Within the strikingly green McGaugh Hall, sometimes known as the “emerald city of UCI,” past the walkways stocked with emergency eye-wash stations, sits biological sciences professor Pavan Kadandale’s office.
The office features a mini fridge, microwave, Nespresso and common pantry items such as Jelly Bellys and seasonings for lunches — all the necessities one would find at home. Although the room has enough chairs to fit a small lab class, Kadandale opts to use a standing desk to accommodate students during his office hours.
Other key items arranged — or in Kadandale’s words, “scattered” — on a desk and within a bookshelf include colorful hats from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, graduation photos, a look-alike Academy Award trophy for “best professor” and a collection of mugs, one of which is labeled as “Student tears (still warm).”
In addition to these items — all of which have been gifted to Kadandale by former students — are a wide collection of letters of appreciation. As a professor who meets 800 to a thousand students per year, these notes serve as a reminder of the impact Kadandale makes as a professor.
“It’s easy to forget the kind of impact that you can have on students,” Kadandale told New University. “I love saving those cards because they constantly remind me of the weight that I carry in terms of how much I can impact a student’s life, both negatively and positively. I try to always make it positive, and they also inspire me to try and be better.”
During Kadandale’s exams, one would find an unexpected scene of energetic students and loud voices commanding the room as peers collaborate on the test.
“I think the least important thing [you] should learn from me is biochemistry,” Kadandale said. “If you can teach them skills, like critical thinking or how to analyze data or solve complex problems, then I think those are very transferable.”
Kadandale is a professor in microbiology and biochemistry. His research in facilitating effective learning and biology focuses on the pursuit of how best to teach critical thinking skills and how assessments at the college level can best serve students’ needs.
There is an underlying assumption that any information not initially grasped by students through the process of memorization will be quickly understood by the student the next time they come into contact with the material. According to Kadandale, this notion is commonly accepted but had not been thoroughly tested until Kadandale and his colleagues proved it wrong.
“We found over and over again that these hypothesis strings are false,” Kadandale said. “So if you just cover material, it doesn’t actually make students learn it better the second time. So it was very counterintuitive. But for me, that was really important because it makes you realize that content should not be what we focus on.”
Kadandale always knew he was destined for academia, but it wasn’t until his postdoctoral career at UC San Diego around 2010 that he had a series of “wake-up calls.” One of which happened after a workshop, when he and his colleagues made an effort to learn more about the existence of racism in the classroom from graduate students.
“It was eye-opening,” Kadandale told New University. “I realized so many times we go into the classroom and we teach something, but we don’t realize what was actually taken in by students and those could be completely different things.”
In his quest for assessing critical thinking, Kadandale created an unorthodox way of giving his students exams, which he breaks into three key components.
The first stage happens before test day, through what he calls “challenges.” Students are given data from an experiment to sift through on their own for a week. During this time, students are free to use any available resources at their disposal. Then, the day of the exam is a “free for all.” Students are encouraged to roam around the classroom, trade answers with peers or Google among themselves — a problem-solving practice more akin to the real world.
Kadandale said the method solves a wide array of problems created by traditional assessment strategies by offering a period of collaboration and experimentation.
“It solves many different problems,” said Kadandale. “So one is, for example, if a student had English as their second language, now they have a whole week to work with the data so they can really analyze it and take their time to understand what’s going on.”
After the free-response portion, students return to individual work with a set of multiple-choice questions based on the original data. This is the only portion of the challenge that Kadandale grades. In the data of the challenge results, Kadandale has found that oftentimes the individual free response portion correlates with the student’s final response, making the “challenge” method a more successful tool in assessing critical thinking than traditional strategies.
Kadandale finds that his method has a positive effect on student performance; this “free for all” structure encourages student collaboration, or what he calls “learning communities.”
“Students who work in learning communities actually end up doing better in the class,” Kadandale said. “And more importantly, there’s disproportionate impacts on students from underrepresented groups who do better because of these learning communities.”
After 13 years of research at UC Irvine, student impact is what keeps Kadandale going.
“I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is there is never going to be one magic bullet,” Kadandale told New University. “There’s never gonna be one thing that you do that’s magically gonna change everyone’s lives, right? … The more things you put in that are gonna be effective, the greater the probability that you’re gonna hit more students and have it be a meaningful experience for more students.”
As the wide collection of letters from past students continues to accumulate on his bookshelf, Kadandale sits — or rather, stands — in his office and considers his driving question.
“How do I, every year, get a little bit better and a little bit better?”
Editor’s Note: Dr. Kadandale’s title was corrected to Professor instead of Assistant Professor
Emma Richman is a Features Intern for the spring 2025 quarter. She can be reached at richmane@uci.edu.
Edited by Annia Pallares zur Nieden and Sofia Feeney.