In this series, we speak with instructors who lead different sections of the Core Curriculum to learn what they love about engaging with College students. This month we chat about Frontiers of Science with Bita Alaghebandan GSAS’24, a lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences. Alaghebandan has been teaching the Core since 2024.
What is the best part about teaching the Core Curriculum?
The best part is that I’m not just teaching future scientists. I’m teaching students who will go on to become lawyers, policymakers and parents who will have to make decisions for their children. It completely changes how I approach my role as a science educator, because I think there’s a real responsibility that comes with teaching students how to evaluate evidence and make informed decisions. Most of them will forget the details of a particular experiment, and that’s OK. What I hope they carry with them far beyond this class are the scientific habits of mind that we work on building throughout the semester. I try to encourage them to always ask: How do we know this? What is the evidence? How confident can we be in this claim? And my favorite question: What evidence would I need to see to change my mind?
What I think is so special about the Core is that it offers students ways of thinking that they can carry with them into entirely different domains, and science is such a crucial part of that conversation. Learning how to reason under uncertainty is not just a scientific skill. I believe it’s a civic skill that everyone should be taught.
How do you innovate and/or bring your own spin to Frontiers?
I try to make my seminars less about receiving science and more about doing the intellectual work of science. One thing I try to do with my students is take the scientific reasoning we practice in the classroom and apply it to the kinds of information they might encounter in their daily lives. There is one activity that I like to do called Science and the Media, where I’ll share a news article that makes a specific claim, and then we trace that claim back to the original research. We evaluate the research paper as a class and try to determine what gets lost, or exaggerated, as findings move from a science journal to various media outlets.
This year, I want to take that a step further by having students evaluate scientific claims made in a viral short-form video. This is increasingly how people encounter information, so I want them to have a framework for approaching it. For me, the goal is to make the skills we teach in Frontiers feel useful far beyond the classroom. Most of my students might never read through a scientific paper again after this course, but they will encounter claims about their health, new technologies or the world around them. I want them to leave the course knowing how to interrogate those claims and decide for themselves how much confidence the evidence deserves.
What are you teaching that feels especially relevant for this year?
This year, we’re covering topics ranging from nuclear weapons, to CRISPR and gene editing, all the way to climate science — all of which feel particularly timely. But I think the most relevant thing I can teach is the scientific process itself and how to use that process to evaluate evidence and recognize misinformation.
We are surrounded by more voices and claims than ever. Whether those claims come from social media, public figures or trusted institutions, it can be difficult to decide where to place our confidence. Our instinct is often to form an opinion before doing the intellectual work, and science requires us to pause and interrogate our assumptions. It’s a disciplined way of thinking that can be applied to a range of topics and conversations.
That’s why I think science education has to be about so much more than simply teaching what we know. We also have to teach how we got there. I don’t want to tell my students what or whom to believe. I want to give them the tools to figure that out for themselves.
What has been your favorite Core Curriculum teaching moment?
My favorite moments are when I see a shift in the way a student is thinking. They might start out completely convinced by one interpretation of the data, and then they’ll notice something they hadn’t considered before and suddenly think, ‘Wait a minute … .’
I love watching that happen in real time because you can almost see the wheels turning. That shift, from being a consumer of information to becoming an evaluator of evidence, is what I love to see most.
