“Fact‐Ways”: Teaching Cellular Signaling Using The Nobel Archives

Freshmen biology courses often present facts as given rather than constructed. Rarely then do students recognize the time, effort, and investment that have produced those facts and sense the excitement and fascination of scientific research. In a large‐enrolment first‐year course (>180 students), we used active learning strategies to give health sciences students an appreciation of the process of scientific discovery by focusing on Nobel Prizes given to seminal discoveries in cellular signaling. Groups of students were asked to explore the works of a specific Nobel Laureate and their learning was assessed in one or more different formats that ranged from an individual written examination to different group activities (simulated interviews, generation of an open‐ended problem‐solving exercise, or a take home project). On a 10‐point scale, 619 students, over a period of 6 years, rated the learning value of the projects as follows: mean 7.2, median 7, mode 8, and range 1–10. The group projects received slightly higher rating than the individual exams. Deconstructing facts, rather than simply memorizing them, makes learning richer. Support or Funding Information None