Five questions for Jenny Knight
Growing up, Jenny Knight’s mind concentrated on how things worked. Plants and animals were fascinations; by the time she was a college student, she zoomed in on the workings of the brain.
“I was a biology major with a concentration in neuroscience and then went on to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience,” she said. “I just got fascinated by how this incredibly complex system, our brain, governs everything we do. I was particularly interested in the development of organisms and the development of the brain.”
Even after she started down a path as a lab scientist, doing work as a molecular biologist and geneticist, her curiosity kept returning to the question of how the brain works.
“Why is it so difficult for us to process certain kinds of information and easier to process other kinds of information? Why do some people seem to be better at learning some things than other things?
“After many years of research, I realized I wanted to be more involved in helping students learn and become scientists.”
That’s what she does as a professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology at CU Boulder. As a Discipline-Based Education Researcher, she and her lab study how students learn to solve problems, and how they develop skills that support learning, such as reflection and regulation, all within the discipline of biology.
Last year, she was named a President’s Teaching Scholar at CU.
1. You have led work in trying to understand how undergraduate students learn biology, assessing areas where they might struggle and what educators could do to improve their learning. What have you learned from these assessments, and have they influenced changes in how you and others teach?
When I entered this field, there weren’t many ways of assessing where the issues were with student learning. So, people might say, “Oh, you know, X number of people did well in my class, or did poorly in my class.” But people cover lots of different kinds of things in their courses and you never really know whether one person’s course is anything like another person’s course. We realized we needed to figure out a more standardized way of looking at what people were learning.
The projects that I embarked on were all collaborations with other people who were either knowledgeable about assessment development, excited about teaching, or experts in the field. The goal was to develop some assessments that were more conceptual, to diagnose areas where students struggle – and especially areas where they struggle even after taking coursework on the topic.
The assessments have been useful for me teaching those courses myself, but also for other people across the U.S. who are teaching similar courses, because now we can talk about it. We can say, “OK, my students always seem to struggle with certain genetic concepts, such as the structure of a chromosome or how genes are inherited.” And they can say, “Yeah, we have the same issues.”
We’ve done a couple of research projects to tease out, all right, if we focus on this kind of a concept, do students end up performing better on it than they would if we don’t focus on that concept? That seems really obvious: Of course, if you spend time on it, students should get better at it. But that doesn’t always seem to be the case. You can spend the whole semester talking about something and thinking that it’s all crystal clear, but then the students end up still confused about it at the end.
2. Is biology something that, perhaps more than many subjects, is taught best in classroom and lab settings? Or is technology making that less so?
I really believe in the power of one-on-one communication, in-person communication. I feel like it really is a lot better than anything that you can sit and watch or listen to on your own.
I taught lab courses earlier in my career. There’s nothing like helping a student see something for the first time: learn how to use a microscope, learn how to handle an organism, learn how to operate machinery. There’s no replacement for really doing it.
Non-laboratory learning is maybe not as dependent on procedures as lab courses are, but nonetheless there’s something about walking through things with people, showing them how to think about it, giving them alternative explanations, reacting to how somebody is struggling with something. That all happens in the classroom. I’m sure it could be facilitated by AI, but I’m one of those people who feels that personal connection, that personal experience and storytelling, is important – professor-to-student, in person.
3. One of your journal articles is titled, “Teaching more by lecturing less.” Have you seen the benefits of this approach play out during your teaching?
Oh yeah, absolutely. First of all, I was taught in a very didactic way. When I was a student, and when I first started teaching at CU, it was all very much delivery from the professor to the students. I really feel like we’ve changed in the last 20 years.
I know I’ve worked very hard with my colleagues around the nation and with people at CU to elevate the value of letting people think and practice while they’re in the classroom. If students are talking to each other, using the information, asking questions and answering questions, they’re learning. If the students are just hearing something, it may or may not be really getting into their brains. So I’m a big proponent of letting students grapple with things while they’ve got a person there to ask questions of, as opposed to doing the grappling at home by themselves when maybe they don’t have the same kind of resources.
A classroom that’s full of conversation is actually a great classroom to be in. When I was a student, that’s the kind of treatment you got if you were in a language classroom or maybe a creative writing seminar. But there was very little discussion in the science classes. And now I go to my colleagues’ science classes and people are talking to each other, grappling with, “How do you do this? What’s the correct experiment here? How do we analyze this data?” That’s what scientists do all the time.
It’s really great to see that changing and becoming more commonplace. There’s quite a lot of research that’s been published, my own and lots of other people’s work as well, that shows it does produce a higher learning outcome almost every time.
4. Over the years, you have served as a member of the Boulder Faculty Assembly (BFA). Why is shared governance important to you?
It’s important that everybody be represented, that we all kind of know what’s going on. You have to pay attention to things that are happening at the university. You have to know what kinds of rules are being made or not made.
Participating in shared governance, being part of the Boulder Faculty Assembly, was very eye-opening to me. It gave me a chance to talk to people from different departments and to understand a little bit more about how the university operated.
It takes a lot of time. But as faculty, we need to make sure our voices are heard. Otherwise, decisions get made that don’t reflect the things that we care about.
5. What does it mean to you to be named a President’s Teaching Scholar at CU?
It’s an honor, of course. It’s such a great opportunity to be part of a group of people who care about things that you care about.
The thing I really like, which I also liked about being part of the BFA, is that these are people whose scholarship and expertise are all over the map. And there’s people from the other campuses, not just Boulder. It’s really interesting to hear how things work at other campuses. It's exciting to hear what people do to help elevate teaching and how deeply people care about their students and all the cool programs that people have designed and implemented. It’s a great group of people who are passionate about their teaching, but also giving back to the community.
Maybe the biggest strength of this group is that we all have the students’ best interests at heart. We really want to talk about how we can do the best things for them.