Unwrapping Enzyme Kinetics

How the Cereal Crumbles

“…This study investigates the use of these practices on student learning and confidence of enzyme kinetics and thermodynamics in an introductory biology course. A wide variety of active learning methods exist for teaching enzyme kinetics; they include use of toothpicks, beans (Hinckley, 2012), marbles (Runge et al, 2006), nuts and bolts (Junker, 2010; Lechner, 2011; Silverstein, 2011), pennies (House et al, 2016), modeling clay (Friedman & Terry, 2020), or candy (Berndsen et al, 2020). Assessment of an activity using plastic building bricks in a cell biology course demonstrated student improvements in interpreting and discussing Michaelis-Menten and Lineweaver-Burk graphs and the effects of substrate concentration and addition of competitive and noncompetitive inhibitors (Darling et al, 2021), as well as improvements in students visualizing V max and K m .…”

“…Interviews, concept inventories, and writing exercises conducted by several research groups have identified common challenges and misconceptions relating to energy, enzyme kinetics, and enzymatic interactions (Bretz & Linenberger, 2012; Halim et al, 2018) that we have taken into consideration in our instructional plan. Challenges include visualizing V max and K m (Runge et al, 2006; Darling et al, 2021; Berndsen et al, 2020), interpreting graphs with rates or unfamiliar representations of time (Rodriguez et al, 2019; Rodriguez & Towns, 2020), and identifying if energy is absorbed or released when bonds form or are broken (Bain & Towns, 2018). Fostering student reasoning of core concepts that relate to diverse disciplinary contexts may help to reinforce learning of Gibbs energy and enzyme kinetics that are often presented as separate topics in texts (Bain & Towns, 2018; Bearne, 2012).…”

“…This study investigates the use of these practices on student learning and confidence of enzyme kinetics and thermodynamics in an introductory biology course. A wide variety of active learning methods exist for teaching enzyme kinetics; they include use of toothpicks, beans (Hinckley, 2012), marbles (Runge et al, 2006), nuts and bolts (Junker, 2010;Lechner, 2011;Silverstein, 2011), pennies (House et al, 2016), modeling clay (Friedman & Terry, 2020), or candy (Berndsen et al, 2020).…”

“…The visualization observations are consistent with an association between a similar activity and visualizing V max and turnover number (Runge et al, 2006). An additional recent report describes survey data showing improved student confidence in analyzing enzyme kinetics data, calculating kinetic constants, and making appropriate figures of numerical data (Berndsen et al, 2020).…”