Workshop: Teaching Variant Curation through Team-based, Active Learning Approaches

Single nucleotide variant (SNV) curation is an important skill to develop for students in genetic counseling, genomics, and bioinformatics master’s programs. It is also a common subject for continuing education workshops for professionals working in clinical genetics roles. While the number of evidence categories and scoring criteria can be intimidating for new learners, the process lends itself well to team-based, active learning approaches in the classroom. This workshop will use the ACMG/AMP standards and guidelines for germline SNV interpretation as a case study for developing classroom activities that engage learners, develop variant analysis skills, and build confidence in the curation process for students. Throughout the workshop, participants will gain hands-on experience designing instructional activities for clinical genetics concepts, assessing the effectiveness of the activities, and constructing an instructional scaffold to guide learners to mastery of the curation process. Participants will also discuss the benefits of teaching in a team-based, active modality. While the workshop will focus on in-person educational formats, there will also be discussion of how to adapt the same activities to synchronous, online delivery and self-paced, solo learners.

Learning Objectives

• Design team-based, active learning activities for teaching genetics concepts
• Assess the effectiveness of active learning activities
• Plan an educational approach to develop students' skills in SNV interpretation
• Describe the benefits of team-based learning approaches for students