is there any validity in academic testing?

Now that I'm getting ready to apply for jobs and graduate programs, I've have to come into contact with my transcript more than I would have liked to. Over the past four years, I've had my share of abysmal grades. And I'm not being dramatic, some semesters have been just as atrocious as you can get. When I think back to the courses in which I had received such poor grades, I realize that the classes were based almost solely on exam grades. You do poorly on an exam or two, and you don't really have an opportunity to help yourself. Is that really fair? Grades, after all, are supposed to be indications of how well a student is understanding the course material, not punishments for inadequate or misguided study habits.

I get that "intelligence" or "knowledge of a subject" needs to be operationalized somehow in order to make comparisons. While an exam is a way to numerically gauge how much a student has retained about a subject, it almost never truly displays their understanding of it. When you see a student cramming for an exam - whether it be biochemistry or history - you see them hunched over a notebook full of facts and figures, attempting to jam their head full with as much as possible, with the hope that come exam time, they will be able to regurgitate enough to form cohesive answers.

If exams really did a good job of assessing knowledge of a subject, why do students dread cumulative exams so much? If we had truly gained an understanding of material we were previously tested on, we would prefer a cumulative exam, which would allow us to integrate across material of multiple exams. If professors are going to really use testing to assess a student's understanding of material, they should make exams cumulative, because to me, mastery of a subject requires integration, rather than being able to report on bits and pieces of material.

While standardized testing has been continually lambasted for being an inadequate measure of how prepared a student is for college or graduate schools, there is not much more of an option. However, once you're at school, professors have an entire semester to gauge their students' understanding of the course material. By spreading the grade out over a variety of assignments, some of which are subjectively graded by the professor, not only will students who consider themselves "bad test-takers" feel that they have equal opportunity to do "well" in the class, but there will be much less extrinsic motivation and would most likely spur students' interests in the course material itself. Isn't that what college courses are supposed to be about anyway? Spending four years consistently worried about grading and cramming could potentially be a big precursor for giving students a propensity to dislike fields they would otherwise be interested in.

It would be interesting to perform some kind of meta-analysis comparing students who take classes in which grades are overwhelmingly based off of exam grades and those who receive grades more based off of presentations/papers/integrative assignments. Not only would it be cool to see how GPAs differ, but to see which students pursue careers directly correlated with what they studied in college. How satisfied were they with their collegiate experiences? How do they perform on other, non-academic based, integrative and/or memory tasks? Are there really such people as "bad test-takers"?

two key aspects to successful comparative psychology research

This semester, I'm taking a seminar on Comparative Psychology, and have found myself to be repeatedly frustrated with an overwhelming majority of the studies we have read. Maybe I'm becoming too opinionated of a reader, but it seems to me that two fundamental things are missing from a lot of the studies. When trying to understand whether or not non-human subjects possess specific psychological abilities (e.g. theory of mind, self-recognition, reciprocal altruism), you must keep two things in mind. First, animals may not perform the behaviors we are looking for without adequate motivation to do so. Secondly, completely novel situations may provoke an animal to react in a way in which they would not customarily react. Therefore, it is important to provide situations that are somewhat familiar to ones they might encounter in their day-to-day lives in their natural, environment to which their species has adapted (unless, of course, using a novel situation removes a bias in the experiment).

(1) Experimenters should provide adequate motivation for the subject to elicit behavior: In an attempt to ascertain whether or not chimps possessed the ability to display the most efficient search technique available using logic (Call & Carpenter, 2001), the experimenters baited one of three tubes with a reward and gave the subjects opportunity to search for it. They called systematic/exhaustive search techniques "inefficient", but without any time or disciplinary motivation, why shouldn't the subjects perform exhaustive searches? As a human, it would be smart to do so. If there were no costs for me to check every option for a reward 2-3 times, why wouldn't I? After all, why should I assume there is only one reward? Maybe if I only had a certain amount of time before my options were taken away, I would be forced to employ a more efficient strategy. Perhaps in this study, after 60 seconds in each trial, the experimenter should have covered the apparatus, thus ending the trial. Eventually, the chimpanzees would realize they had limited time to make their best attempt at finding the food reward, and begin employing more logical/"efficient" strategies. If they did not, then perhaps we could assume they do not have the potential to do so.

(2) Studies should provide situations that are relevant to the natural habitat of the subject species: A study in 2005 (Hattori & Kuroshima) attempted to decipher whether or not Capuchin monkeys possess the ability to cooperate with one another to accomplish a common goal. The results of their study asserted that the monkeys spent a significantly greater amount of time looking at their partner when they needed help on a task. This result conflicted with previous studies (Visalberghi 1997; Visalberghi, et al. 2000) that had failed to provide any evidence of communication during cooperative tasks. The difference here is that the 2005 study used a task that was more intuitive for Capuchin monkeys, whereas the earlier studies used more unfamiliar scenarios. In the earlier studies, the monkeys may have just been more confused about the task in general, and did not fully understand that it required their partner's cooperation. In the end, laboratories are only logistic necessities, and it is more useful to understand whether or not animals can perform in their natural environments.

Basically, in order to conclude that a subject with whom you cannot communicate with does not possess specific mental abilities, you must design an experiment that will do its best to elicit it. Only then can you conclude that the subject does or does not have such capabilities.

"everything's better in moderation" - neural plasticity can't be the exception to that rule.

My neuroscience and behavior seminar, required for all us lucky (or not-so-lucky) neuroscience majors at Vassar, has been molded around one of the most broad and frankly irritating topics of all time: plasticity. Like, I get it. Plasticity's important. New synapses, changes in dendritic spines, pruning - all clearly vital to a functioning brain. And it's definitely necessary for someone studying neuroscience - or any science for that matter - to understand that the brain is capable of changing, even after the so-called "critical period".

Environmental conditions, both intra- and extra-cellularly, have the potential to impact the structure of synapses in the brain. Behaviors can even be re-delegated to new brain regions after an injury (dependent on age and other factors of course). While this all sounds great, there is no way that neural plasticity is always a positive thing. It doesn't make sense that something that can change relatively often would be beneficial to most organisms. Perhaps one can make the argument that as the average life span of a species increases, it could be more favorable (over a century, a lot of environmental stimuli can change dramatically), but often times, plasticity studies are done on mice and rats, both of which do not have a long life span at all. What would be the advantage of neural plasticity after the critical period in development in a mouse that only lives for a few months? Could it possibly be more advantageous for the mouse to have strengthened synapses and stable dendritic branches throughout its lifetime? Is it possible that an organism undergoing neuronal plasticity is actually being diverted from stimuli it should be paying attention to?

It's week 5 of my neuroscience seminar. I have read 17 articles on how neuronal plasticity occurs at different levels of an individual's biology (chromatin remodeling all the way up to cortical neurons being remodeled), and how a thousand different neuronal processes are altered by synaptic plasticity and dendritic changes. After discussing all 17 articles, never has one student questioned the real benefits of these changes occurring in post-developmental subjects. Admittedly, neither have I. I don't know if I can attribute my own hesitation to challenge my Professor's apparent deep affection for neurogenesis and plasticity to my fellow classmates, but there is no way they're not also feeling this frustration. Nothing in science is ever good all the time. In fact, most of the time, eventually we find out that things we think are  beneficial turn out to have colossal downsides. So when is it too much when it comes to plasticity?

using a 31-gene profile to predict the occurrence of breast cancer metastasis

So I know it's been a while since I've posted, but the first month of senior year has been a little hellish. Turns out I don't know nearly enough biochemistry for molecular bio, or enough about random brain regions for my neuroscience seminar, but maybe it'll just motivate me to keep up with my genomics readings and blog posts.

This semester, I'm taking a class about the biopolitics of breast cancer. While the class itself is, by and large, one large women studies-fueled (don't even get me started...) debate, it has propelled me to look a little bit more into breast cancer in the US. I happened to stumble across an article on GenomeWeb that really sparked interest - there is now a way for patients diagnosed with breast cancer to find out the likelihood and time it would take for the cancer to metastasize, based on a 31-gene signature.

This time-to-an-event breast cancer gene panel can be seen as a totally new type of diagnostic paradigm, that essentially has the potential to alter clinical management of breast cancer. On one hand, if accurate, individuals affected by breast cancer can avoid drastic treatment options if this gene panel predicts a very low chance of metastasis. On the other, patients can seek earlier therapies if they find out there is a good chance of their cancer metastasizing. Of course, the accuracy of this method would have to be just about 100% - I can't even imagine the legal liability that would come along with this kind of technology. But the prospects of this type of test could completely revolutionize a breast cancer diagnosis. Maybe then I wouldn't have to hear about how mastectomies "objectify women" because of some silly conspiracy theory about male doctors trying to take over the world... but I digress - we all know how I feel about vassar college feminazis...

hipsters: not only do I not like you, but your transcriptomes don't either.

naturopathicyoga.com

We all know smoking causes various cancers, heart disease and chronic lung disease. Well, now there's yet another reason to stay away from those cancer sticks.

Genome-wide quantitative transcriptional profiles taken from 1,240 subjects in the San Antonio Family Heart Study* (included ~300 current smokers) identified 323 unique genes whose expression pattern levels were significantly correated with smoking behavior! (provisional abstract) These genes have been implicated in immune response, cancer and cell death. The study has also suggested that smoking cigarettes can alter the expression of hundreds of white blood cell genes. As an article on GenomeWeb points out, "a comprehensive picture of how smoking affects the body has been difficult because cigarette smoke contains thousands of compounds that seem to act throughout the body".

With the current craze in the genomics world to understand how, and to what extent, environmental factors influence an individual's gene expression pattern, these findings are especially exciting. Smoking is considered an environmental factor, and we can see that just in this one study, it affects the expression of hundreds of genes and gene networks. It would be interesting to somehow assess how second-hand smoke exposure affects the genomes of individuals who have been exposed to second-hand smoke on a regular basis. I'm sure a study like that would push some places (coughvassarcough) to more rapid non-smoking policy. Speaking of, today Vanderbilt students found out that come Fall, their campus would be strictly non-smoking, and smoking would therefore be designated to specific locations on campus (where all the hipsters can gather and indulge). Let's get a move on it Vassar.

*Potential sample bias considering subjects of the study are involved in a Heart Study? Could gene expression profiles be different since subjects are in hypertension/obesity experiments? This study should probably be re-done with a random cohort, controlled for gender/SES/family history/age/smoking frequency, with equal numbers of smokers and non-smokers.