[HN Gopher] DNA-RNA: What Do Students Think the Arrow Means? (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
DNA-RNA: What Do Students Think the Arrow Means? (2014)
Author : Tomte
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-08-21 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (europepmc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (europepmc.org)
| chromatin wrote:
| Wow. This is very nice work in which the authors find that about
| a third of undergrad students completely misunderstand the
| physical process underlying information flow from DNA to RNA.
|
| I teach the central dogma of molecular biology to learners at
| multiple postgraduate levels. With the curse of knowledge, it
| never even occurred to me how wrongly people might get this.
| icedchai wrote:
| Don't AP Bio classes still cover some of this? I remember it
| being covered, at least at a high level, in my AP Bio class
| back when I was in 10th grade.
| parsecs wrote:
| They still do, as someone who completed AP Bio a few months
| ago.
| icedchai wrote:
| Good to know! I took it almost 30 years ago. (Yeah. I'm
| old.)
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Having studied biology myself, I am also amazed by the level
| and the frequency of the misunderstandings that the authors
| found amongst students.
|
| By the way, relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2501/
| AprilArcus wrote:
| I used to TA undergraduates in Molecular Bio. It was
| demoralizing to see how many answers to midterm and final exams
| were just regurgitated babble-stage nonsense. A hidden Markov
| model could have outscored half my students.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Well this is kind of what undergraduate studies are about,
| yeah? Not every student who wants to go into molecular
| biology is cut out for it. Hopefully when they meet a topic
| thats too hard and the grading is tough but fair they'll put
| their efforts elsewhere.
|
| Maybe we should be encouraged that half would really
| understand a Markov chain in biology?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Only in the USA. Undergrad in the US is what high school is
| in most of the developed world -- a time for broad learning
| and exploration. Outside of the USA, if you're going to
| college, you're getting serious and fairly specific. In my
| experience, Americans take an extra four years or so to
| grow up, because they're allowed to. (I'm not saying this
| is good or bad.)
| andi999 wrote:
| The comment before didn't mean half know what a Markov
| chain is, instead that their knowledge is not better then
| one.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| https://kraulis.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/why-do-so-many-scie...
| Also an interesting read about how the central dogma was never
| really meant to be presented in teh way that it is currently
| presented (really was meant to focus on "information" flow
| starting at DNA rather than show a definitive guide to the
| transformations between these molecules in a cell).
| [deleted]
| woliveirajr wrote:
| (it's a PDF file)
| Causality1 wrote:
| HN could really use some kind of tag for when a submission goes
| to a file instead of a web page.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Why?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It would be useful for many. I have several computers that
| can browse the web but can't render PDF files (or run
| PDF.js).
|
| Things don't have to be useful for everyone to be a good
| idea.
| Causality1 wrote:
| So my phone does what I expect it to do. When I open a link
| I might be opening it in another tab to read later, or
| switching to a different app while it loads, or something
| else. If it's a file I'm going to get a pop-up asking me
| what I want to do with it. Depending on where my finger was
| I might open the file with the wrong app or dismiss the
| pop-up making me either download it again or go find the
| file in a file manager. It also clutters up my Downloads
| folder with things I'm going to read or skim once and never
| look at again.
| ajsfoux234 wrote:
| There is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix
| =true&que...
|
| It seems that the submitter hasn't applied it
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| I remember that it was a video like this that made it click for
| me in high school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M198uHJd_8
| kasperset wrote:
| html link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041510/
| Hayarotle wrote:
| I've always found those articles studying common student
| misconceptions and their causes interesting . There's quite a lot
| of physics publications dealing with phenomenological primitives
| and concepts learned in other disciplines and how they influence
| students' learning of physics and might be misapplied. For
| example, this one describing common misconceptions about chemical
| bonding [1]
|
| Some misconceptions are so strong and common that you might even
| get teachers that have and propagate them. I remember having a
| thermodynamics teacher who would insist it's impossible to reduce
| the entropy of a closed (rather than isolated) system, despite
| making it clear in their classes that you can reduce the entropy
| of such system by work and / or heat transfer.
|
| [1]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225227224_Some_Stud...
| codethief wrote:
| > reduce the entropy of a closed (rather than isolated) system
|
| How do you define "closed" and "isolated"? In fact, this is the
| first time I'm hearing of a distinction between the two terms.
| In my experience, they are used synonymously.
| Hayarotle wrote:
| In a closed system, matter cannot be exchanged between the
| system and the surroundings, but energy can be exchanged (in
| form of work or heat). In an isolated system, neither matter
| nor energy can be exchanged [1].
|
| Those are the definitions used in thermodynamics, but they
| might be conflated into a single concept in other
| contexts/disciplines
|
| [1] http://www.projects.bucknell.edu/LearnThermo/pages/Other%
| 20T...
| Shmebulock wrote:
| So how does it really work? What does the arrow actually mean?
|
| Is the point that the information on the DNA gets copied onto RNA
| while the DNA remains intact?
| wtallis wrote:
| > Is the point that the information on the DNA gets copied onto
| RNA while the DNA remains intact?
|
| Close, but I think it's more that the information gets used to
| _assemble_ the RNA, and the resulting RNA also encodes
| information. Saying "copied onto RNA" can imply that the RNA
| previously existed in some kind of blank slate form.
|
| So the arrow denotes a transfer/flow of information, but does
| not denote a chemistry 101 style reaction that changes a
| physical piece of DNA into a piece of RNA and then into a
| protein.
| hirsin wrote:
| As an analogy - DNA is source code. The first arrow is the
| parser and creates RNA that is a reflection of the DNA. The
| second arrow (RNA to protein) is the compiler, taking the
| parsed code (RNA) and generating a program (protein) from it.
|
| At no point is the source code consumed to create the
| program, akin to DNA.
| kace91 wrote:
| Just semi related: I find it curious that 3 out of the 4
| universities have the same percentage of minority students (12%).
| Is this figure a coincidence, or is it the result of some
| specific policy?
|
| ( I'm not American so I lack the context).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't have a direct answer to your question, but that's very
| close to the representation of black Americans in the total
| population. That number is cited colloquially as 15%.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Most regional schools, as they get larger and larger, will have
| a student body that reflects the regional population fairly
| well. Three of these schools were private though, and small
| private schools especially can have idiosyncratic student
| populations. Apart from that, it's hard to say more without
| knowing which schools these were.
|
| (A regional school is one that draws students mostly from the
| surrounding region instead of nationally/globally)
| labster wrote:
| Apparently transcribe is a technical term too complicated for
| undergrads. I guess a third of college students have never read a
| transcript before leaving high school. Terrifying.
|
| When I was a tutor at my community college, I learned pretty fast
| to explain concepts in as many different ways as I could until
| the concept "clicked". Vocabulary is the gateway to
| understanding. From reading this paper, it seems like people
| didn't know what transcribe means, so they miss that the name
| itself is an analogy and not solely a technical term.
|
| It's kind of frustrating that people are doing bad at biology
| because their English classes failed them.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-21 23:00 UTC)