TABLE 3.

Example of a portion of the semistructured interview protocol informed by the open-ended survey (Figure 1, arrow B) question about important representations used when thinking about protein function (Table 2)

Interview prompts pertaining to representations
1. In the survey, there was a question asking you to list and describe the types of representations you use, and how you use them, when thinking about or explaining protein function. You provided the following representations:
A. Enzyme assays: chemical reaction drawings help us to understand how the parts of a protein catalyze a reaction.
B. Molecular visualization: ligand binding demonstrates if a substrate binds to an active site.
i. Enzyme assays
ii. Chemical reaction drawings
1. How the parts of a protein catalyze a reaction
iii. Molecular visualization
1. Ligand binding
Could you please talk me through:
a) How you would use each representation to reason about protein function?
b) What types of biochemistry representations are useful for students to be familiar with to help them in this course?
c) How you would like students to use them?
d) What you observed students doing with each representation?
e) Whether these representations are new to the students, or did they have some previous experiences with them? If so, describe the experiences they had.
f) How would you know if students were having difficulties and whether they were improving?
g) What type of things did students do to practice and overcome these difficulties?