Teaching a Biotechnology Curriculum Based on Adapted Primary Literature

Adapted primary literature (APL) refers to an educational genre specifically designed to enable the use of research articles for learning biology in high school. The present investigation focuses on the paedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of four high‐school biology teachers who enacted an APL‐based curriculum in biotechnology. Using a constructivist qualitative research approach, we analysed those teachers' aims and beliefs, the instructional strategies they used during the enactment of the curriculum, as well as the outcomes of the enactment as perceived by the teachers and their students, and as reflected in the class observations. Some of the teachers' strategies applied during the enactment, such as the conversational model, were specifically designed for teaching APL‐based curricula. We found that the instructional strategies applied for the adapted articles were associated with cognitive and affective engagement, active learning, inquiry thinking, and understanding of the nature of science. Suitable teacher PCK promoted learning by inquiry in addition to learning on inquiry. Students' challenges were mainly linked to the comprehension of complex, multi‐stage, biotechnological processes and methods that are abundant throughout the curriculum and required the use of previous knowledge in new contexts. A complex interaction of factors, namely teachers' PCK, the APL genre, and the biotechnology content of the curriculum, shaped the instructional strategies of the new curriculum and the outcomes of its enactment     

The contribution of science‐rich resources to public science interest

This preliminary study examined the effect that five major sources of public science education—schools, science centers, broadcast media, print media, and the Internet—had on adults' science interest values and cognitive predispositions. Over 3,000 adults were sampled in three U.S. metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, California, Phoenix, Arizona, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To minimize potential sampling bias, the results were weighted by current U.S. Census data to be comparable to demographics from each of the three jurisdictions. Participants were asked to self‐report their current and early adolescent usage of these five science‐related resources, the quality of their experiences with each, and their current abilities, values, and cognitive predispositions relative to science. Data showed that overall, a broad cross‐section of adults living in these cities engaged in a wide array of science‐related activities and that large majorities did so frequently. Nearly two‐thirds of all respondents self‐reported currently participating in some kind of science‐related activity every week and nearly half doing so daily. Results suggested that having frequent; positive science‐related experiences in‐ and out‐of‐school, both early and later in life, correlated with having a strong interest in and positive perception of science as an adult. Although a diversity of positive science‐related experiences correlated with current adult science interest values and cognitive predispositions, only five factors uniquely and significantly predicted adult science interest, values, and cognitive predispositions in the multivariate models: (a) early adolescent experiences visiting a science center, (b) early adolescent experiences watching science‐related television, (c) adult visits to a science center, (d) adults reading books and magazines about science, and (e) adults using the internet to learn more about science. Discussed are issues of self‐selection, quality of experiences, and the complex and synergistic nature of the science learning ecosystem.     

An Inside Look at the Two Envelopes Paradox

When two sealed envelopes contain money, one twice as much as the other, a player should be indifferent between them. But when one envelope is opened, one's decision should vary as a function of the observed value and one's subjective probabilities.     

Enhancing use of learning sciences research in planning for and supporting educational change: Leveraging and building social networks

This paper explores practical ways to engage two areas of educational scholarship—research on science learning and research on social networks—to inform efforts to plan and support implementation of new standards. The standards, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States in Next generation science standards: For states, by states. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2013), have been adopted by U.S. states serving more than one-quarter of all students, and they are grounded in decades of research on how students learn science. In this paper we discuss efforts to leverage recent research on social networks to inform standards implementation across a set of professional associations and school districts. These efforts are being undertaken by the Research + Practice Collaboratory which is testing a set of conjectures related to how the knowledge base from both research and practice can mutually inform STEM education improvement.     

Cultural participation in Europe: Can we identify common determinants?

This article examines the extent to which demographic and socioeconomic characteristics influence the decision to visit and the number of visits to museums, art galleries, historical monuments, and archaeological sites. Using ordered probit models based on data for 350,000 adults in 24 EU countries, we find that the likelihood and number of such visits depend mainly on per capita household income, education, labor market status, and country of birth. Attained characteristics such as education and income have remarkably similar positive effects on cultural participation across the countries in our sample, while the effects of age and gender are both weaker and less consistent across countries. We conclude that cultural distinctions along the lines of socioeconomic attainment are stable even in very different country contexts with varying cultural policies and economic conditions. We discuss the way these results inform three research topics: identification of the characteristics of visitors to museums and historical sites in order to attract new audiences; the effect of public spending on culture on accessibility to cultural sites; and cross-national variation in cultural stratification.