Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
An understanding of metabolic pathways is critical for biochemistry students to advance in their discipline. Accordingly, the regulation and dynamics of biochemical pathways has been recognized as a threshold concept in biochemistry, and several societies-including the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology-have described metabolism and its energetics as a core concept. However, learning about metabolism can be overwhelming for students. Often, pathways like glycolysis are presented without an analysis of the chemical logic underlying each enzyme-catalyzed step, requiring rote memorization by students and evaluation of student ability at lower Bloom's levels by instructors. However, this represents a missed opportunity in biochemistry education because a deeper understanding of the transformation of metabolites can improve student understanding of energy flow, enzyme regulation, and prepare them to apply their knowledge to subsequent metabolic pathways. Here, we describe a card-sorting Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) activity that encourages students to deduce a logical order for the glycolytic intermediates based on their chemical structures, even before presenting the glycolysis pathway in class. This activity has been administered successfully in biochemistry classes ranging from 12 to 100+ students at eight institutions of higher education across the United States. This versatile card sorting activity is amenable to face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online delivery. We present the specifics of each of these modalities, alongside assessment data from pre- and post-tests at two universities that show improvement in student learning. We invite instructors to pilot our activity in their own classrooms, and take inspiration from the simplicity of this card-sort to design engaging activities on a range of life science topics in their own classrooms. This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Texas at Austin (STUDY00001087) and ruled exempt by the Institutional Review Boards of the University of Delaware (2074530) and Providence College (IRB-FY24-19). This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant 1712268 (DUE) and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. C.W. was partially supported by National Institutes of Health Grant T32GM133395.
Genova et al. (Fri,) studied this question.