In an effort to constantly improve university science education, Dr. Knight has collaborated with students and faculty to publish articles in the education literature. From 2014-2018, we teamed up with Honors General Chemistry (HGC) professor Dr. Peggy Bruehl and library resource specialist Denise Pan to study how teaching information literacy to science students in early courses impacts their scientific information literacy later on. In 2021, we published two companion articles in the Journal of Chemical Education: one detailing Dr. Knight's projects in the General Biochemistry I-II sequence that involve scientific literature and writing, and one comparing the performance on these assignments between students who had had prior instruction in information literacy with Dr. Bruehl versus those who hadn't. We found that students who had prior information literacy instruction (in HGC) performed better on the General Chemistry I assignment, but the performance gap closed by the time students got to General Biochemistry II. (Instead, the Biochem II students who had Dr. Knight for Biochem I tended to score better on the Biochem II literature assignment than students who took Biochem I with other professors.) These results show that students retain information literacy skills from prior work with scientific literature, even for several years.
Diagram of the overall structure of the literature-based assignments in Dr. Knight's Biochemistry lecture courses. Left: Students work in groups to write a literature review describing a cellular signaling or metabolic pathway. Right: Each group presents their pathway to the class. From Knight et al, J. Chem. Educ. 2021, 98, 3758-3766.
Students with previous information literacy instruction perform better on scientific literature-based assignments. Top: Students who previously took Honors General Chemistry (HGC, green bars) achieved significantly higher average scores on the mini-review assignment in Biochemistry I (left) but not in Biochemistry II (right), compared to students with no HGC experience (blue bars). Bottom: Letter grade distributions on the assignments. **: p < 0.02. From Pan et al, J. Chem. Educ. 2021, 98, 3749-3757.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Knight participated in a consortium of faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) who published a 2022 report in The Biophysicist describing how the pandemic impacted their teaching practices. It's worth reading to see how different professors reacted and adapted to the new normal.
Dr. Knight and the lab continue to innovate biochemistry and biophysics education. We are especially excited about our Physical Biochemistry lab course at CU Denver, where we have integrated single-molecule fluorescence microscopy of membrane binding proteins into this standard undergraduate lab course. Email Dr. Knight if you are interested in this course or contributing to ongoing experiment development.