NEWS RELEASE

Contact: Leah Jackson (jacksonl@nsula.edu )
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466

9/03/2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NATCHITOCHES- Northwestern State University students taking anatomy, physiology and microbiology will be using textbook companions authored by an NSU biology instructor and a nursing student.

Published this fall by McGraw-Hill Higher Education, the three companions to standard textbooks were jointly authored by Dr. Ray Kumar of the department of biological sciences and Sharon Lindsay of Shreveport, an undergraduate student pursuing an associate degree in nursing.

"When I started teaching at the Shreveport campus of NSU, I realized that the nursing student population is mostly compiled of single mothers working full-time," Kumar said. "The students quite often complained that by mere reading, they begin to doze and soon fall asleep. The failure rates in various classes were usually almost 40-50 percent."

To keep his students interested, Kumar began formulating study questions to give the students as homework.

"This proved very popular and the class results began to improve. In their evaluation of my teaching, the students highlighted the importance of study questions. The head of Biological Sciences foresaw the importance of the study questions and suggested that they should be published." Kumar said, recognizing Dr. Michael Bodri for his support in matters relating to scholarship and learning.

"It is such an overwhelming amount of information, that students tend to get discouraged and do not retain anything they read or study," Lindsay said. "This book supplies a great amount of important information providing a foundation needed for the practical and critical thinking skills that are an integral part of many science-based professions."

Questions for the workbooks are written in multiple choice, matching and true/false form. Each workbook contains about 1,000 questions aimed at helping students learn life sciences by problem solving. Questions are designed to stimulate thinking and pique curiosity in the student are sharpen their critical faculties by applying the concepts and processes that are a part of the way the human body and microbes are structured and how they function, Kumar said.

"These companions were developed to guide and supplement the students studying and self-testing skills," Kumar said. "The number and type of questions are focused on applying the content, analyzing, and applying knowledge that will require critically and thoroughly thinking through each question. The questions are geared at encouraging the students to think about and apply the concepts they have studied in each chapter."

"I looked at it from a student's point of view," Lindsay said. "The questions were assimilated to provide a strategy for active learning, assist in building vocabulary and making well-reasoned interpretations and decisions."

The workbooks were developed over about a year with the help of constructive criticism from students attending classes the last three semesters.

"I found Sharon a dedicated and an extremely hardworking student. She brought students' perspective to the companions. I therefore have had no hesitation in inviting here to be my coauthor," Kumar said.

"It made me feel really good that Dr. Kumar put his trust in my ability to help him complete this goal," Lindsay said. "It has been a rewarding experience not only because the book was published by McGraw-Hill, but also it gave me the opportunity to recap or review the most important concepts and processes and enhance my depth of understanding of the human body.

The seed money for the project was provided to Kumar by an anonymous donor from Basel, Switzerland.

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