discussion+oct29

1.What are the research questions the authors are investigating? 2. What theoretical framework do they describe for their work? Is it situative or cognitive? 3. What type of data do they collect? 4. What type of analysis do they do? 5. What are the findings? Do they address the original research questions?

Addressing.....genetics

1.conceptual change, cognitive

1.In the present study, we decided to use an instructional programme based on conceptual change strategies. However, rather than start at students’ prior/alternative conceptions, we began from the presuppositions by presenting them with everyday phenomena that have genetic origins but have underlying nonscientiﬁc presuppositions or are based on popular culture. Speciﬁcally, this study sought to assess the extent to which students adhere to nonscientiﬁc presuppositions regarding genetic phenomena in the Igbo culture of Southeastern Nigeria before and after instruction; second, it assessed the relationship between the level of presuppositions and students’ achievement; and ﬁnally, it considered the effect of the present instructional strategies on students’ understanding of genetic concepts in relation to a comparison group.

3. This study sets out to determine whether students involved in an intervention package based on the conceptual change theory will perform better than a comparison group taught using the traditional method of textbook sequencing and whether the intervention had any effect on the level of nonscientiﬁc presuppositions held by these students. We also sought to determine whether the level of nonscientiﬁc presuppositions held by these students played a role in their achievement in genetics. There is a control group.

4.To determine the role of the level of nonscientiﬁc presuppositions on achievement in genetics we constructed a boxplot of the data from PI against the scores from the achieve- ment test. To determine the effect of the intervention on the level of presupposition, we did a cross tabulation with chi-square statistics and tested the value for signiﬁcance at P < .05. Finally, a 2 × 3 analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was done to compare the mean scores of the experimental group students with the mean scores of the comparison group students. The main effects were, therefore, method and presupposition levels. To conﬁrm the detected trends from these analyses, we ran analyses of covariance for the experimental and comparison groups separately, with presupposition levels as the main effect.

6. Results The boxplot (Figure 3) reveals that the low-presupposition group did better than the intermediate group, which in turn did better than their high-presupposition counterparts. The same is true of the distribution of the scores for each group. The low-presupposition group has a wider distribution than the intermediate group, which in turn has a wider distribution than the high-presupposition group

The results of the present study suggest that where the method of teaching is not delib- erately designed to handle the presuppositions, performance is affected.

culture matters.

1. situative, learning theories in the community of
 * Becoming a Scientist**

2. Questions:

• what students identify as the benefits of UR--both following the experience, and in the longer term (particularly career outcomes); • what gains faculty advisors observe in their student researchers and how their view of gains converges with or diverges from those of their students; • the benefits and costs to faculty of their engagement in UR; • what, if anything, is lost by students who do not participate in UR; and • the processes by which gains to students are generated.

3. qual. data Hunter's experiment had a much larger experimental group and also encompassed a control group, with "n"s of 76 and 62 respectively. The control group did not have an undergraduate research experience. Although these ns diminished over time as the researchers went back to re-interview the students. Data was collected from interviews and verbally administered surveys of both the student participants and their science researchers that acted as mentors for this study. The students were spread out over 4 small liberal arts colleges.

4.n regards to analyses, the researchers, using a cool-sounding program called the Ethnograph, transcribed and coded the responses of the students and the mentor researchers that categorized the benefits and losses that all of the participants experienced from their undergraduate research.

analysis: This study did a good job of breaking down perceived benefits of both mentors and participants from UR into sub categories. Percentiles and rankings were assigned to these benefits that attempted to quantify rather intangible things. The researchers noted that this was just an initial analyses of their massive amount of data and that they were hoping to conduct more research and so their vague responses to the research questions did not really bother me.

Findings:UR research was helpful!

1. What kinds of shared knowledge do students have access to, and to what degree? 2. To what extent does the knowledge of the community of practice in the workplace resemble the knowledge shared within the community of school? answer: they did not resemble each other.
 * Co-op**

situative.

data: interviews from 10 years of case studies and interviews. The ﬁrst question we asked in this paper was, “What kinds of shared knowledge do stu- dents have access to, and to what degree?” Our review of the literature and our analysis of data collected in workplaces like veterinary clinics, dental ofﬁces, medical laboratories, and hospitals suggest that students have sufﬁcient support for accessing procedural knowledge, but are not able to access declarative knowledge. Our second question was, “To what extent does the knowledge of the community of practice in the workplace resemble the knowledge shared within the community of school?” We have shown that there are qualitative differ- ences between workplace science and school science: there are differences in sequencing and there are differences in the purpose of knowledge. And we have suggested that these differences may limit the success students have in accessing the science knowledge of the workplace.