Jaime Sabel Podcast
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Jamie Sabel: So if you think about how many times you've seen a headline that says something like, cure for cancer found, right? There was certainly a treatment for cancer found or a major discovery as to how we could treat cancer, but we still have cancer, it's not cured, right? And so being able to have the scientists actually be able to help with that process of bringing the complex science to a level that is a lot more understandable, say by high school students, is a really important way to make sure that that science is being accurately represented. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff, with departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, and Physics. Chemistry and Biochemistry, [00:01:00] Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others. The College always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: Joining me today in the ASC Marketing and Communication studio is Jaime Sabel, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Director of the Center of Life Sciences Education, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Dr. Sable, welcome to Voices.

Jamie Sabel: Thank you so much. 

David Staley: Well, and let's start with that. What is the Center for Life Sciences Education? 

Jamie Sabel: Yes. So, the Center for Life Sciences Education, we call it CLSE for short, yes. It houses the biology major, so, traditionally there used to be a department of biology, but then they changed things around, and so now the center houses the biology major, but it works really closely with all of the other life sciences departments. So, what are those: EEOB, ecology, evolution, and organismal behavior, microbiology, molecular genetics, that's where my [00:02:00] tenure appointment is, and chemistry and biochemistry, so specifically the biochemistry part of it is the life sciences. So, we serve as sort of a hub, a center, as you will, for all of those four departments. So, all of those students in those majors, including our biology majors, all take our introductory biology courses in the center.

In the biology major, we also have a couple upper division courses that our biology students take, but otherwise all of their upper division electives are taken in the life sciences departments. So, it's a very collaborative life science community. A lot of the classes in our center are also taught from the faculty in those life sciences departments.

So again, very collaborative, very much a life sciences community. 

David Staley: Well, and before we started recording, I learned that you are very, very new to Ohio State, like, in a matter of months. 

Jamie Sabel: Yes. 

David Staley: What is it that drew you to Ohio State? 

Jamie Sabel: Well, I will say, I grew up in Iowa. I'm an alumni of both the University [00:03:00] of Iowa and the University of Nebraska.

David Staley: We won't hold that against you. 

Jamie Sabel: So, I've been a go Big Ten person. I was a, grew up an Iowa Hawkeye, but go Big Ten always, and so certainly coming back to the Big Ten was a, big draw for me, but definitely specifically this particular job. I'm really excited about what the center does.

I'm also really excited about its mission. Yes, it houses the biology major, but it's very much founded on scientific literature. So, what are the best practices that education researchers have been able to show are the best way that students learn? How can we help to support them to learn complex biological concepts in the classroom?

All very much founded on the idea of using evidence based practices, and as a biology education researcher myself, that is something that I'm very passionate about. And so, being able to be in this center that is so focused on biology while having this foundation of best practices in teaching [00:04:00] biology, really excited about the prospect of being able to lead that center forward.

David Staley: Well, let's talk about some of those research projects. So let's start first with the FRAMER framework. 

Jamie Sabel: Yes, FRAMER. 

David Staley: And FRAMER is an acronym. 

Jamie Sabel: FRAMER is an acronym, and you know what, I'm not going to be able to remember what every step stands for, but I will obviously share the paper, and so FRAMER is a framework that I developed. I joke a lot that education researchers really love acronyms, and so that's where that comes from. A little later we'll talk about another acronym that I use in one of my projects. But, so my research group really focuses on biology education, pretty broadly. So we think of it as the kinds of scaffolds we can use to support students to learn.

So, scaffolds in this particular sense, often we think of scaffolds as, you know, the sort of thing that you see up on the outside of a building while construction is happening. In fact, education scaffolds are [00:05:00] pretty similar to that in a lot of ways. So, the purpose of that scaffold on a building is to hold it up while you're doing work on it, right, to make sure that it maintains its structure while there's work happening, while there's construction happening. An educational scaffold is meant to do a lot of the same thing. It's meant to sort of hold a place for the student as they're going from a concept that they know a little less about to something that they know a lot more about.

So it could be a concept, as I said. It could also be a scientific practice: learning how to interpret graphs, for example. And so, the scaffold can be a lot of different things. It could be an assignment, it could be a particular way in which instruction happens, but it's purposefully built to help the student get from less knowledge to more knowledge, and ideally, that scaffold will then be able to be taken away, and the student can still continue to use that information or use that skill without the scaffold. And so, that is really what [00:06:00] connects a lot of variety that we do in our lab.

We've kind of gone in quite a few different directions, but ultimately we're always looking at what is the tool that we can develop and test and implement to support students to get to a more complex thinking in biology. And so, FRAMER was what I built to walk people through each of the steps of how to effectively build one of these scaffolds.

David Staley: Scaffolds for students learning biology. Do these scaffolds work for other sciences, other disciplines? Could we apply this to history, let's say? 

Jamie Sabel: Absolutely, you could. Yes. So, an educational scaffold is a non domain specific term. So, absolutely. And in fact, we do in lots of ways.

There are ways that we help students think about an introductory writing course. There are lots of tools that we use to help students learn how to become more effective writers. And so, those are scaffolds as well. 

David Staley: Well, let's talk about some of these projects. The Majors [00:07:00] Metacognition project.

Jamie Sabel: Yes. 

David Staley: Tell us more about this, please. 

Jamie Sabel: So metacognition is something that I have been really interested in since graduate school. So, metacognition, there are many pieces that go into it, but a very general definition is how we think about our own thinking. So, how do we recognize whether or not we fully understand something and doing that, engaging in metacognition is an important way for us to recognize what we don't know and then take steps to fill that gap, to gain more knowledge, and again, more complex understanding.

So, the Majors Metacognition Project is something that I started when I was at the University of Memphis, and it involves biology majors, hence the title. And so when I first started there, I did a longitudinal study where we followed biology majors through all of the five core required courses for the biology major there at Memphis, and the idea was to get a better sense of how metacognition was developing as they progressed through the major. So, we [00:08:00] know that seniors tend to be more metacognitive than first year students, but there's not a lot that's known about how that develops in the particular pieces that go into it, and then, bringing in the scaffolds, what can we do to better support that metacognition? Again, metacognition has been linked to better success in courses and majors, so if we can get students in their first year, in their introductory biology course, engaging more in metacognition, then we can potentially help to support them to then be more successful as they go up through the major. And so, that actually, the foundation of that came from my dissertation. Like I said, I've been interested in it since graduate school, where we found that if we sat down with students and walked through a set of reflection questions with them, that they would continue to use them throughout the rest of the semester, and even though the rest of the class, the ones that didn't sit down with us for individual instruction, the rest of the class [00:09:00] still had access to those reflection questions. A few of them used them, but not a lot, mostly it was just the ones who sat down with us.

And again, every single one of them ended up using them for the rest of the semester, and those that had that instruction scored higher on their exams and their overall grade. We did control for things like GPA and ACT, SAT, so it's not that these were just higher performing students.

That said, I have to acknowledge that these are students who agreed to come in and sit with us, so certainly there's probably some motivation aspect that is involved there, but, that got me really excited that we can in fact make a difference with those students who are using them.

The problem is most of our first year introductory biology courses are very large. Here at Ohio State, one of our sections is in the six hundreds; we can't sit down with every one of those students, and so I was really interested in thinking about how can [00:10:00] we scale up this kind of instruction to make it so that it is more accessible to all students and not just those that we can sit down with.

And so, based on that longitudinal study and what we found as some of the factors that contributed to whether students engaged in metacognition or not, first we developed another acronym that we call MASTER, I told you there was another one coming.

So, MASTER is, basically those reflection questions that we were talking with students distilled down into just six. So, each letter of MASTER stands for one step that you would engage in metacognition. So, for example, M is measure your current understanding. So we have now built modules that are assignments for students that go through each one of those six steps that introduce, of course, the entire process of MASTER, but then talk students through, how would you measure your understanding? We put it in the context of content [00:11:00] that they're working at, at that stage in the intro bio course, and then we also ask them a series of questions to help them measure their understanding and then to help them really engage in using this step.

And so, we ran that for the first time last semester. We're expanding the study now to look at other populations of students, but we are finding that students are really engaging in these and that it is changing how they're thinking about their own, understanding as they go through an intro bio course.

David Staley: So these, give us an example what one of these reflection questions would be. 

Jamie Sabel: Sure. So for example, in measure your understanding, first of all, we would actually ask them, that particular one, the content, we're talking about large biological macromolecules, so things like carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, so we asked them to think about when they were reading about it and when they were talking about it in class, what did they understand, what were [00:12:00] questions they still had, and then we give them a scenario that gets a little more in depth than maybe they covered in the class, and we ask them to think about that.

And most of the time, that makes them realize, oh, well, there is something that I didn't fully understand here, so, they're actually engaging in that process of, Oh, wow, this is a little more complicated than I thought, let me go back and think about what I would need to do to address that gap in my understanding.

David Staley: So, are these reflection questions, I guess, are they being evaluated? In other words, are they part of the course that they're taking or is this part of your research study? In other words, do they have skin in the game here, I guess? 

Jamie Sabel: They have skin in the game. They absolutely do. We have to have them have skin in the game.

You know, as much as I would love for students to do it just for the sake of doing it, you know, we have to give them a little bit more motivation to do so. So yes, they are assignments that are part of the course. Now that said, they're not graded as correct or [00:13:00] incorrect because it's based on students own experiences, so it is credit for completion. But we have found that students are really engaging in them, that they've found them to be useful. So yes, I think the first one, we have to convince them, and that is certainly by giving them credit for completing it, but they do tend to really engage in them.

You know, there's always cases where students just won't do an assignment, but we're seeing a pretty high completion rate for these assignments. 

David Staley: So this is my next question, is metacognition, is thinking about their thinking, is this easy or difficult for students? 

Jamie Sabel: Oh, it's very difficult for students.

It absolutely is, and I think a lot of that comes from, a lot of science before they get to college is a lot more focused on things like memorization, and for good reason. There's nothing wrong with memorization, there are big words in science, right? I mean, I always talk at the beginning of my intro bio course, you know, we all know what the mitochondria is, right?

It's the powerhouse [00:14:00] of the cell, and I would guess that listeners probably maybe even said that. 

David Staley: You're pushing me back to my High school biology there, but.

Jamie Sabel: Exactly, exactly. It's the powerhouse of the cell. But what does that mean? What does it mean that it's the powerhouse of the cell? Yes, it makes energy, but how and why, and all those kinds of things.

And so, a lot of that prior biology learning, science learning, has been a lot more memorization focused. When you get to college, we're really asking you to start thinking more conceptually, asking you to think across systems, and that is a lot more complex. And so, a lot of times, actually, we find that the things that lead to students becoming more metacognitive are that they have to have some kind of challenge.

And often that challenge is that very first exam in intro bio, because it's asking them to think differently about concepts than they've been asked to think before, and suddenly they realize memorizing isn't just enough, even though we tell [00:15:00] them that. They don't believe us most of the time until they've actually experienced it in that first exam.

So, they have to have some kind of challenge in that way. The next thing that has to happen is that they have to have a sense that they should do something differently. So sometimes we'll have students that will tell us, I didn't do well on that first exam, so I'm pretty sure that I just need to do a lot more of the same thing.

David Staley: Or try harder. 

Jamie Sabel: Try harder, study longer, things like that. So again, they have to have that sense that they need to do something differently. Once they have that, they need to have a sense of what they can do differently. So again, sometimes we have students who say, I know that what I'm doing isn't working, but I just don't know what else to do, and that's really where these modules come in. That's how we developed them, is we can't make them have the challenge, I mean, that's not true, we can give them the first exam, but that's not always challenging for everyone. But once they've had that challenge, these modules are going to help them with both of those other [00:16:00] steps of recognizing that they need to do something differently and giving them tools to be able to learn what they can do differently.

David Staley: What or who are STEMM Ambassadors? 

Jamie Sabel: STEMM Ambassadors. So, that's a project that I have in collaboration with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So, this actually started in 2020, so we were virtual in the pandemic when we got started. So, it's STEMM Ambassadors, the second M stands for medicine. We developed this program to be able to bring in scientists, and we define scientists broadly from graduate students all the way up to PIs of labs, we bring in the scientists, in the fall, have them go through a series of workshops where we teach them skills about how to communicate their science with the public. So, they're developing a summary of their research as well as a presentation that they will give to high school students.

So, we're really challenging them to think about that you [00:17:00] know, in terms of making their science less complex to the level of a high school student. We then pair with high school classrooms, and it started just in the Memphis area, but it has expanded beyond that at this point, and we do something that is akin to a journal club with the high school students.

So, the scientists present their research in a very interactive way with the high school students. They also spend a decent amount of time talking about their own journey into becoming a scientist, how they got to doing this kind of research. And so, for the high school side, they're learning about new science that is relatively newly discovered.

They're also meeting an actual scientist and learning about their journey. So we are supporting both scientists to learn more about their communicating science to the public, while also supporting high school students to potentially see themselves as future scientists.

That was how we started. We then, about a year ago, got a grant from the NIH to expand that. So, it's an NIH SEPA [00:18:00] grant, which is a Science Education Partnership Agreement, so that grant is now allowing us to expand our training for the scientists. So, we're creating a asynchronous learning modules the scientists complete before they come into the workshops. So, we're putting some of that information that we gave them in a pre assignment essentially, and then they come into the workshop and we can really work together to help them think about how can they take this very jargony science title and reduce it to something that high school students can understand. And then, of course we go on to simplifying figures and things like that. So, that's allowing us to have a lot more hands on time with the scientists to actually support them to develop their presentations. We're also developing curriculum for high school teachers to be able to use this.

So in the past, this has really been kind of a one off thing with the [00:19:00] teachers. One off in that the scientists would come, they would have this class, and then that would kind of be the extent of how it was integrated into their curriculum. Now, it is more than one time, each classroom does see three different scientists.

So they do have that, but, you know, for high school teachers, there's so much that they have to do to align what they're doing in their classroom with state and national standards, and so what we're doing now is developing additional curriculum to help those teachers see how this could align to standards that they already have to teach and then giving them additional tools to be able to expand this and make it more than just, for this hour, the scientist is going to be here, but actually link it before and after to the rest of the content that they're talking about in class. 

David Staley: Hmm. The public communication of science I know is a field. I know there's at least an Oxford professorship that's in the public communication of science. To what degree [00:20:00] Is that part of the training, say, the graduate training of someone, say, in biology and the life sciences?

Is that a requirement? Is that an opportunity that graduate students have? 

Jamie Sabel: Not often. 

David Staley: Really?

Jamie Sabel: It's really not very often at all. And we see that as a big problem with the disconnect in how the public thinks about science, right? It's... we often see scientists as you know, we think of it as the ivory tower, right?

That the scientists are over here doing their work. It's often not the case that they are translating that into ways that someone who is not a PhD scientist would understand. And so then what happens is we end up relying on the media to to make that connection, and, you know, certainly, I think most of our media is trying to do a good job.

Maybe not everyone, but most of our media is trying to do a good job, but they also have to rely on headlines, right, headlines getting you to click on something. So if you think about how many times you've seen a [00:21:00] headline that says something like, cure for cancer found, right? There was certainly a treatment for cancer found or a major discovery as to how we could treat cancer, but we still have cancer, it's not cured, right? And so being able to have the scientists actually be able to help with that process of bringing the complex science to a level that is a lot more understandable, say by high school students, is a really important way to make sure that that science is being accurately represented.

David Staley: I know another project that you've done involves understanding plant awareness disparity, and I ask this in part because I actually have a, an interest in this area. Could you tell us a little bit more about this project?

Jamie Sabel: Absolutely. So this is one of those situations where, you know, I mentioned at the beginning that my lab overall thinks about scaffolds and that has meant that we've been able to kind of go into quite a few different fields while all pulling that together into the scaffold. So, my very [00:22:00] first PhD student, Kathryn Parsley, she's now Dr. Parsley, she actually came to me and she said, I'd love to work with you. I want to study what was at the time called plant blindness. And I said, I don't know what that is, but I will learn it and we'll work together.

And it's become something that I'm now very passionate about as well. So, it was originally called plant blindness. and that was something that had been in the literature for a while. The idea of it is that we don't necessarily see the plants around us. We tend to see it as sort of a green backdrop, so we don't pay attention to individual plants in a way that we absolutely do pay attention to individual animals. 

David Staley: Right. 

Jamie Sabel: So... 

David Staley: Look, there's a squirrel, that sort of thing. 

Jamie Sabel: There's a squirrel, right? Absolutely. And in a lot of ways, that's really important, right? If we think about our prehistoric brains, we needed to be able to see that there was a tiger.

That's maybe an extreme example, but still, you know, there's a reason for that neurologically. That said, there's a really important implications [00:23:00] for things like climate change and the ecosystem if we're not thinking about plants and their very important role in our ecosystem, they make oxygen, that's a little bit important for us. So, they are very important. So it was originally called plant blindness, but there was call from the community that that was really an ableist term. In other words, the people who, you know, are not seeing plants, it's not because they have an issue with their sight, it's just that they're not thinking about plants in the same way. And so, the person who was involved in the initial coining of the term plant blindness was Dr. Elisabeth Schussler She's now at UT, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She and Kate, worked together and Kate actually took the lead on redefining this term as plant awareness disparity.

She wrote a couple papers and the field is absolutely starting to adopt that term. So, it was very exciting. But in addition to that really important work, Kate also developed an [00:24:00] instrument, essentially a survey that instructors can use in their classes to determine the level of plant awareness disparity their students have, and the really great thing about that is if we have some sort of intervention in the class to better support students to recognize the importance of plants, they could use this instrument as a pre and post, so at the beginning of the class and the end of the class to see how well that intervention, whatever they used in the classroom, how well that worked to actually shift students to having less plant awareness disparity.

David Staley: My understanding is that children understand plants to be alive much, much later than they do say with animals. 

Jamie Sabel: That's absolutely true, and actually at the undergraduate level, we see a serious issue in that... you look surprised. They, they know plants are alive, typically. But, they don't think of plants as evolving, they don't think of plants as having DNA, they don't think of plants as going through, you know, the same kinds of [00:25:00] cellular processes that our cells do.

That becomes a problem at the undergraduate level. 

David Staley: So you begin your research career as a developmental geneticist, and now you are a biology education researcher. How did that happen? Tell us about that journey. 

Jamie Sabel: Yes. So like so many biology majors, I went to college thinking that I was going to go to med school.

I'm wanting to go to med school. I came from a very small town in Iowa, shout out to Diagonal High School. But, in that small town, for me, I loved biology. I knew I was really interested in science, and so the only thing that I knew to do, really, was to be a doctor. And so, I went to college with that in mind, and then became aware of so many other opportunities, and I got really excited about research.

And so, I went to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. One of my professors there, Dr. Jackie Brittingham, was a developmental biologist, and I took a lot of her classes, got really excited about [00:26:00] it, and then she actually helped connect me with my first job out of college, which was with a neonatologist at the University of Iowa.

His name is Dr. John Daigle, and he did developmental biology research as well. At that point we were looking at early heart development, and I loved my work there and it inspired me to then go on to graduate school. I worked with Dr. Robert Cornell also at the University of Iowa where we were looking at early zebrafish development, and it was focused on a gene called IRF6, which stands for Interferon Regulatory Factor 6, that is involved actually in humans in cleft lip and palate and so I will say zebrafish do not have a cleft lip and palate.

David Staley: I was going to ask, but...

Jamie Sabel: They do not. 

But, they are a really great model to look at early embryonic development, and so we were able to find actually that what's going on with that gene is a problem with how cells move together. And so, in the zebrafish, [00:27:00] this actually resulted in a quite dramatic trait in which the embryo would not survive even past being sort of a ball of cells, and that's because the cells weren't able to move in the right ways. So, similarly, in humans as they're developing, what happens with the lip and palate is actually cells have to move together to form those.

So, you know, there's of course a lot more involved than just this one single gene, but really cool stuff to, to allow us to see what's happening with implications for human development as well. But while I was working on that degree, I started teaching a developmental biology lab and this was a course for, almost exclusively seniors, a few juniors, and they took this course a semester after they had taken a developmental biology course, and then they came into the lab, and so it was very much all focused on using that information that they had learned the semester before, and applying it to these different embryonic models, and [00:28:00] I just got very interested in In the kinds of struggles that they would have in understanding these complex topics, but also then in applying them in the lab setting.

And it got me very interested in how can we, as instructors, better support students to bring these different ideas together from, say, the different courses that they've taken into this lab now where they need to apply a lot of different things and again, can't just rely on memorization. They need to think a lot more broadly, and that was that was the first step towards thinking more about this.

And so for me, what I do now, my teaching and my research are very closely connected. So, the things that I study in my lab are things that I have experienced as problems, as questions, as things that I've seen students struggle with in the classroom. We then bring that into the lab and we study more about it.

We develop tools to then be able to take that back into the classroom to support those students. And so, [00:29:00] that sort of process of getting excited about that is what led me then to get more involved in science education. So my PhD is in science education, I worked with Dr. Corey Forbes at the University of Nebraska. At that point, our initial research was a lot more focused on K 12 students and teachers, but again, getting back to that developmental biology lab experience, I was really interested in thinking more about the undergraduate student population. 

So, I still absolutely do work in K 12, but primarily my focus is on undergraduate students. 

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Jamie Sabel: Yes. So like I said, especially with MASTER, we're really kind of at the first stages of getting that rolled out. So, we're still testing that, making sure that it is doing what we want it to do, making sure that it's as scientifically grounded as it can be.

But that will be coming out hopefully as something that instructors much more broadly will be able to use. I do currently have four PhD students, each of them have sort [00:30:00] of different iterations of these projects. So, Kendra Wright started working on the Majors Metacognition project, but now she's focusing a lot more on student identity.

So, how can we support students to have a sense of that they are scientists, that they belong in these biology programs. Elizabeth Shriner has really been the force behind the MASTER modules. Summer Jasper has worked a lot with us on the St. Jude project, but she is kind of taking a little bit of a tangent on that and looking more specifically at the mentoring experiences, the ways in which mentoring impacts mentors themselves. So, a lot more has looked at how students are impacted by mentoring, not a lot has looked at what's happening with the mentors themselves? How are they impacted? What's their motivation? What keeps them doing it? Those kinds of things.

And then Skylar Brooks is my newest PhD student and she is really running with this STEMM ambassadors [00:31:00] project. So lots of very cool things happening. As you mentioned at the beginning, I've only been here for three months, so I'm very much also working to develop new partnerships here at Ohio State, doing a lot of research with our students in the biology major, so those are very much in development still. So, stay tuned, I'll have more to say about that hopefully soon. 

David Staley: We will indeed. Jaime Sabel. Thank you. 

Jamie Sabel: Thank you so much. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio.

More podcast and our guests can be found at go. osu. edu slash voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer. [00:32:00]