Amy and the role of proteins: a slogan - "proteins are needed for…"
Amy was a participant in the Understanding Science project. Amy was in her first term of A level biology. One of the things she was studying was proteins:
"because proteins do lots of things…they’re used for growth and repair, and they form different things like apparently (sic) insulin is a protein"
Amy admitted to be surprised that insulin, which was “made in the pancreas which controls blood glucose levels” should be a protein. She had not expected this “just because you were never told”. She has also now learnt that “apparently (sic) haemoglobin is a protein”. Amy explained that
“it’s just cause like, up until GCSE you’re just told that like you know a protein is something which is used for growth and repair, and not that it can be used to make sort of something like insulin”
It seems that at GCSE level Amy learnt a slogan relating to the role of proteins – proteins are needed for growth and repair, but a slogan that only related to a processes, without any suggestion of how this might relate to materials and structures. Insulin is considered to be linked to (processes of) sugar regulation, and haemoglobin to (processes of) supplying cells with oxygen. Neither of these processes are seen as growth or repair. It seems ‘repair’ is primarily understood in terms of damage at the level of tissues, not individual cells or molecules.
This could be considered as an example of a fragmentation learning impediment – the student has not made the link. However, if her school teaching was in terms of the slogan ‘proteins are needed for growth and repair’, then this could also be seen as a pedagogic learning impediment (a type of grounded learning impediment), as that way of teaching gave Amy a way of thinking about the roles of protein in the body which did not make her receptive to learning that molecules such as insulin and haemoglobin might be proteins.
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Dr Keith S Taber kst24@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education