Abstract 2668 Mentorship in the Classroom: How a Social Constructivist Approach to Teaching Introductory Biochemistry from the Primary Literature Can Serve as an Intensive Mentorship

Mentored research is a high-impact practice due to its fostering students' autonomy, developing their confidence as scientists, and offering them an environment in which they begin to act the part of a member of the scientific community. Can we create a similar educational space in the biochemistry classroom? Here, we present a curriculum in which students work in teams to identify core concepts from the life sciences primary literature. This social constructivist pedagogy uses cholinergic neurotransmission as a central theme, with students deriving their own understanding of traditional content, such as enzyme and binding kinetics, structural biochemistry, and basic molecular biology techniques.