Genetically modified food in perspective: an inquiry‐based curriculum to help middle school students make sense of tradeoffs

To understand how students learn about science controversy, this study examines students' reasoning about tradeoffs in the context of a technology‐enhanced curriculum about genetically modified food. The curriculum was designed and refined based on the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration Framework to help students sort and integrate their initial ideas and those presented in the curriculum. Pre‐test and post‐test scores from 190 students show that students made significant (p?<?0.0001) gains in their understanding of the genetically modified food controversy. Analyses of students' final papers, in which they took and defended a position on what type of agricultural practice should be used in their geographical region, showed that students were able to provide evidence both for and against their positions, but were less explicit about how they weighed these tradeoffs. These results provide important insights into students' thinking and have implications for curricular design.     

Can Middle School Students with Serious Reading Difficulties Help Each Other and Learn Anything?

This investigation was intended to examine the effects of teaching middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. All students were reading significantly below grade level and many students exhibited behavior problems in addition to their primary disability area. Students were randomly assigned to a tutoring or traditional reading instruction condition. Within the tutoring condition, students were matched into tutoring dyads, trained in the tutoring procedures, and taught specific reading comprehension strategies. Reciprocal tutoring was employed, such that students assumed roles of both tutor and tutee during daily reading periods. Performance on reading comprehension tests following tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Observational, survey, and interview data revealed that students enjoyed tutoring more than their traditional instruction, appeared to see the value and benefits of the tutoring, and wanted to include tutoring as part of their other classes, such as science and social studies. Findings are discussed with respect to the strengths and challenges associated with the use of tutoring to provide strategic instruction to students with special learning needs.     

Grades or Scores: Predicting Future College Mathematics Peflormance

Do men and women with similar admissions test scores earn similar grades in mathematics? What factors may explain underprediction for women? Do men and women differ in persistence in mathematics study?     

Supporting Knowledge Integration in Chemistry with a Visualization-Enhanced Inquiry Unit

This paper describes the design and impact of an inquiry-oriented online curriculum that takes advantage of dynamic molecular visualizations to improve students’ understanding of chemical reactions. The visualization-enhanced unit uses research-based guidelines following the knowledge integration framework to help students develop coherent understanding by connecting and refining existing and new ideas. The inquiry unit supports students to develop connections among molecular, observable, and symbolic representations of chemical reactions. Design-based research included a pilot study, a study comparing the visualization-enhanced inquiry unit to typical instruction, and a course-long comparison study featuring a delayed posttest. Students participating in the visualization-enhanced unit outperformed students receiving typical instruction and further consolidated their understanding on the delayed posttest. Students who used the visualization-enhanced unit formed more connections among concepts than students with typical textbook and lecture-based instruction. Item analysis revealed the types of connections students made when studying the curriculum and suggested how these connections enabled students to consolidate their understanding as they continued in the chemistry course. Results demonstrate that visualization-enhanced inquiry designed for knowledge integration can improve connections between observable and atomic-level phenomena and serve students well as they study subsequent topics in chemistry.     

Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis to Identify the Impact of Social Media on the Standards of Knowledge

The collaboratively edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia is among the most popular websites in the world. Subsequently, it poses a great challenge to traditional encyclopedias, which for centuries have set the standards of society's knowledge with their printed editions. It is, therefore, important to study the impact of social media on the standards of our knowledge. This longitudinal panel study analyzed the framing of content in encyclopedia entries of top Fortune companies in Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Content analyses of the length, tonality, and topics of 3,985 sentences showed that Wikipedia entries were significantly longer, were more positively and negatively framed, and focused more on corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues than the online entries of the traditional encyclopedia, which were predominantly neutral. The findings stress that the knowledge-generation processes in society appear to be fundamentally shifting because of the use of social media collaboration. These changes significantly impact which information becomes available to society and how it is framed.