How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour

In the second article in the series, I will describe how the young Karl von Frisch, later to become another founding father of ethology and Nobel Laureate, defied established authority to design simple yet logically clever experiments to show that honey bees indeed have colour vision. His experiments forever changed our view of animals and also the way experiments in animal behaviour are designed. It might interest readers to know that Karl von Frisch’s experiments described in this part inspired Tinbergen’s experiments described in the previous article in this series.     

Connections and critique: Feminist pedagogy and science teacher education

In this article, we authors and feminist science and teacher educators share assignments we developed and used in our undergraduate and graduate teacher education classes. We designed these varied assignments to help students feel comfortable with science, to begin to understand and critique the many ways science has been narrowly and powerfully shaped and has marginalized significant groups of individuals, and to begin to deconstruct scientific knowledge and construct alternative views of science and science education that are gender and culture sensitive. We also challenged them to use what they were learning to develop pedagogical strategies that would be inviting to their own students. The focus of the article is our students' reactions to these assignments and how these reactions—both inviting and resisting—informed us about their notions of science, of teaching, of themselves as learners, and of the social context in which they would teach. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 897–918, 1998.     

“But at school … I became a bit shy”: Korean immigrant adolescents’ discursive participation in science classrooms

In reform-based science curricula, students’ discursive participation is highly encouraged as a means of science learning as well as a goal of science education. However, Asian immigrant students are perceived to be quiet and passive in classroom discursive situations, and this reticence implies that they may face challenges in discourse-rich science classroom learning environments. Given this potentially conflicting situation, the present study aims to understand how and why Asian immigrant students participate in science classroom discourse. Findings from interviews with seven Korean immigrant adolescents illustrate that they are indeed hesitant to speak up in classrooms. Drawing upon cultural historical perspectives on identity and agency, this study shows how immigrant experiences shaped the participants’ othered identity and influenced their science classroom participation, as well as how they negotiated their identities and situations to participate in science classroom and peer communities. I will discuss implications of this study for science education research and science teacher education to support classroom participation of immigrant students.     

Non-Athletic High-School Contests: 40,000 Orchestras 600,000 Debaters

Great teachers understand the fundamental difference between motivation and inspiration: motivation is self-focused and inspiration is other focused. Exceptional teachers guide students to greatness by inspiring them to discover where their talents and passions intersect. For today's besieged classroom teacher, the desire to motivate students often springs from a place of self-concern: "I want to change your behavior with a reward or incentive so that, if you meet the targets or goals I set for you, this will help me meet my own needs and goals." Students are highly motivated to perform when they first come to school. The question is not "how can students be motivated?" but rather, "how can educators be deterred from diminishing—even destroying—student motivation and morale through their policies and practices?"     

Reality is broken to be rebuilt: how a gamer’s mindset can show science educators new ways of contribution to science and world?

This paper presents a review of Jane McGonigal’s book, “Reality is broken” (Reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. Penguin Press, New York, 2011). As the book subtitle suggests it is a book about “why games make us better and how they can change the world”, written by a specialist in computer game design. I will try to show the relevance this book might have to science educators through emphasizing the points that the author offers as the fixes to rebuild reality on the image of gaming world. Using cultural-historical activity theory, I will explore how taking up a gamer mindset can challenge one to consider shortcomings in current approaches to the activity of teaching–learning science and how using this mindset can open our minds to think of new ways of engaging in the activity of doing science. I hope this review will encourage educators to explore the worldview presented in the book and use it to transform our thinking about science education.     

How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour

In this article, I will describe how a simple, curiosity-based experiment to understand how ants are smart enough to choose the shortest path led the exploration of self-organization and swarm-intelligence and resulted in major applications in computer science and optimization algorithms. The focus will be on curiosity, simplicity, interdisciplinarity, and being unmindful of immediate applications.     

What goes before the CART? Introducing classification trees with Arbor and CODAP

This volume is largely about nontraditional data; this paper is about a nontraditional visualization: classification trees. Using trees with data will be new to many students, so rather than beginning with a computer algorithm that produces optimal trees, we suggest that students first construct their own trees, one node at a time, to explore how they work, and how well. This build-it-yourself process is more transparent than using algorithms such as CART; we believe it will help students not only understand the fundamentals of trees, but also better understand tree-building algorithms when they do encounter them. And because classification is an important task in machine learning, a good foundation in trees can prepare students to better understand that emerging and important field. We also describe a free online tool—Arbor—that students can use to do this, and note some implications for instruction.     

Professional development in person: identity and the construction of teaching within a high school science department

This is a narrative inquiry into the role of professional development in the construction of teaching practice by an exemplary urban high school science teacher. I collected data during 3 years of ethnographic participant observation in Marie Gonzalez’s classroom. Marie told stories about her experiences in ten years of professional development focused on inquiry science teaching. I use a social practice theory lens to analyze my own stories as well as Marie’s. I make the case that science teaching is best understood as mediated by socially-constructed identities rather than as the end-product of knowledge and beliefs. The cognitive paradigm for understanding teachers’ professional learning fails to consistently produce transformations of teaching practice. In order to design professional development with science teachers that is generative of new knowledge, and is self-sustaining, we must understand how to build knowledge of how to problematize identities and consciously use social practice theory.     

Book reviews

This study examines Black student and parental perceptions of exclusionary practices of Black school principals. I ask why students and parents viewed two Black principals as contributing to abusive and exclusionary school environments that marginalized Black students. After a two-year ethnographic study, it was revealed that exclusionary behaviors toward Black students—which was viewed as “abuse” by students and parents—was a reproduction of the district's racism, and thus adds new considerations for discussions around the value of racially-like (i.e., all Black) educators and students. Parents perceived these two Black principals as dealing more harshly and rigidly with the Black students and their families; moreover, analysis of the interview data revealed that the principals rejected the cultural and social capital, and proclivities of Black students, and blamed Black students for their lower achievement and unique behaviors. I draw significant attention to the larger contexts of White supremacy and racism as I examine how Black principals negotiate their own roles, how they understand their own treatment of urban Black students, and how they are (knowing or unknowingly) reproducing oppressive practices of White supremacy on Black students in school.     

Metacognition,comprehension monitoring,and the adult reader

This article provides an overview and synthesis of the current literature on metacognition and comprehension monitoring among adult readers. It is organized around three major research questions: (1) How do adults conceptualize their own comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities? (2) How effectively do adults evaluate and regulate their ongoing efforts to understand? (3) How successfully do adults assess the final products of their comprehension efforts? Cutting across these broad issues are questions concerning metacognitive differences as a function of reading ability, academic success, domain expertise, developmental level, and task variables. The research reveals that adults' conceptions of how they comprehend and how they monitor their comprehension are quite variable. In general, those who have more expertise, who are better readers, and who are more successful students seem to have greater awareness and control of their own cognitive activities while reading. The research also reveals that adults evaluate and regulate their ongoing efforts to understand, although there is considerable room for improvement in these skills. Finally, the research shows that adults are remarkably unsuccessful at assessing how well they have comprehended a text and whether or not they are ready to take a test on the material. The article closes with a discussion of recent intervention efforts aimed at enhancing the metacognitive skills of adult readers.     

Understanding creative cultural divergence: a Bakhtinian reflection from a culture-crossing scholar

I respond to Baron and Chen’s article on creative cultural divergence, which they describe as the novel pedagogy of diverging from culturally generated educational expectations. Their article provides an analysis on how an experienced Taiwanese teacher drew on different forms of creative cultural divergence to facilitate students’ critical thinking and science inquiry. To better understand the phenomenon of creative cultural divergence, I draw on Bakhtin’s concepts of outsideness, novelization, and internally persuasive discourse to analyze how these divergences are produced. These concepts not only help us to understand the phenomenon of creative cultural divergence, they also help me to reflect on my own culture-crossing experience. The implications of these concepts for culture and education are further discussed.     

Scientific Literacy: The Role of Goal-Directed Reading and Evaluation in Understanding Scientific Information

In this article, we examine the mental processes and representations that are required of laypersons when learning about science issues from texts. We begin by defining scientific literacy as the ability to understand and critically evaluate scientific content in order to achieve one's goals. We then present 3 challenges of learning from science texts: the intrinsic complexity of science phenomena, the need to coordinate multiple documents of various types, and the rhetorical structure of the texts themselves. Because scientific information focuses on models, theories, explanations, and evidence, we focus on how explanatory and argumentative texts are processed. Then we examine 2 components of executive control in reading—goal-directed guidance and evaluation of content—that readers can acquire and adopt to deal with these challenges. Finally, we discuss 3 implications that these theories and empirical findings have for interventions intended to improve laypersons’ understanding of scientific information.     

In-Service Improvement of College Teachers

ABSTRACT

This paper will provide readers with a unique perspective on maximizing the benefits and overcoming the challenges inherent in the collaborative teaching process. This narrative reflection will explore collaborative teaching through the reflections of a music professor who has team-taught two different interdisciplinary courses over a period of 10 years. The lessons learned align with the findings of the existing literature, but they also uncover new implications that will provide other professors with a vision of how they might become effective in their own collaborative teaching. These experiences have helped the author come to understand that teaching in a collaborative setting requires educators who are creative, flexible, and both willing to compromise and to learn.     

How the Elderly Can Use Scientific Knowledge to Solve Problems While Designing Toys: A Retrospective Analysis of the Design of a Working UFO

The venerable aphorism “an old dog cannot learn new tricks” implies that the elderly rarely learn anything new—in particular, scientific knowledge. On the basis of “learning by doing,” the present study emphasized knowledge application (KA) as elderly subjects collaborated on the design of a toy flying saucer (UFO). Three types of KA were identified by questioning the work: Type 1—knowing neither how nor why; Type 2—knowing how, but not why; and, Type 3—knowing how and why. The results indicated that female elderly subjects more often exhibited Type 1 of KA compared with male elderly. The evidence supported a KA of Type 3 for those who had a science background, as they performed better than those without a science background. However, even those without a science background were able to produce science toys if they worked cooperatively, particularly when they could learn from others who had a science background.     

21 Ideas: A 42-Year Search to Understand the Nature of Giftedness

In this article, I describe the 21 ideas underlying a 42-year search to understand giftedness. I present the ideas roughly chronologically, in the order in which they arose, and discuss how in a career as in science, progress means supplementing or even superseding one idea with the next. In terms of the 21 ideas, I start with a discussion of how I thought IQ tests could account for giftedness and end with a discussion of the ACCEL (Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership) model. But I frame the article in terms of a paradox—that despite the fact that IQs rose 30 points during the 20th century, people often seem to be operating at an intellectual level that is not notably higher and may even be lower in some respects than in previous times.     

Learning progressions from a sociocultural perspective: response to “co-constructing cultural landscapes for disciplinary learning in and out of school: the next generation science standards and learning progressions in action”

This article discusses a case for a different, socio-cultural way of looking at learning progressions as treated in the next generation science standards (NGSS) as described by Ralph Cordova and Phyllis Balcerzak’s paper “Co-constructing cultural landscapes for disciplinary learning in and out of school: the next generation science standards and learning progressions in action”. The paper is interesting for a number of reasons, and in this response I will identify different aspects of the paper and link the points made to my own research, and that of colleagues, as complementary perspectives. First, the way that the science curriculum is conceived as an expanding experience that moves from the classroom into the community, across subjects, and across time, links to theoretical positions on disciplinary literacies and notions of learning as apprenticeship into the discursive tools, or ‘habits of mind’ as the authors put it, that underpin disciplinary practice. Second, the formulation of progression through widening communities of practice is a strong feature of the paper, and shows how children take on the role of scientists through this expanding exposure. I will link this approach to some of our own work with school—community science partnerships, drawing on the construct of boundary crossing to tease out relations between school science and professional practice. Third, the demonstration of the expansion of the children’s view of what scientists do is well documented in the paper, illustrated by Figure 13 for instance. However I will, in this response, try to draw out and respond to what the paper is saying about the nature of progression; what the progression consists of, over what temporal or spatial dimensions it progresses, and how it can productively frame curriculum processes.     

Creating a common terminology for play behavior to increase cross-disciplinary research

Historically, play behavior has been difficult to define. This likely stems from the number of different species, types of play, and context under which it occurs. In 2016, the Chicago Zoological Society – Brookfield Zoo hosted the Psychonomic Society leading edge workshop on the evolutionary and psychological significance of play. Sixteen experts attended from the diverse fields of African ethnology, animal behavior, animal science, animal welfare, cognitive psychology, cognitive zoology, comparative psychology, cultural anthropology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, ethology, neuroscience, primatology, and zoology. Approximately half of the participants studied human play and the other half studied non-human play. Before the workshop, participants were asked to send in either their personal definition of play or the one that they cite in peer-reviewed literature. Definitions were then reviewed to determine characteristics of play inclusive of all disciplines. The goal of the current study was not to do a literature review on play behavior, but to come up with a list of characteristics across all forms of play that could be used as a common terminology moving forward. Hopefully the results of this workshop and the current article will help to increase cross-disciplinary research in the field of play.     

编译原理实验课的实践探索

编译原理是计算机专业的重要专业课之一,设计一组合理的实验并很好地实施,对理解和掌握这门课是十分重要的.设计的实验是以简单的算术表达式为处理对象,进行词法分析、语法分析和语义分析,兼有表格处理和出错处理.本组实验具有与理论相呼应、操作性强、适用范围广等特点.     

Teaching science with homeless children: Pedagogy,representation, and identity

In this article, I explore the question of what it means to create a science for all from the vantage point of urban homeless children. I draw on the work of critical and feminist scholars in science and education, as well as my own teaching and research with urban homeless children, to question how inclusive the science education community is in its efforts to understand the margins of science for all. I frame this analysis through the pedagogical questions of representation in science (what science is made to be) and identity in science (who we think we must be to engage in that science). J Res Sci Teach 35: 379–394, 1998.     

Experience,Intersubjectivity, and Reflection: A Human Science Perspective on Preparation of Future Professionals in Adaptive Physical Activity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to show that and how philosophy and philosophical thinking can be of relevance for the preparation of future professionals in adaptive physical activity. To this end we utilize philosophical insights from the human science perspective on two central issues, namely experience and intersubjectivity, which are weaved together in an analysis of a reflective journal produced by an adaptive physical activity student. More specifically, by drawing on phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy, we show how the meaning of adaptive physical activity—as adaptive—is created through a complexity of individual and shared meaning making processes between adaptive physical activity educators, students, and the people they meet in their practicum. Through this article, we will show how the human science perspective can provide tools to understand the students, their learning, and their involvement in the educational program.