A. Three main things in BIOL463

Please describe, briefly, the three things that you learned in BIOL463 and that you consider to be the “most important” ones.

1. I learned to much more clearly make the very important distinction between necessary and sufficient when looking at data.

2. I learned the difference between what the data shows, conclusions, and models.

3. You can’t always trust the figure legends or conclusions that papers make

 B. Identify types of knowledge

For each of your three “things”, please try to identify what type of knowledge it represents (Factual, Conceptual, Procedural/Skills, Metacognitive).

1 and 2 are somewhat procedural and conceptual. 3 is metacognitive.

C. What makes “things” stand out for you

For each of your three “things”, please indicate what made it stand out for you.

• This was introduced to me in Biol 200 but it seemed a lot simpler then. In this class looking at data from papers and making necessary/sufficient statements seemed more difficult in the beginning because it was using data that I had not seen before.
• Again, in Biol 200 we had to make a distinction between what the data show and what they mean, but in this class I then had to make the further distinction to a model, where conclusions are combined to explain the data. This step is much more difficult in my mind and I thought we got a lot of practice and feedback in this course.
• There were a couple of instances in class where I was tripped up a bit in my thinking because I took the figure legend at face value and didn’t think through what was actually being presented.

D. Relevance/use

Please describe, briefly, what you expect each of these three “things” to be useful or relevant for.

These three things will be useful in a lot of ways, including thinking about any further research I do, reading papers for interests sake, or solving problems in everyday life.

E. Three main things in your undergraduate education

Please describe, briefly, the three things that you learned during your undergraduate education and that you consider to be the “most important” ones. Why do you find them so important?

1. Be careful to look at where information comes from. Is it from a credible source? From a peer review journal?: This is incredibly important when looking at information on the internet, often statements are made that may not be entirely what was found using credible peer reviewed research or there might not be any research on something that is being stated as fact. It might be a little pessimistic but in today’s society its usually good to be a bit skeptical of information that someone is talking about, writing about, or discussing if they cannot show where they got that information from
2. A lot is known but there are a huge number of unanswered questions that still need to still be addressed and explored: I found that this was, to me at least, the central theme of 2^nd I was shocked by the number of times there was a statement like “we know this is true for this species, but we don’t know for others” in my microbiology textbook. I’ve come to realize that the more I know, the more questions I can come up with because of connections to other topics, classes, and sometimes random things.
3. Teamwork is so important, and may be one of the most important things in science: Collaborative science is able to produce so much more information and ideas than people by themselves and the body of work that makes up what we know about science today was developed by an incredibly large number of people. This is also true in smaller ways in that labs that are able to assist each other and work in a creative and encouraging environment may make more progress than those that are at odds with each other.