DESCRIPCIÓN

El proyecto Drug Research es una actividad de Estudio de Caso donde se propone al alumnado que estudie la eficacia de varios medicamentos antitumorales candidatos. Partiendo de imágenes de microscopio de biopsias de ratones tratados con diferentes medicamentos, determinarán mediante análisis matemáticos la eficacia antitumoral de los medicamentos, diseñando experimentos. Llegados a este punto, el alumnado debe escribir un artículo científico con sus investigaciones y un prospecto con la especificaciones técnicas para el uso del medicamento. La actividad incluye eventos de reflexión sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento científico, la relación ciencia-ética y ciencia-técnica, mientras se trabajan conceptos sobre mitosis y cáncer.

REFERENCIAS

[Artículo]

Drug Research: una secuencia contextualizada de indagación sobre mitosis, cáncer y creación del conocimiento científico. Investigación en la escuela (2016), 88, 1-19. J. Domènech. https://wp.me/p25seH-kV

Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos y Competencia Científica. Experiencias y propuestas para el método de Estudios de Caso. Enseñanza de las Ciencias, Septiembre 2017 (número extraordinario) 5177-5183. Jordi Domènech-Casal. https://wp.me/p25seH-uE

ANDAMIOS DE APLICACIÓN

  • COL1. Formación de equipos y roles
  • MAT2. Resolución de problemas
  • COL2. Conversación y debate
  • COM1. Póster Científico (Investigación)
  • CRI4: Ventajas y desventajas
  • CRI2. Auto y co-evaluación
  • CIE1. Diseño de experimentos (Pensamiento Computacional)
  • CIE2. Indagación y diseño de experimentos
  • COM3. Proyecto Tecnológico
  • COM5. Ensayo
  • E1. Macroestructuras y relación de ideas
  • E2. Mapa Conceptual
  • R1. KPSI
  • R2. Rúbrica

APLICACIÓN DEL PROYECTO

Your Mission

You work in a Cancer Research Laboratory, and your team has just obtained the results of a test performed with candidate anti-carcinogenic drugs.

You are trying to determine the anti-carcinogenic properties of three drug compunds: Heferodoxine, Cicloflavin A and Zanton L, that could increase the therapeutic possibilities for cancer patients.

Following several steps, you will analyze the effect of these drugs on the development of tumoral tissues, extract conclusions, design experiments, finding ways to help cancer patients…

….and try to keep your job as a scientist.

In this activity, you will work as real scientists do:

you will work in teams, constructing knowledge and designing experiments.

Image modified from an original image in the public domain authored by Rhoda Baer

Step 0: Mitosis and Cancer

Here you will find materials and videos to answer the following questions:

  • What is mitosis?
  • What is cancer?
  • Which is the relationship between mitosis and cancer?
  • How does chemotherapy work?

These materials are here to support you in your research. Skip this step if you know the answer to these questions.

How cells divide and how chemotherapy works

Cell division and the Cell Cycle

Mitosis stages

Mitosis stages and cell cycle

Unregulated cell division and Cancer

What is cancer

Step 1: Analizing results, getting conclusions from data in different formats.

At the bottom of this page you have the AX files, just came from the lab! Select one of the documents in the list below. Just one. Each AX File contains the report of two biopsia performed before and after treatment with one of the candidate drugs. Microscopic analysis of the biopsia are shown.

In this step, your work is:

  • Calculate the mitotic index from the biopsia before the treatment
  • Calculate the mitotic index from the biposia after the treatment

Using these data, construct an histogram to make evident if this drug in this treatment is or not effective against tumoral processes.

*If you find difficulties in calculating the mitotic index, you can learn about it in the Training session.

Ressources:

Step 2: Identifying factors. Designing Experiments.

Your AXFile describes an experiment with a determined combination of experimental conditions.

Look at your mates’ files, and try to find a mate which results fit well with yours, in order to extract conclusions.

When you have find it, sit with your mate (you are a team, now), analize together which conclusions can you extract together from putting in common your AX Files.

If your conclusions are not robust, or it is difficult to extract conclusions, maybe you have not choosen the good mate for you.

Some hints:

  • You can try to discover the effect of a drug, of a specific dose or of a treatment time.
  • It is difficult to see the effect of a factor if you compare two treatments that differ in several conditions.

When it’s done, in the next step, you will have to write a scientific article describing your results.

Step 3: Sharing Knowledge, Communicating Science.

In this step, you and your mate have to write a Scientic Article about your research and try to get your article published. To do so, you can use as a reference the documents cintained in the link below.

Do your best. The quality of your work in this step will determine your ability to continue your research.To publish is something important, as it is the parameter used to determine the quality of your work and your ability to go ahead with your research.

Step 4: Editorial Boards. Evaluating and selecting publications.

Distribute yourselves in four editorial Boards, one for each Journal. You are now referees.

Referees are expert scientists contacted by the Journals to evaluate if the articles are accepted or not.

To do so, you have to choose one of the following scientific journals (take in account that some journals are more selective, and thus, to publish there gives you more opportunities to get good collaborations and finantial support).

Minimal criteria to be selected. Archives of Cell Biology Journal of Cell Research Trends in Cancer Research Cancer Research Journal
 Graphs are correct. Vocabulary is correct and it is easy to understand the text. 
x		 
x		 
x		 
x
 Data choosen to compare fits well with the explicited objectives of the article. 
 
x		 
x		 
x
 The article extract all the possible correct conclusions from the data.   
x		 
x
 Results are presented in a way that it is easy to see how to apply it, connecting it with the present scientific knowledge, and proposing future ways of research.    
x

Editorial Boards

Your work in this step, is to read the articles sent to your Journal and discuss about its quality, taking in account the selection criteria of your Journal.

If an article sent to your journal is accepted, communicate it to the authors.

If an article sent to your Journal is not accepted, you have two options:

  • If it needs just some modifications, tell the authors to modify it and send it to your editorial board again.
  • If it is definitely wrong, just sent it back to the authors, telling them the reasons why it is rejected.

Authors

  • If your article is accepted: congratulations! it is important, as it makes evident that your work is interesting.
  • If your article is rejected: you cannot argue with the Editorial Board. Select another, lower-impact Journal. Use the reasons given by the Editorial Board to improve your article.

A key point in research is to get the money.

Research is usually an expensive process. Laboratory analysis, facilities, etc…have to be payed.

The money for research came from Governamental Institutions or from private investors. In any case, you will have to convince them that your project is interesting and useful, and that you and your team are competent scientists able to undertake it with success.

You and your mate from the step before have finally got your article published. But you alone are not good enough to get the finantial suppor of an institution that has opened a selection process for research projects to be funded. In this step, You will have to find two other teams which research fits well with yours, to build together a research project.

Remember:

Select good partners (with a good CV: this means that htey have published in a good journals)

Construct a good project: their data and yours have to fit in a way that it is possible to extract new and interesting questions from it, to be tested through new experiments.

Conclusions

In this final step you will receive the answer of your projects. Some of you will have accepted projects. Some of you won’t.

Let’s discuss about some topics you may experienced during this activity:

  • Are your absolutely sure about your results? What can you do to improve it?
  • Which has been your priority: to heal patients or get success as a scientist?
  • Which problem do you find in the selection process for articles and projects? How would you improve it?
  • Have you considered the number of animals used in these experiences? Did they suffer? Relate this with the need to get new and better drugs.
  • Is it correct to use in humans drugs that has only been tested in animals. How could you test this in humans? Which ethical concerns can you identify?

A: Traning session to calculate the mitotic index.

A characteristic of tumoral tissues is that cells in tumors are doing mitosis very often.

As a consequence, when we observe a tumoral tissue, we can detect these mitosis, and use this as a diagnostic procedure.

The mitotic index is a measurement of the ratio of cells that are doing mitosis.

In this exercice, you will practice to recognize the mitosis steps from microscopy images and to determine the mitotic index from tissue samples to stablish if it is or not a tumoral tissue.

Ressources: Training Session

B: Getting conclusions from real samples in the laboratory.

As a final step, you can analize real samples at the laboratory.

Teachers: Instructions to prepare the samples accordingly to the design of the activity are avaliable at the Didactic Guide for teachers.

From the experimental treatments you asked in your project a certain number (depending on the quality of your application for funding) has been accepted.

You have to follow the procedure in the references below to observe through a microscope the samples corresponding to the treatments you asked for, in order to confirm or discard your expected results.

Ressources: Microscope protocol

C: Bioethics and Epistemologic concerns: critical reading activities.

Scientific and medical research can be driven and limited by other aspects, ethical and competitive concerns that deviates the investigative strategies from its merely logic perspective.

To analyze some of these aspects, you will work with two readings from newspapers.

Read the two attached documents, and fill in the CRITIC test, also attached.

After this, you are prepared to make a debate in your classroom, with a main question:

Are scientific knowledge and research policies created exclusively from scientific aspects? Should it be?

Assessment

Didactic Scaffolds

During the activity, several didactic scaffolds to promote the self-assessment and co-assessment of students are furnished:

  • Rubric for scientific articles.
  • Model of a scientific article.

Student’s productions

Along the didactic sequence, students create several produts that can be object of assessment:

  • AX File analysis (individual)
  • Scientific article (couples)
  • Funding project (groups)

Observation in the classroom can also allow to assess student’s participation in discussion procedures:

  • Editorial Boards
  • Debates in the conclusions.

Didactic Guide for Teachers

This activity is directed to secondary school 14-18 years old students. As you can see, the site is directed to students, so you can propose them directly the web adress to undertake the activity. This is one of the reasons why correct answers are not provided.

Versions created by other teachers

(If you develop a new version, you are invited to share it with me and other teachers, I’ll include and link your version in the list).

Didactic Frame and Teacher’s Guides

This activity is part of the educational C3 Project (Creation of Scientific knowledge) and the Syllabus ABP/IBSE Itinerary ProyectandoBioGeo. Comments and suggestions are welcome. If you add or modify steps from this didactic sequence, please, let me know, your work can be useful for other teachers and students. If you want, I could eventually add your activities as a contribution in this website, toghether with your name and contact details.

A description and discussion on the application of the activity is available in a published article in Spanish:

Didactic Goals

The didactic sequence dealing mitosis, cancer and creation of scientific knowledge, this activity pretends students to:

  • Understand scientific knowledge as a knowledge permanently under construction.
  • Compare differences and similarities between the different stages of mitosis and correlate it with the mitosis process.
  • Communicate scientific data in scientific formats.
  • Analyze and create data in different formats (microscope images, graphics, numeric,…) and take decisions and design experiments from it.
  • Apply mitosis and cancer scientific models to interprete real data.

Indications to apply the activity

  • Don’t explain anything to your students. They will be able to learn it alone. Just let them work, and observe their discussions. You’ll have the opportunity to collect the explanations after and from their work.
  • Let them talk between them, even between the different teams. Science is a social process. Scientists don’t call it copying or cheating. They call it constructing knowledge, and it usually happens in congresses and seminars.
  • Ask your students to think. Explain them you expect their best.
  • Regarding the Additional Step B.

Calendar and Class Organization

  • Step 1: One session. Students can finish it as homework. Individual work. Organization of the classroom. Individual activity. Students should seat separated one from another. Distribute among them one of the Patient Files, or make them to download it from the activity website. Each student should have only one document and shouldn’t know anything about the information from other students. They shouldn’t choose the document. It’s no problem if two students are analizing the same document in parallel in case that you have more than 20 students. Each document is identified by an ID number, you will easily identify that only the last digit is informative.
  • Step 2, Step 3: One session. Is is important not to explicit which are the factors of these experiments. In this step, students are asked indirectly, to identify which are the changing factors, and discover that we can extract conclusions only when there is only one different factor (dose, drug, period). Before the end of the step 3, each team have to present their article and decide which is the Jorunal they want to publish in.
  • Step 4:One session. There are not instructions about if students can go to the same Editorial Board they have sent the article in. It is a good experience that them arrive, by themselves, to decide that one cannot evaluate his own work.
  • Additional steps: There are some concerns regarding the additional step B that should be only accessible to teachers. These indications are included in the following document “StepBconcerns” (will be soon uploaded).This document is only available for users logged on with their “Xtec ” account from the Department of Education of the Catalan Governement. If you are a teacher and you want access to it, contact me from your institutional mail adress, as I can confirm that you are a teacher.

About IBSE (Inquiry-Based Science Education)

Some of the principles of IBSE used to build this site and didactic activity:

  • Scientists generate scientific theories based on evidence, but they do not find definitive answers. Real science has not a book of “correct answers” were you can contrast if your conclusions are correct. “Correct processes” and “Best explanations” is the most you can get in real science. It’s why answers have been supressed from all the documents given here.
  • Scientific knowledge and ideas change over time and are open to further revision as our understanding of the world around us evolves. Education doesn’t mean to transmit a false feeling of certainty. Education means to teach how to deal with uncertainty, to take decisions and assume risks. Don’t confirm them if they have the correct answer or not. In case of misunderstandings, just ask them if their process is correct and their results coherent. Answer with questions to their questions, or help them to make better questions. “Correct solutions” or “Wise teachers” won’t be present in their life for ever. Teach them how to arrange without it.
    • Science is a social and creative activity. Constructing and testing hypothesis, interpreting data from different formats and adjusting an abstract model as a consequence, identifying patterns and stablishing relationships, discussing results and justifying conclusions, are key competences that science learning must include as a priority, not only to make them best scientists, but to make them critical citizens.

Examples of students’ productions

CLIL/Aicle

This site has been built from a didactic activity performed with spanish students, and in some steps, liguistic clues are given. I’m yet working on this aspect.

Hints and Ideas for further development

The Additional tasks section contains other activities that can be proposed or choosen by the students. If you develop new activities from this didactic sequence I’ll be glad if you share it with me, I could eventually offer it in this site with the same License as the rest of the materials.