Visions of value: Leading the development of a view of the University Library in the 21st century

Over the course of 2018 the University of Sheffield Library conducted a series of interviews and workshops with stakeholders as part of a strategic project to reflect on the value of the university library in the 21st century. Using a mixed methodology, participants were asked to reflect upon the future Higher Education (HE) environment for the university and, for academic participants, their discipline. In this context participants were also asked to reflect upon the future value of the University Library in a series of questions designed to elicit value statements using a tool which the project group have called the ‘Wheel of Value’. The resulting reflections upon the future environment have been grouped into four categories reflecting the drivers for change; Digitalisation, Student Experience, Diversification and Collaboration recognizing that there is considerable overlap and interconnection between these. The reflections on the future value of the library are presented by Wheel of Value higher order categorization. This approach proved useful in eliciting responses from participants in the face of recognized difficulty in getting beyond current views of the library and the approach is recommended to other universities looking to carry out a similar project. The results of this research will be used to inform the development of a view of the library for the purpose of engaging with our university community and key partners.     

Teachers’ Concerns About Biotechnology Education

The impacts of biotechnology are found in nearly all sectors of society from health care and food products to environmental issues and energy sources. Despite the significance of biotechnology within the sciences, it has not become a prominent trend in science education. In this study, we seek to more fully identify biology teachers’ concerns about biotechnology instruction and their reported practices. Consistent with the Stages of Concern framework as modified by Hord et al., we investigated teachers’ awareness, informational, personal, management, consequences, collaboration, and refocusing concerns about biotechnology teaching by employing a qualitative design that allowed for the emergence of teachers’ ideas. Twenty high school life science teachers attending a biotechnology institute were interviewed using an interview protocol specifically designed to target various Stages of Concern. Although the Stages of Concern framework guided the development of interview questions in order to target a wide range of concerns, data analysis employed a grounded theory approach wherein patterns emerged from teachers’ own words and were constantly compared with each other to generate larger themes. Our results have potential to provide guidance for professional development providers and curriculum developers committed to supporting initial implementation of biotechnology education. Recommendations include supporting teacher development of biotechnology content knowledge; promoting strategies for obtaining, storing and managing biotechnology equipment and materials; providing opportunities for peer teaching as a means of building teacher confidence; and highlighting career opportunities in biotechnology and the intersections of biotechnology and everyday life.     

Science Teachers’ Use of Mass Media to Address Socio-Scientific and Sustainability Issues

The currency, relevancy and changing nature of science makes it a natural topic of focus for mass media outlets. Science teachers and students can capitalize on this wealth of scientific information to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues; however, without a lens on how those media are created and how representations of science are constructed through media, the use of mass media in the science classroom may be risky. Limited research has explored how science teachers naturally use mass media to explore scientific issues in the classroom or how mass media is used to address potential overlaps between socio-scientific-issue based instruction and education for sustainability. This naturalistic study investigated the reported and actual classroom uses of mass media by secondary science teachers’ to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues as well as the extent to which their instructional approaches did or did not overlap with frameworks for SSI-based instruction, education for sustainability, and media literacy education. The results of this study suggest that secondary science teachers use mass media to explore socio-scientific and sustainability issues, but their use of frameworks aligned with SSI-based, education for sustainability, and media literacy education was limited. This paper provides suggestions for how we, as science educators and researchers, can advance a teaching and learning agenda for encouraging instruction that more fully utilizes the potential of mass media to explore socio-scientific issues in line with perspectives from education for sustainability.     

Competition Out of Bounds: Sport in American Life

The 1992 NIH Research Planning Conference on Prosthetic and Orthotic Research for the 21st Century (Childress, 1992) recognized that the field of prosthetics lacks theoretical understanding and empirical studies on learning to control an upper-extremity prosthesis. We have addressed this problem using a novel approach in which persons without amputations are required to perform or learn basic motor tasks using a prosthetic simulator. The findings so far have three important implications for rehabilitation: (a) learning prosthetic control can be facilitated by general principles that have been shown to promote motor learning; (b) bilateral transfer can be used to enhance prosthetic limb control and minimize rejection; and (c) a voluntary closing terminal device has some advantages relative to a voluntary opening device     

Students’ Participation in an Interdisciplinary, Socioscientific Issues Based Undergraduate Human Biology Major and Their Understanding of Scientific Inquiry

The purpose of this study was to examine whether Socioscientific Issues (SSI) based learning environments affect university students’ epistemological understanding of scientific inquiry differently from traditional science educational contexts. We identify and compare conceptions of scientific inquiry of students participating in an interdisciplinary, SSI-focused undergraduate human biology major (SSI) and those participating in a traditional biology major (BIO). Forty-five SSI students and 50 BIO students completed an open-ended questionnaire examining their understanding of scientific inquiry. Eight general themes including approximately 60 subthemes emerged from questionnaire responses, and the numbers of students including each subtheme in their responses were statistically compared between groups. A subset of students participated in interviews, which were used to validate and triangulate questionnaire data and probe students’ understanding of scientific inquiry in relation to their majors. We found that both groups provided very similar responses, differing significantly in only five subthemes. Results indicated that both groups held generally adequate understandings of inquiry, but also a number of misconceptions. Small differences between groups supported by both questionnaires and interviews suggest that the SSI context contributed to nuanced understandings, such as a more interdisciplinary and problem-centered conception of scientific inquiry. Implications for teaching and research are discussed.     

Gender differences in introductory undergraduate physics performance: University physics versus college physics in the USA

Efforts to ameliorate gender disparity in pursuit of science careers in the USA have focused on equalizing girls' participation in pre-college science courses and out-of-school activities. Our examination of nearly 1500 US college students at 16 universities found that gender and preparation both have an impact on success in introductory college physics courses. In terminal, algebra-based physics females perform better than their male classmates. However, in calculus based introductory college physics courses, which are prerequisite to advanced study in many fields, women do significantly worse than their male counterparts with the same background. For both genders, taking a high school course that limits coverage and concentrates more time in in-depth study is associated with better performance in college physics. We conclude that efforts to ensure the success of women entering the physical sciences should concentrate on increasing the depth and reducing the vast coverage of most high school physics courses as well as addressing the apparent bias in college courses that mark the first step in careers within scientific research and engineering.     

Contextualizing Nature of Science Instruction in Socioscientific Issues

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two learning contexts for explicit-reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction, socioscientific issues (SSI) driven and content driven, on student NOS conceptions. Four classes of 11th and 12th grade anatomy and physiology students participated. Two classes experienced a curricular sequence organized around SSI (the SSI group), and two classes experienced a content-based sequence (the Content group). An open-ended NOS questionnaire was administered to both groups at the beginning and end of the school year and analyzed to generate student profiles. Quantitative analyses were performed to compare pre-instruction NOS conceptions between groups as well as pre to post changes within groups and between groups. Both SSI and Content groups showed significant gains in most NOS themes, but between-group gains were not significantly different. Qualitative analysis of post-instruction responses, however, revealed that students in the SSI group tended to use examples to describe their views of the social/cultural NOS. The findings support SSI contexts as effective for promoting gains in students’ NOS understanding and suggest that these contexts facilitate nuanced conceptions that should be further explored.