Homeostasis Concept Inventory (HCI), a 20-item multiple-choice instrument that assesses how well undergraduates understand this critical physiological concept. We used an iterative process to develop a set of questions based on elements in the Homeostasis Concept Framework. This process involved faculty experts and undergraduate stud...

Although a growing literature has documented the effectiveness of informal group work during class sessions, virtually no data exist on which students are collaborating. As a result, instructors rarely know whether students are self-sorting in ways that maximize learning. This article explores which undergraduate students worked together on each of...

We have developed and validated a conceptual framework for understanding and teaching organismal homeostasis at the undergraduate level. The resulting homeostasis conceptual framework details critical components and constituent ideas underlying the concept of homeostasis. It has been validated by a broad range of physiology faculty members from com...

Recent reform efforts in undergraduate biology have recommended transforming course exams to test at more cognitively challenging levels, which may mean including more cognitively challenging and more constructed-response questions on assessments. However, changing the characteristics of exams could result in bias against historically underserved g...

Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education outlined five core concepts intended to guide undergraduate biology education: 1) evolution; 2) structure and function; 3) information flow, exchange, and storage; 4) pathways and transformations of energy and matter; and 5) systems. We have taken these general recommendations and created the Bio...

In response to calls for implementing active learning in college-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, classrooms across the country are being transformed from instructor centered to student centered. In these active-learning classrooms, the dynamics among students becomes increasingly important for understanding student...

Homeostasis is a core concept necessary for understanding the many regulatory mechanisms in physiology. Claude Bernard originally proposed the concept of the constancy of the "milieu interieur," but his discussion was rather abstract. Walter Cannon introduced the term "homeostasis" and expanded Bernard's notion of "constancy" of the internal enviro...

There is extensive evidence that active learning works better than a completely passive lecture. Despite this evidence, adoption of these evidence-based teaching practices remains low. In this paper, we offer one tool to help faculty members implement active learning. This tool identifies 21 readily implemented elements that have been shown to incr...

There is extensive evidence that active learning works better than a completely passive lecture. Despite this evidence, adoption of these evidence-based teaching practices remains low. In this paper, we offer one tool to help faculty members implement active learning. This tool identifies 21 readily implemented elements that have been shown to incr...

Although gender gaps have been a major concern in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines such as physics and engineering, the numerical dominance of female students in biology has supported the assumption that gender disparities do not exist at the undergraduate level in life sciences. Using data from 23 large...

As Hora acknowledges (1), our paper calls for second-generation research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education that is focused on comparing modes or intensities of active learning (2). As part of this effort, we agree with Hora that researchers should use one of the many validated instruments now available to quantif...

Significance The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has called for a 33% increase in the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) bachelor’s degrees completed per year and recommended adoption of empirically validated teaching practices as critical to achieving that goal. The studies analyzed here do...

Physiology faculty have identified homeostasis as one of the core concepts their students must understand and apply. Visual representations of physiological processes are important for teaching and learning in physiology. What visual representations of homeostasis do faculty employ to help students understand this core concept? 40 Anatomy & Physiol...

Homeostasis is an important core principle for undergraduate physiology students to understand and apply. Assessment of student conceptual understanding of homeostasis is important for teaching and learning, especially formative assessment to reveal students’ incomplete understanding and ‘misconceptions’. We engaged in a 3‐step process to develop a...

Biology as a discipline has expanded dramatically. As we begin to acknowledge that we cannot possibly teach everything in an undergraduate biology curriculum, we struggle to come to consensus about what is most important to teach. The report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (AAAS, 2011) offers a set of five core concepts that ar...

Learning progressions are research‐based models of how core ideas are formed over time, often focused on student ‘ways of thinking’ (Duncan and Rivet 2013, Songer et al. 2009). We currently lack a learning progression for undergraduate biology majors’ understanding of experimental design. In order to better understand student thinking about experim...

Active learning is defined and implemented in a variety of ways. Yet how activities are implemented in the classroom may be key to whether student learn. Recognizing the cognitive science underpinning the activity is therefore an important first step to successfully implementation. Unfortunately, there are few easy to use observation tools to asses...

Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education outlined five core concepts intended to guide undergraduate biology education: 1) evolution; 2) structure and function; 3) information flow, exchange, and storage; 4) pathways and transformations of energy and matter; and 5) systems. We have taken these general recommendations and created a Visio...

Background: Phylogenies are ubiquitous in college-level biology textbooks, yet many college students continue to struggle to interpret them correctly. Multiple activities and frameworks for teaching phylogenies have been proposed to address this problem. In an introductory biology course for majors, we tested two contrasting hypotheses about the be...

We specifically asked forty‐seven physiology students in a survey about the core concept “homeostasis.” Physiology students (200 level) were asked to define homeostasis and describe the process by giving a physiological example of homeostasis. Finally, students chose whether heart rate, blood pressure, or both were homeostatically regulated and jus...

Physiology faculty regard homeostasis as one of the core concepts their students should understand and be able to apply. We asked how 10 commonly used undergraduate physiology and biology textbooks introduce and use this core concept. We evaluated these textbooks to answer a number of questions: (1) do they contain an identifiable introductory ‘sec...

Many institutions require candidates for faculty positions to present a teaching demonstration as part of the interview process. To help job candidates prepare for this and to assist departments in planning how to structure this portion of the interview, we surveyed biology faculty from community and liberal arts colleges and master's- and PhD-gran...

Experimental design is a fundamental skill for scientists, but it is often not explicitly taught in large introductory biology classes. We have designed two pencil-and-paper in-class activities to increase student understanding of experimental design: an analyze activity, in which students are asked to evaluate data, and a design activity, in which...

The core principles of physiology are those that physiology students should understand and be able to use. We have ‘unpacked’ three of the most important core principles (Flow Down Gradients, Homeostasis and Cell‐Cell Communications) into their component ideas and thereby articulated a conceptual framework for each. Physiology faculty at 2‐and 4‐ye...

This session will examine questions such as: Who are today’s undergraduates? How do they learn best? How can findings from cognitive and learning research be employed to optimize learning? Participants will actively engage with issues such as using tests as ways to both measure and promote increased learning and using pacing techniques during lectu...

We tested the hypothesis that highly structured course designs, which implement reading quizzes and/or extensive in-class active-learning activities and weekly practice exams, can lower failure rates in an introductory biology course for majors, compared with low-structure course designs that are based on lecturing and a few high-risk assessments....

Biology education research (BER) can be a major contributor to the herculean task of modernizing and transforming biology education. However, as researchers in a relatively young and still small field, BER practitioners now find themselves fragmented across 64 biology-related societies and lacking agreement on a core research agenda, a convenient p...

Most scientific endeavors require science process skills such as data interpretation, problem solving, experimental design, scientific writing, oral communication, collaborative work, and critical analysis of primary literature. These are the fundamental skills upon which the conceptual framework of scientific expertise is built. Unfortunately, mos...

Formative assessment is designed to provide information about students' learning to help them and their teachers to identify deficiencies and misconceptions. It differs from summative assessment, which aims to rank students according to their achievements to determine which students pass or fail or to assign grades to students. This article reports...

We developed the Blooming Biology Tool (BBT), an assessment tool based on Bloom's Taxonomy, to assist science faculty in better aligning their assessments with their teaching activities and to help students enhance their study skills and metacognition. The work presented here shows how assessment tools, such as the BBT, can be used to guide and enh...

We tested five course designs that varied in the structure of daily and weekly active-learning exercises in an attempt to lower the traditionally high failure rate in a gateway course for biology majors. Students were given daily multiple-choice questions and answered with electronic response devices (clickers) or cards. Card responses were ungrade...

Undergraduates students in 12 courses at 8 different institutions were surveyed to determine the prevalence of 13 different misconceptions (conceptual difficulties) about cardiovascular function. The prevalence of these misconceptions ranged from 20 to 81% and, for each misconception, was consistent across the different student populations. We also...

Dual specificity protein tyrosine phosphatases (dsPTPs) are a subfamily of protein tyrosine phosphatases implicated in the regulation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK). In addition to hydrolyzing phosphotyrosine, dsPTPs can hydrolyze phosphoserine/threonine-containing substrates and have been shown to dephosphorylate activated MAPK. We hav...

In the MM14 mouse myoblast cell line, fibroblast growth factor (FGF) stimulates proliferation and represses differentiation. However, the intracellular signaling pathways used by FGF to affect these cellular processes are unknown. The predominant FGF receptor present on MM14 cells, FGFR1, is a receptor tyrosine kinase capable of activating the mito...

Myofibril remodeling occurs during the normal life, in growth and development, and in the special case when isoform switching occurs. In this review we concentrate on the ultrastructural aspects of how myosin is incorporated into the A-band. Anatomic methods of study are emphasized that include isotope and immunochemical labeling as well as in situ...

Myofibril remodeling occurs during the normal life, in growth and development, and in the special case when isoform switching occurs. In this review we concentrate on the ultrastructural aspects of how myosin is incorporated into the A-band. Anatomic methods of study are emphasized that include isotope and immunochemical labeling as well as in situ...

Electron microscopy (EM) in situ hybridization provides the higher resolution necessary to determine the spatial relationship between a specific mRNA and the organelle containing the protein encoded by that message. EM in situ hybridization was used to determine the subcellular myosin heavy chain (MHC) mRNA distribution with respect to the myofibri...

Hyperthyroid treatment produces rapid cardiac cell hypertrophy with all subcellular components increasing in an orderly manner. We compare normal and hyperthyroid tissue in order to relate changes in distribution of myosin mRNA during rapid assembly of myofibrils. At the light microscopic level, in situ hybridization of the ventricular cells shows...

Myocytes in adult rabbit ventricle express and alpha and a beta form of myosin heavy chain (MHC). The alpha-MHC distribution detected with indirect immunofluorescence has been found in different proportions in adjacent myocytes producing a mosaic staining pattern. The basis for cell-specific expression of the alpha-MHC isoform is not known. Since t...

A monoclonal antibody (mAb 37) specific for alpha-myosin heavy chain (alpha-MHC) is used to follow the spatial and temporal incorporation of alpha-MHC into rabbit left ventricular myocytes. The expression of the two adult cardiac MHC genes, alpha and beta, is regulated by manipulating the thyroid hormone level of the animal. 10 wk on a propylthiour...

The structures and functions of the various subdivisions of the membrane systems of muscle are reviewed. Morphometric data have been recalculated using functional definitions of the membranes as identified by their proteins. Thus, the junctional coupling between the sarcoplasmic reticulum and T system is separated from the remaining longitudinal sa...

Typescript original and library bound. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rush University, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-103).