Mixing "Hot" Scientific Topics with Critical Thinking Skills
Professor's Casual Style Belies Intensity of Her Pedagogy

by Anne C. Paine

Professor Jan Thornton (second from left) listens as a student makes a point in her "hot topics" course. In fact, she listens quite a bit in this course, allowing students to lead the discussions, ask questions, and draw conclusions about the journal articles they read.

Students rarely request that a professor teach a class in addition to the full load she's already teaching. But that's how the Current Topics in Biology and Neuroscience course came to be.

During the fall 1999 semester, biology major Charlie Nokes '00 formed a journal club with other students as a way to keep up with current literature. The discussions were stimulating, but the students were sometimes stumped by accounts of complicated experiments or sophisticated techniques.

So Nokes asked his advisor, Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Jan Thornton, to turn the club into a class. Thornton graciously agreed. The course meets once a week and covers a wide range of subjects, from cancer research and transgenic plants to time perception and cystic fibrosis gene therapy. Grades are based on participation in discussions on articles assigned for each week.

"This class is much more like graduate school. I'm assuming the students have the background knowledge so we can really discuss some of the current, dynamic scientific literature," Thornton said. "The students came up with the topics for discussion, and they're doing the work. They're learning more about the subjects that interest them and about cutting-edge research. They're getting to see not only the scientific issues, but also the ethical, moral, and economic issues involved. I'm just here as a resource person."

A recent session focused on the placebo effect and possible neurological mechanisms to explain it. The conversation -- an easy give and take punctuated by much laughter -- leaped from topic to topic: the ethics of placebo surgery; whether desperately ill patients can really give informed consent when participating in medical trials; the role of social learning and classical conditioning in the placebo effect; and how to design a study that accurately measures something subjective like pain.

Keeping with Thornton's teaching style, the class is both casual and intense.

"I'm very concerned about critical thinking. I want students to learn experimental design and analysis so they can understand when science has been done properly. In all the classes I teach, I use primary literature and work on experimental design and analysis," she said in an interview in her office, which also suits her style, decorated with brain-related toys, artwork done by her 11-year-old daughter, and shelves and shelves of thick science books.

"She's very realistic," said Nokes, who has worked in Thornton's lab. "She wants to train you as a scientist, not just put information in your head."

That's not to say her classes don't pack an information punch, however. Isaac Natter '01, a neuroscience major who has taken several courses with Thornton, described her Neuroendocrinology course.

"She knew the material well and presented it with amazing clarity, succinctness, and relevance," he said. "I don't think there was a wasted sentence spoken in that classroom. I had more work for that class and the accompanying lab than I did for my other classes combined that semester, but every assignment was relevant. And the tests had less to do with recall than with putting what we had learned to use in novel ways."

Thornton, who is also the neuroscience program director, focuses her research on how hormones exert their effect on the brain to affect behavior. She didn't always dream of being a neuroscientist.

"I originally thought about going into journalism," she said. "In my junior year of college, I took a class in physiological psychology -- the biological basis of behavior -- and became greatly interested in it. I changed my major to psychology and spent an extra year in undergraduate work. I was a first generation college student -- I didn't even know what a Ph.D. was. I had a work-study job in the costume shop of the theater, but was able to get another job working with animals in the labs and helping professors with their research. I found something I really loved, I learned about graduate school, and went on."

"I like Oberlin because it's fun to teach here," she continued. "Students are academically bright and academically serious. They want to learn, and they appreciate when you challenge them."

Oberlin Joins Engineering Forces with Caltech

Oberlin's new partnership with the California Institute of Technology brings to four the number of universities with which Oberlin has 3/2 engineering programs.

In this program, the student spends the first three years at Oberlin and the next two at the engineering school, graduating with a B.A. from Oberlin and a B.S. in engineering from the engineering school.

"The partnership with Caltech strengthens opportunities for Oberlin science students," said Oberlin's engineering advisor Taylor Allen, a biomedical engineer who's also an assistant professor of biology.

"In addition to the broad appeal of Caltech's traditional engineering programs, Caltech's major in computation and neural systems might interest Oberlin neuroscience students, and its program in environmental-engineering science complements Oberlin's major in environmental studies."

Richard McKelvey '66, professor of political science at Caltech, helped forge the new partnership. Oberlin's other 3/2 partners are Case Western Reserve University, Washington University, and the University of Pennsylvania.