"Bridge Program" Interns Help High Schoolers Toward College-Level Science
Bridge program interns (l-r) Andy Agacaoili ’07, Jen Felder ’07, and Trevan Rankin ’08 plan their next move in the classroom.
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6/26/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Fifteen high school students watched a restaurant scene on a TV screen. Soon after being served, one of the diners began to gasp and choke, then fell, dying, to the floor.
Whodunnit? And how?
The three Davidson students who produced the video spent the next two weeks leading the rising high school seniors to unravel the crime in a summer biology research program sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Along the way, Andy Agacaoili ’07, Jen Felder ’07, and Trevan Rankin ’08 also strengthened their own skills in research and teaching.
“I have a lot more respect for my professors now,” said Agcaoili, a chemistry major. “We spent the first eight weeks of the summer developing the curriculum for a two week class. The job takes a lot of time outside the classroom.”
The HHMI “Bridge” program intends to excite high school students about science, and prepare them for the inquiry based method of laboratory investigation they will encounter in college science classes. Rankin, the only biology major of the three, observed a big difference between her high school and college science courses. “In college labs your professor isn’t there every step of the way as in high school. They don’t lead you by the hand anymore, and that can be a big shock if you’re not ready for it!”
Students gather around Agacaoili (l) to get a closer look at chemical reactions in a blood typing exercise.
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Trevan, Agcaoili and Felder fabricated the restaurant crime to make the course more engaging, demonstrate the real-world application of biomedical research, and provide a central theme around which they could weave a number of pertinent lab exercises.
They also studied educational pedagogy, practiced active teaching techniques, planned the day-by-day curriculum, and designed and created labs that would challenge students to develop their own hypotheses, conduct experiments to test them, and present their results. The high school students worked on their lab exercises in small groups, and shared the rest of the class in Powerpoint presentations. The presentations were carefully watched, and critiqued through public comments from the interns and written comments from all other members of the class.
Felder, a psychology major, recalled, “My first college presentation was in a biology class, and my group got torn apart because our presentation skills weren’t up to par.”
She continued, “I wish I had known more before I got to college, not only about that, but also statistics, and been more comfortable just raising my hand and asking questions. We’ve worked hard to try to incorporate those aspects of learning into our teaching.”
The laboratory exercises included DNA analysis, blood typing, lie detector testing, bacteria and germ detection, fingerprinting, and respiration, all of which yielded clues to help solve the crime. One exercise occurred without students even knowing it was happening. A college student — a plant — entered the classroom unobtrusively during a lecture to ostensibly check his work on a lab machine. He made a commotion over the unexpected result he found, was rebuked, and stormed out of the room. Later in the day, the interns tested the students’ powers of observation, and introduced commentary on the validity of eyewitness accounts, by asking them to recall all they could about the incident and the student.
The two-week curriculum was intense, including eighty hours of classroom time running from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. daily. Students from three local high schools applied to participate, and were paid $500 to compensate for wages they may have missed by giving up summer jobs. They also receive a certificate of achievement, and feedback on their strengths and weaknesses in the classroom.
Trevan Rankin explains a lab exercise to one of the high school participants.
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Karen Bernd, associate professor of biology, directed the project, which was in its second of four years this summer. Bernd said the program not only exposes high school students to college-level science work, but it also offers them good role models. “The three interns are just a few years older than the high schoolers, so we hope they will say, ‘Hey, if these students can do science, so can I!’”
The extensive study of pedagogy and work at curriculum development also gives the Davidson interns a thorough taste of teaching. “They’ve had more teacher training than your average graduate student, who in some cases is pointed toward a room with no more direction than ‘Here’s your class. Go teach,” said Bernd.
While none of this year’s three interns currently aspires to a teaching career, they said the long hours in front of class taught them communication skills that will serve well in whatever career they choose. “The necessity for flexibility has been challenging,” said Felder. “We spent a lot of time developing a syllabus, but things don’t always go according to plan. The students would occasionally whiz through a lab and then we had to quickly figure out what to do with the extra time.”
The program includes pre- and post-course testing, as well as a survey of student feelings about science. Last year’s results showed improvement both in the scientific knowledge of participants, and in their confidence and comfort with taking a science course.
This year’s criminal scenario provided another, entertaining measure of the success of the project. On the final day, students analyzed their lab results and posed their theories about what had happened in the restaurant. Agcaoili, Felder, and Rankin then showed the class a concluding video that revealed that the truth of the awful incident was a sordid and tragic tale of money, jealousy, adultery, and mistakenly switched dinner orders. In other words, the waiter did it!
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently recognized as one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation.
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