| Summary: | In this work we are reporting a course of University of Brasilia called “Topics in Biochemistry”. It is offered to second semester medicine and nutrition students (around 12) who have just finished the Basic Biochemistry Course (BioBio), plus one or two third semester students, who are taking the course for the second time, as “coordinators”. This course is composed of two parallel activities: weekly meetings for scientific discussions and the peer-tutor activity.In each meeting, one student presents an article. The topics are mostly on metabolic biochemistry, but can range from animal adaptability to Alzheimer Disease. The requisite is that the article was published in a recognized international journal (as Nature, American Journal of Physiology, New England Journal of Medicine) and is adequate for group discussion. The emphasis of the discussion is greater on the methodology of science, instead of on specific details about particular subjects. What did the authors want to prove? How did they do it? Were the conclusions valid? What were the experimental errors and omissions? How could it be a better article? Also, it’s a good opportunity to discuss statistics, methodology, and to exercise the sense of criticism. Overall, the objective of these discussions is to teach students how to make science and criticize science. The second attribution of the course is the peer-tutor activity. Each student is responsible for tutoring a BioBio group on a seminar/poster presentation (Hermes-Lima et al., Biochem. Mol.Biol.Educ. 30: 30-34,2002) and is responsible for evaluating their group, always supervised by the coordinating professor. Moreover, they must elaborate a “true or false” exam (Sé et al. Are tutor-students capable of writing good biochemistry exams? SBBq 2004, abstract K-18) and help with other activities as the 9-hour exam elaboration (Sé et al. A 9-hour biochemistry exam. An iron man competition or a good way of evaluating undergraduate students? SBBq 2005, abstract K-6), both exams are applied in BioBio, they also participate on the exams correction.
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