High School Student Participation in Scientific Research Apprenticeships: Variation in and Relationships Among Student Experiences and Outcomes

Research apprenticeships for secondary students provide authentic contexts for learning science in which students engage in scientific investigations with practicing scientists in working laboratory groups. Student experiences in these research apprenticeships vary depending on the individual nature of the laboratory in which students have been placed. This study explores potential relationships among student experiences in apprenticeship contexts and desired student outcomes (e.g. science content knowledge, understandings of nature of science, and aspirations for science oriented career plans). The following two research questions guided the study: How do participant experiences in and outcomes resulting from an authentic research program for high school students vary? How does variation in participant experiences in an authentic research program relate to participant outcomes? Primary data sources were student and mentor interviews in addition to student generated concept maps. Results indicated that the greatest variance in student experiences existed in the categories of collaboration, epistemic involvement, and understandings of the significance of research results. The greatest variation in desired student outcomes was observed in student understandings of nature of science and in students’ future science plans. Results suggested that collaboration and interest in the project were experience aspects most likely to be related to desired outcomes. Implications for the design of research apprenticeships for secondary students are discussed.     

Assessing the Life Science Knowledge of Students and Teachers Represented by the K–8 National Science Standards

We report on the development of an item test bank and associated instruments based on the National Research Council (NRC) K–8 life sciences content standards. Utilizing hundreds of studies in the science education research literature on student misconceptions, we constructed 476 unique multiple-choice items that measure the degree to which test takers hold either a misconception or an accepted scientific view. Tested nationally with 30,594 students, following their study of life science, and their 353 teachers, these items reveal a range of interesting results, particularly student difficulties in mastering the NRC standards. Teachers also answered test items and demonstrated a high level of subject matter knowledge reflecting the standards of the grade level at which they teach, but exhibiting few misconceptions of their own. In addition, teachers predicted the difficulty of each item for their students and which of the wrong answers would be the most popular. Teachers were found to generally overestimate their own students’ performance and to have a high level of awareness of the particular misconceptions that their students hold on the K–4 standards, but a low level of awareness of misconceptions related to the 5–8 standards.     

Moral Sensitivity in the Context of Socioscientific Issues in High School Science Students

This study is a part of a larger study that examined using socioscientific issues (SSI) as a form of effective science teaching. The purpose was to investigate how teaching a year‐long curriculum using SSI affects science learning outcomes. In this report, we examine the effects of a SSI‐driven curriculum on the development of students’ moral sensitivity. Our results indicate that development of moral sensitivity can be promoted through science learning experiences embedded in SSI. Results also suggest that moral sensitivity is contextually dependent. Implications for teaching are discussed.     

Preservice Science Teachers’ Informal Reasoning about Socioscientific Issues: The influence of issue context

The purpose of the current study is to explicitly test the extent to which issue contexts affect the informal reasoning processes engaged in by individuals. In order to address the research question framing this study, we engaged 39 Turkish preservice science teachers (PSTs) in interviews designed to elicit argumentation related to multiple socioscientific scenarios. Three scenarios related to gene therapy, another three related to human cloning, and the final scenario related to global warming. The data were analyzed using an interpretive qualitative research approach. Our work builds on a framework initially proposed by Toulmin in 1958 Toulmin, S. 1958. The uses of argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]. This study has provided new evidence related to informal reasoning in the context of socioscientific issues (SSI). At the sample level, there was strong consistency in informal reasoning quality among varying socioscientific scenarios. However, finer‐grained analyses indicated a greater level of variability in the informal reasoning practices of individual PSTs. These results support previous conclusions that suggest context dependence for informal reasoning related to SSI. This study provides an initial picture of the reasoning practices of preservice teachers as opposed to science learners. The results indicate that teachers, at least those in this Turkish setting, would benefit from learning experiences that support their own informal reasoning practices as well as their ability to foster development of these practices among their students. We encourage the field to continue the investigation of SSI as contexts for education particularly as it relates to the education of teachers.     

Erratum to: Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: Supporting Consequential Play

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gaming engine to establish a virtual world through which students learned about science inquiry, water quality concepts, and the challenges in balancing scientific and socio-economic factors. Overall, students were clearly engaged, participated in rich scientific discourse, submitted quality work, and learned science content. Further, through participation in this narrative, students developed a rich perceptual, conceptual, and ethical understanding of science. This study suggests that multi-user virtual worlds can be effectively leveraged to support academic content learning.     

Why We Are Not Google: Lessons from a Library Web site Usability Study

In the Fall of 2009, the Moraine Valley Community College Library, using guidelines developed by Jakob Nielsen, conducted a usability study to determine how students were using the library Web site and to inform the redesign of the Web site. The authors found that Moraine Valley's current gateway design was a more effective access point to library resources than a mock-up site which incorporated a central-search box on the site homepage. This finding stands in contrast to the observed trends of library Web site design that emphasizes a “Googlized” search.     

Abject Magic: Reasoning Madness in Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness Trilogy

This paper explores the representation of magic and madness in Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy (2005–2007). Throughout the series, magic is constructed as an abject and disabling force that threatens to disable magic-wielders, either through madness or death. Despite being represented as a ubiquitous force, the consequences of magic are gendered, and the female protagonist of the trilogy, Reason, sets out to remove the threat of magic. The intersections between ableist, magical and feminine discourses are explored via a feminist disability politics and Kristeva’s concept of abjection. While, at times, the trilogy challenges the ability/disability binary schism, the narrative closure reaffirms dualistic constructions of reason/madness, ability/disability, reality/fantasy and masculine/feminine. Thus, rather than redressing social attitudes towards mental illness and critiquing normative constructions of disability and the other, Larbalestier’s trilogy reaffirms dualistic and normative constructions of mental illness.     

A Critical Information Literacy Model: Library Leadership Within the Curriculum

It is a time for a new model for teaching students to find, evaluate, and use information by drawing on critical pedagogy theory in the education literature. This critical information literacy model views the information world as a dynamic place where authors create knowledge for many reasons; it seeks to understand students as information users, and emphasizes that information “evaluation” is a continual process during research. This model centers libraries within the curriculum as the experts on overcoming many of the obstacles to conducting successful research in the ever-changing information world.