Fostering Critical Thinking and Student Participation in Biological Sciences

Instead of giving a lecture that can discourage both students and teachers, let’s try a different way of teaching Biological Sciences by using student participation and critical thinking techniques. Science professors usually perform power point presentations that include hundreds of slides in regards to a specific topic lasting about 2 hours without a break or interruption by student questions. Studies have demonstrated that students, when they participate in class, will memorize information for a longer period of time and develop critical thinking skills. Thus, an interesting approach would be to make students more involved in the course by having interactions between teacher(s) and the student body. To achieve this, analyzing experiments that have been published in international journals would make the course more realistic, and would also allow the students to understand what clinical and academic research has benefited our progress and knowledge base in the field of interest