Bio:
Dr. Wenderoth received her Ph.D. in 1988 from the Department of Physiology at Rush University in Chicago. She worked with Dr. Brenda (Eisenberg) Russell on the remodeling mechanism of the thick filament of cardiomyocytes. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow and research scientist in Dr. Stephen Hauschka's laboratory in the Biochemistry Department of the University of Washington on muscle creatine kinase gene regulation and muscle differentiation.
Her interest in teaching lead her to a part-time teaching position at Green River Community College and then back to the Zoology Department at the University of Washington. She began a collaboration with Dr. Harold Modell on revising her teaching to more fully incorporate active learning into her classroom. She was a Co-PI with Dr. Modell on a grant from NSF-CCLI (Course Curriculum and Laboratory Investigation)-”Active Learning as a Basis for Reform of Undergraduate Life Science Education”. She has since worked on a DOE- FIPSE grant with colleagues at BYU-“Disseminating a Package of Best Practices for Teaching and Assessing Analytical Reasoning in Biology”
She is a member of the Department of Biology's Biology Education Research Group(BERG). BERG conducts research to improve student learning in Biology. Dr.Wenderoth was a member of the FIRST (Faculty Initiative to Reform Science Teaching)team from 2002-2005, the UW team selected to attend the HHMI Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in 2006 and has served as a facilitator at this meeting in 2007 and 2008. She was recently selected to be a Biology Scholar by the American Microbiology Society.
She is currently co-director of the UW Teaching Academy, the Teaching and Learning Consortium, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Symposium and she is director of the UW Institute of Teaching Excellence.
She organizes 12 sections of Large Lecture Success for the First Year's Program during Dawg Daze and is involved with UW Career Discovery Week.
She received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001 and was voted the Professor of the Year by the graduating class of 2007.
Research Interests:
 UW- Biology Education Research Group web page-http://uw-berg.wetpaint.com/
My research interests focus on how to help students learn Biology. The 2001 findings of the National Research Council on How People Learn, indicated that three areas are critical to student learning; confronting misconceptions students hold about the discipline, creating a framework to organize facts of the discipline, and enhancing student metacognition (monitoring their learning).
To help students build more robust and mechanistic understanding of physiology, I have integrated the use of General Models (GM) (Modell 2001)into all my classes. My initial research shows that students who use GM when answering exam questions provide more robust answers that earn more points. I also have students create Summary Sheets, a pictorial form of concept map, to help them form connections between the various parts of each physiological system.
To encourage metacogniton, I have students do weekly reflective paragraphs on what they have learned (not memorized) each week.
My colleagues and I recently developed the Blooming Biology Tool (BBT), an assessment tool based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, to assist science faculty in better aligning their assessments with their teaching activities and to help students enhance their study skills and metacognition. We created the BLASt (Bloom's based Learning Activities for Students) to help students develop study skills that better meet the academic challenge of their courses.
Future research questions will address the effectiveness of various class assignments on enhancing student metacognition.
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Selected Publications:
UW- Biology Education Research Group web page-
http://uw-berg.wetpaint.com/
Crowe, A., C. Dirks, and M.P. Wenderoth. (2008) Biology in Bloom: Implementing Bloom’s Taxonomy to Enhance Student Learning in Biology. CBE-Life Science Education 7(4):368-381
Freeman,S., E. O’Connor, J. W. Parks, M. Cunningham, D. Hurley, D. Haak, C. Dirks, M.P. Wenderoth. (2007) Prescribed Active Learning Increases Performance in Introductory Biology. CBE—Life Sciences Education (CBE-LSE)6,132-139.
Modell, H., J.A. Michael, and M.P. Wenderoth. (2005) Helping the learner to learn: The role of Uncovering Misconceptions. American Biology Teacher 67(1): 20-25.
Michael, J.A., M.P. Wenderoth, and H.Modell, W. Cliff ,B. Horwitz, P. McHale, D. Richardson, D. Silverthorn,S. Williams and S. Whitescarver (2002). Undergraduate's understanding of cardiovascular phenomena. Adv. Physiol. Educ. 26:72-84.
Teaching Interests:
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