Biochemistry lecturer named a BEN Scholar

Beason-Abmayr will share her digital teaching tools with educators everywhere

Students used to fall asleep in Beth Beason-Abmayr’s class. But that doesn’t happen anymore — not since she moved her lectures to the Web and turned class time into a busy and engaging conversation.

“They’re awake now,” she said. “They’re paying attention.”

Beth Beason-Abmayr

Beason-Abmayr, a lecturer and lab coordinator in biochemistry and cell biology, is a proponent of student-centered, inquiry-based education. She has come up with some methods and materials that work for her students. And now she’ll have a chance to share those methods — along with the digital tools she uses to carry them out.

Beason-Abmayr has been named one of 34 new BiosciEdNet (BEN) Scholars. The 18-month program will allow her to share her ideas and her teaching materials with educators all over the country.

The BEN Scholars program is coordinated by the BEN Collaborative, a coalition of professional societies led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The coalition has been selected to assemble an archive of biology education materials for the National Science Digital Library — nearly 18,000 resources so far and peer-reviewed to provide trustworthy materials for biology educators to use in the classroom.

As a BEN Scholar, Beason-Abmayr will contribute her own work to that archive, and she’ll do outreach to promote those digital materials and the student-centered teaching they support.

Specifically, she’ll submit the digital material she uses in her lab class, BIOC 311 — Advanced Experimental Biosciences. For BIOC 311, Beason-Abmayr put her course materials online, including lab instructions, a detailed syllabus and more. Most notably, though, she took her lectures out of the classroom and turned them into online videos.

“I had traditional hourlong PowerPoint lectures that were background information on biochemistry theory or information about setting up equipment for lab,” she said. “We used to do that during class time; I’d go through it. It was pretty passive, pretty traditional.”

Then Beason-Abmayr used OWL-Socrates, the section of OWL-Space designed for multimedia presentations, to turn that material into a video. She broke up her PowerPoint presentations into three- to five-minute chunks and then synced her voice to the slides. Now, instead of coming to class for a lecture, students are expected to view those materials before they arrive. Then they can spend class time on discussion, group activities and quantitative calculations.

Beason-Abmayr said she sees her students engaging with the material more thoroughly and asking better questions that reveal a new depth of understanding.

“They’re asking probing types of questions,” she said. “They’re showing, ‘I really want to understand what’s happening here.’”

Once Beason-Abmayr’s materials are archived through the BEN Collaborative, educators all over the country will be able to access the entire package online. They’ll be free to download the materials and use them in their own classes, or to use her work as inspiration for building their own digital tools.

“It gets it out there,” Beason-Abmayr said. “I think that’s a lot of the beauty about this. It lets other people know, ‘Here’s what I’m doing.’”

Beason-Abmayr said her digital materials are adaptable enough to be used in a high school classroom or even in graduate courses. In fact, she will speak about her strategies at the Pre-Advanced Placement (AP) Science Inquiry workshop, a summer workshop Rice offers for middle- and high-school teachers who teach pre-AP science courses.

“I want to share with them,” she said. “‘These are things I’ve done. This is what’s worked for me. Here are some things that maybe you can try.’”