APPENDIX 24
Memorandum from the Centre for Bioscience,
part of the Higher Education Academy
By way of introduction, the Centre for Bioscience
promotes and supports high quality learning, teaching and assessment
in UK higher education as part of The Higher Education Academy
network. The aim of the Centre is to support learning and teaching
at a discipline level recognising that for many staff in higher
education it is at this level where networking and exchange takes
place.
In principle, this response covers issues in
the teaching of bioscience in higher education but specifically
refers to examples within Biochemistry and Pharmacology.
(1) The previous suggestions about changes
in the weightings given to science subjects in the teaching funding
formula would have been disastrous for Biochemistry and Pharmacology
departments. The equipment (mass spec, DNA sequencing etc) and
running expenses (eg for cell culture and molecular biology) costs
are similar to those for Chemistry.
(2) The mechanism by which Chemistry (and
Physics) Departments [whether teaching only or not] might be supported
should be by encouraging students to take these courses rather
than funding the departments directly. This is a difficult problem.
Students might be encouraged by bursaries as is done for PGCE,
but they also need encouragement from their schools to apply to
take degrees in Chemistry and Physics. Public relations and outreach
activities are also important in informing school students about
science, and children need to see role models. This latter has
clearly happened with respect to forensics and TV programmes.
(3) With respect to teaching-only departments,
the material taught needs to be up to date and cutting edge. Teaching
needs to be linked with research in some sort of way, even if
the university teachers themselves are not actually doing active
research at the time (but have done it in the past). We have collaborated
recently in the Higher Education Academy project Linking Teaching
and Research which suggests ways of doing this, and which also
features a number of case-studies [http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/ltr].
Engagement with research and with how research is carried out
is important in the training of university science students. The
QAA Benchmark statements for Bioscience and for Agriculture, Forestry,
Agricultural Sciences, Food Sciences and Consumer Sciences, stress
that an understanding of how research is carried out is vital,
and specifically mention the value of the final-year research
project, which is offered by practically all bioscience departments,
as a way of achieving this.
(4) With respect to students reading for
bioscience degrees (especially Biochemistry and Pharmacology)
rather than Chemistry or Physics degrees, a knowledge of Chemistry
(and some Physics) is vital in order to comprehend the subjects
and to progress. The techniques of analysis, etc, used by biochemists
and pharmacologists are principally chemical ones (see below).
Our contacts in the pharmaceutical industry regard students' present
knowledge as inadequate, for example. There is requirement for
imaginative service teaching by Chemistry departments, and the
importance of this should be recognised (financially). Chemistry
departments have in the past not been good at teaching Chemistry
to bioscience students in an imaginative way: teaching "Chemistry
for Biologists" requires different emphases than for straight
Chemistry or indeed for "Chemistry for Engineers". The
provision of service courses is of course recognised by universities
by a distribution of financial resource, but the total financial
cake is the same: it is simply divided in different ways under
the present system.
(5) It is noticeable that students leaving
school take Biology courses (including Biochemistry and Pharmacology,
but also Forensic Science) because they think that these are "easier"
and are actually more interesting subjects than Chemistry. Students
think that by taking "easier", less rigorous subjects
they will more readily achieve higher grades. However, although
they may indeed achieve better grades at "A" level,
chemical knowledge is vital to their studies in Biochemistry and
Pharmacology. Here again more information at the school level
is what is needed to get them to understand this. This will not
come about while Physics and some Chemistry in schools are taught
in a way which students find difficult to relate to their everyday
experiences, often by Biology graduates with little chemical background,
or by Physics and Chemistry graduates of low ability. The PGCE
scheme should go some way to correcting this, and the Royal Society
of Chemistry is also helping, but there is a long way to go.
January 2005
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