Verbal Final Exam in Introductory Biology Yields Gains in Student Content Knowledge and Longitudinal Performance

We studied gains in student learning over eight semesters in which an introductory biology course curriculum was changed to include optional verbal final exams (VFs). Students could opt to demonstrate their mastery of course material via structured oral exams with the professor. In a quantitative assessment of cell biology content knowledge, students who passed the VF outscored their peers on the medical assessment test (MAT), an exam built with 40 Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) questions (66.4% [n = 160] and 62% [n = 285], respectively; p < 0.001);. The higher-achieving students performed better on MCAT questions in all topic categories tested; the greatest gain occurred on the topic of cellular respiration. Because the VF focused on a conceptually parallel topic, photosynthesis, there may have been authentic knowledge transfer. In longitudinal tracking studies, passing the VF also correlated with higher performance in a range of upper-level science courses, with greatest significance in physiology, biochemistry, and organic chemistry. Participation had a wide range but not equal representation in academic standing, gender, and ethnicity. Yet students nearly unanimously (92%) valued the option. Our findings suggest oral exams at the introductory level may allow instructors to assess and aid students striving to achieve higher-level learning.     

基于论证型式应用的论证挖掘

本文旨在为构建一种以论证型式为基础的方法,用以帮助非形式逻辑的学生分析自然语言对话的文本,并识别出其中所出现的常见论证类型.他们在这一过程中时常会错误地辨识论证类型,而本文将表明所发展的这种方法对于学习非形式逻辑的学生们是非常有帮助的.另外,对于那些可用于构建一种有用的论证识别方法的理论资源,本文对其最新发展动态进行了考察,并且也概览了当前人工智能领域中所发展的自动论证挖掘工具.     

Psychological Allostatic Load: the Cost of Persistence in STEM Disciplines

Research in Science Education - The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of persistence within STEM learning environments as a function of cumulative stress and latent trauma. The...     

YouTube-based course orientation videos delivered prior to matriculation fail to alleviate medical student anxiety about anatomy

Gross anatomy is a source of anxiety for matriculating medical students due to the large volume of information presented in a truncated timeline, and because it may be their first exposure to human cadavers. This study aimed to assess if video-based resources would affect matriculating medical students' anatomy state anxiety levels. Videos were designed to be short, YouTube-based units that served to provide orientation information about the anatomy course, dissection facilities, and available study resources to dispel anxiety around beginning their anatomy studies. To evaluate the impact of the videos, students in two consecutive matriculating years (2018 and 2019) completed the validated State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a demographic questionnaire. The 2019 cohort (n = 118) served as the experimental group with access to the videos; while the 2018 cohort (n = 120) without video access served as a historical control. Analyses revealed that the groups were equivalent in terms of trait anxiety (P = 0.854) and anatomy state anxiety even when student video exposure was controlled (P = 0.495). Anatomy state anxiety was only significantly lower in students with prior formal anatomy exposure (P = 0.006). Further inquiry into students' prior anatomy experience identified that individuals with post-secondary dissection experience were significantly less anxious than those without formal anatomical experience (P = 0.023). These results may serve as a cautionary tale to educators; while preference for video-based instructional materials is prevalent in the literature, videos delivered on public social media platforms fail to prepare students for the psychological impact of studying human anatomy.     

Learning to See with Different Eyes: A Nietzschean Challenge to Multicultural Dialogue

Empathy is a necessity in our multicultural world. Modern democratic societies are home to communities with the most diverse religious, political, and moral convictions, and these convictions often directly, even perilously, contradict one another. Educational theorists differ on how empathy can be taught in the face of these contradictions. Does proper pedagogical action entail an attempt to teach students to understand the other, to see their world through the eyes of the other? Or is such an attempt doomed to fail, a vain and presumptuous striving to surpass the epistemologically preordained limits of subjectivity? While theorists who promote mutual understanding traditionally look to some form of dialogue to establish their empathic pedagogies, those who doubt the possibility of mutual understanding formulate critical, often monological pedagogies in which students are encouraged to “talk back” to their others about their idiosyncratic perspectives. Theorists have thus had choose: dialogue or relativism? Using the robust educational philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Douglas Yacek demonstrates that this is a most unsatisfactory choice, one that ignores the pedagogical complexity needed to teach students genuine empathy. He argues that Nietzsche's educational writings yield a tripartite empathic pedagogy founded on self‐knowledge, foreign language learning, and experimentalism. Upon these three pedagogical pillars, Yacek problematizes Megan Laverty's recent attempt to formulate an empathic pedagogy as dialogical philosophical inquiry. Although Nietzsche would endorse much of Laverty's pedagogy, Yacek concludes that Nietzsche's pedagogy requires engagement with perspectives across the democratic curriculum and, indeed, beyond.     

Recasting Border Crossing Politics and Pedagogies to Combat Educational Inequity: Experiences,Identities, and Perceptions of Latino/a Immigrant Youth

Educational borderlands are the physical and/or conceptual landscapes where one must negotiate notions of cultural difference as she or he lives and learns—landscapes that envelop an array of pedagogical and cultural spaces, yet are typically guarded by exclusionary tactics. In this article, we examine how US immigrant youth navigate three educational borderlands: the geopolitical, institutional, and home community. We also discuss how educators’ biased ideologies and actions towards these youth solidify borders and increase inequity. Data from studies of California and North Carolina school communities allow us to extend border crossing theories and address how many immigrant youth confront and resist inequities, negotiate their cultural identities, and enact agency. While emphasizing that borderlands are sites of risk and transformation, we also suggest how educators can draw upon their relative power and privilege to cross borders too, advocate for immigrant youth, and ultimately improve education.     

The Religious Roots of Ernest L. Boyer's Educational Vision: A Theology of Public Pietism

The educational theories and policies promoted by Ernest L. Boyer (1928–1995), who served as chancellor of the SUNY system, U.S. Commissioner (Secretary) of Education, and president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, were significantly influenced by his affiliations with the Brethren in Christ Church and the Society of Friends (Quakers) even though he rarely spoke about his faith publicly. Drawing on Anabaptist, pietistic, and apophatic (silence-oriented) theological traditions, Boyer's public career demonstrated a service-focused convictional theology that could be termed “public pietism.” Boyer's educational philosophy focused on human connectedness and called for all citizens to be active participants in improving their communities by living out nonsectarian “consensus virtues.” While Boyer was a strong proponent of the separation of church and state, his public service was imbued with deeply held Christian values.     

Public funds and local biotechnology firm creation

A long stream of academic literature has established that public funding towards research and development matters for economic growth because it relates to increases in innovation, productivity and the like. The impact of public funding on the creation of new firms has received less attention in this literature despite theoretical constructs that support such association. In the present paper we study whether indeed there is a relationship between public research funds and local firm births in the context of the U.S. biotechnology industry. In doing so, we introduce a number of changes that strengthen the robustness of our findings when compared with existing literature. These changes include a direct measure of research expenditures and a considerably lengthier longitudinal dataset which allows us to capture a structural relationship and not a chance event. We empirically demonstrate that increases in the level of research funding from the National Institutes of Health towards biotechnology associate with increases in the number of biotechnology firm births at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level. Further, we reveal that public funds towards established firms associate with local firm births considerably more strongly when compared with funds towards universities and research institutes/hospitals. We conclude the paper with academic and policy implications of the present work that highlight the complexity of factors that underlie the creation of local firms in high technology industries.     

The attitudes and opinions of high school sports participants: an exploratory empirical examination

Sport scholars and public commentators have long held both positive and critical opinions about the influence of athletic involvement on participants and their perceptions of the social world. Yet for all of the strong claims and deeply held assumptions, relatively little empirical data or social scientific analysis have been available. This study begins to address this deficiency using new data from a nationally representative survey of American high school students. We compare sports participants and their peers in terms of concern for social problems, interracial contact and attitudes, views of gender roles and sex-based discrimination and political orientation. We find participants and non-participants differ very little in their social concern and views of gender roles and sex-based discrimination, while significant differences were found in levels of interracial contact, views on race relations and political orientation. In view of these findings, we make some general conclusions about the social influence of sport in the lives of American youth and how this topic may be further explored in subsequent work.