out of the mouths of students

First posted over at the Bioblog.

We’ve been trialling some software for on-line paper/teaching appraisals & I got my results back the other day. The appraisal form included open-ended questions where students could give extended feedback on particular issues that concerned them, & I’ve been going through it all so that I can give feedback in my turn, thus ‘closing the loop’. (This is something that I believe is absolutely essential: students need to know that we value their opinions & that, where appropriate, use them to inform what we do.) I’ve been interested to see that some of the class are definitely thinking outside the ‘box’ that represents my paper, and one comment in particular struck a chord:

One concern with the paper is individuals who were not taught certain aspects of the NCEA Level 3 curriculum. This is a major issue that has resulted from the preference of schools to not teach certain aspects of the course. There NEEDS to be consultation to standardise the NCEA curriculum as well as ensuring that the gap is bridged with communication between tertiary education providers and secondary education providers. As I understand it there is significant concern over the changed NCEA Level 3 Biology course, which now does not teach genetics in year 13. I don’t know the answer in the resolution of this issue, however it will greatly impact on future academic success as well as future funding when grades drop.

This student has hit the nail squarely on the head. Teachers reading this will be working on the following Achievement Standards with their year 12 students this year (where previously gene expression was handled in year 13): AS91157 Demonstrate understanding of genetic variation and change, and AS91159: Demonstrate understanding of gene expression. (You’ll find the Biology subject matrix here.)

And as my student says, this has the potential to cause real problems unless the university staff concerned have made it their business to be aware of these changes and to consider their impact. For the 2014 cohort of students coming in to introductory biology classes will have quite different prior learning experiences (& not just in genetics) from those we are teaching this year and taught in previous years. We cannot continue as we have done in the past.

selling services on line

Yesterday’s Sunday Star-Times carried the headline: Chinese cheats rort NZ universities with fakes. The story begins:

An investigation has uncovered a well-organised commercial cheating service for Chinese-speaking students in New Zealand. The long-standing business uses a network of tutors, some outside New Zealand, to write original assignments ordered by Chinese-speaking students attending New Zealand universities, polytechnics and private institutions

and provides a link to an essay bought by the reporting team as part of their investigation.

Frankly, about the only thing that surprised me about the story was the fact that the organisation delivering this ‘service’, and thus helping those using it to cheat, is based in New Zealand. I mean, I’ve just had one of my regular clean-outs of the spam folder. Anything there just gets deleted; there’s so much coming in that I don’t have time to scan it just in case a genuine commenter has been dumped there. But occasionally something at the top of the queue for oblivion catches my eye, and I notice things like this:

Lately, graduates are overloaded to produce essay writing, they can find custom writing services where they are able to buy critical analysis essays.

If you are desperate, you always have a possibility to purchase high quality essay and all your problems will disappear.

Are willing to be a good student? Therefore, you should realise that good high school students buy paper and if it is fits you, you can do the same!

And the icing on the cake:

Some people have got a passion of composing academic papers, but, some of them do not know the correct way to complete research papers. Professional Custom UK Essay writing service is developed to help students who cannot write.

Frankly, the standard of English in that lot should put potential buyers off! At least some of the time they make an attempt at ‘buyer beware’ (but don’t you just know that the following would link to one of these ‘good’ sites?):

If you want to escape any troubles while ordering essays at the paper writing services, you ought to be really thorough. Buy essay services only if you have solid evidences that the people you’ll be dealing with are highly educated.

Lols aside, there’s obviously a market for this sort of stuff; it’s worth pondering why students would buy in work, and what options teaching staff have for avoiding/reducing the temptation.

One obvious motivation is the pressure to do well. Students (& often their families) do invest quite a bit of money into their education. This is particularly true for many international students whose families spend a lot to send them here & support them during their studies. (So do taxpayers, via the student loan system, so we – ie taxpayers – do need to know that we’re getting good value there, & that includes the quality of students’ work.) So fear of getting a poor mark, & perhaps having to repeat a paper, could drive the sort of behaviour that our spammers and the Auckland organisation are hoping to generate.

And unfortunately ‘custom essays’ are not going to be picked up by anti-plagiarism software (eg Turnitin) – unless the ghostwriters are stupid enough to just do a copy-&-paste! That’s not to say they can’t still be identified: an obvious clue would be a standard of English that differed significantly from that in other work submitted by a student; the relevance of the actual content would be another.

But there are ways of reducing incentives to be dishonest around assessment. For example, teachers can review their use of ‘high stakes’ assessment items: single essays or reports that are worth a large proportion of the final grade (& so can offer some incentive to cheat in order to gain a higher mark). ‘End-loading’ assessment, so that it’s all due at the end of semester, is not going to help here either.

Another tool would be to have students generate work in class. Now obviously that won’t work if you want a lengthy report, but what about: getting them to do the relevant research but asking for them to write an abstract, or a summary of their findings, in-class, & having it peer-marked (using your marking scheme) or doing that task yourself? The students still gain practice in useful skills & – hopefully – your workload is somewhat reduced. If students get more involved in the writing process from the start, & are supported in learning the various skills involved, they might be more confident in their own abilities & feel less need to cheat on the assignment.

Recommended reading**:

J.C.Bean (2001) Engaging Ideas: the professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. Jossey-Bass (Wiley). ISBN 978-0-787-90203-2

** actually, make that highly recommended!

science challenges & science education

The National Science Challenges have been announced – and have already received a lot of attention (including on Sciblogs, with posts by my colleagues Grant, Siouxsie, and John - who also points at where the money’s going). What I’d like to address here is the comment by the Panel that it

was concerned by the lack of significant proposals in educational research

I have to admit that my first response to that was, well d’oh! Because, well, the public discussion was around national science challenges, I suspect that for many (most?) submitters the focus was to come up with a science-based proposal. After all (& please note bulging cheek ensconcing my tongue at this point), isn’t science education something that schools & other seats of learning ‘do’, rather than requiring science research? Hopefully not many scientists really think that way, & it’s great to see the additional Challenge, “Science & New Zealand Society” with its two goals (the first a science goal, while the second is societal):

To ensure the science capacities and literacy of New Zealand society so as to promote engagement between S[cience] & T[echnology] and New Zealand society, in turn enhancing the role played by science in advancing the national interest.

To allow New Zealand society to make best use of its human and technological capacities to address the risks and Challenges ahead. This requires the better use of scientific knowledge in policy formation at all levels of national and local government, in the private sector and in society as a whole.

 

Both are relevant to what follows here.

Let’s look more closely at the question of science literacy/appreciation/education for citizenship. The chair of the Panel, Sir Peter Gluckman, has previously made it clear that we need to do much more in engaging young people with science, to the extent of developing a science curriculum that focuses far more on science literacy than on accumulation of science knowledge. But what constitutes science literacy? This is something I’ve written about previously, & my fellow Scibloggers and I discussed it between ourselves more recently. So I was interested to find a set of nine science literacy ‘themes’ listed and expanded upon in a recent paper (Bartholomew & Osborne, 2004):

scientific methods and critical testing

science & certainty

diversity of scientific thinking

hypothesis and prediction

historical development of scientific knowledge

creativity

science and questioning

analysis and interpretation of data

cooperation and collaboration in the development of scientific knowledge

And while we might not agree on the relative order of these themes, or the completeness of the list, but they do give us something to go on with. (I’m going to talk about the formal education system for the moment – but I’m perfectly well aware that there’s much more than that to public engagement with science! Let’s just treat this as a starting point for discussion.)

Now, I’d like to think that the current NZ Science curriculum gives a good basis for developing these skills & attributes in all students Right Now, regardless of whether or not they intend to go on to study science at tertiary level. And let’s face it, most won’t, so we surely have to work on engagement with and understanding of what science is about, for all students. in fact, that’s a tension I struggle with myself: a proportion of my first-year biology students are taking the subject purely for interest, & in some cases haven’t studied the subject before. I want them to come away with an appreciation of the wonder and worth of the subject in their lives, as much as I want them to accumulate biological knowledge. It’s a tricky balancing act.

Anyway, while I might like to think that about the curriculum document, in reality I suspect that it doesn’t yet deliver. And that’s something that’s unpacked further by Bartholomew & Osborne, who note that there are a number of factors that affect teachers’ “ability to teach effectivelyabout science”.

One of those factors is the teachers’ own understanding of what science is all about, as opposed to their body of content knowledge. NB Please note, at this point, that this is not a criticism of teachers and the demanding work that they do; it’s a question of whether the training and experiences we offer our teachers prepare them well for this particular aspect of teaching science.

The researchers found that a reasonable proportion of the teachers they worked with were not really confident in their own ability to teach lessons based on the ideas embedded in those themes. This was partly due to uncertainties about their own knowledge, and partly around feeling that they lacked the classroom skills to deliver such a program. Which, of course, raises issues around provision of professional development opportunities (with the associated resourcing).

Related to that is their own engagement with the subject. OK, if you’re teaching the subject as a specialist science teacher, I’m guessing that you took this role on because you enjoy the subject and want to share that. But if someone’s a primary school teacher with very limited exposure to science during their training, then the story might be very different.

And so that would be a fruitful area for research, in NZ (and at this point someone is probably going to tell me that they’re Already Doing It): what is the actual level of science literacy – using, for example, those 9 themes listed above – in NZ science teachers at all levels? And how does that translate into classroom practices? And – if the answer is, not as well as we’d like - what do we do about it?

Teachers’ ability to enhance learning about science (as opposed to of science) is also affected by factors outside their classrooms. For example, the pressure is on, at senior school level, to ensure students do as well as possible in national assessment – which, for all the changes associated with NCEA, remains largely content-based. And classroom time is limited, so it’s easy to see how there can be more focus on content & less on the other desirable attributes. As Bartholomew & Osborne comment,

developing a questioning and sceptical attitude to scientific knowledge claims in students might actually be disadvantageous.

Perhaps that also needs to change. [Pace, Schol Bio examiners!]

 

H.Bartholomew, & J.Osborne (2004) Teaching students “ideas about science”: five dimensions of effective practice. Science Education 88: 655-682 doi: 10.1002/sce.10135

falling numbers in physics – what do teachers think?

A topic that gets quite a frequent airing in our tearoom is the decline in the number of students taking physics. This issue isn’t peculiar to my institution – a quick look at the literature indicates that it’s a global problem**. The question is, what can be done about this? It’s a question that Pey-Tee Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) set out to answer.

They identified (from the science education literature) several reasons why students don’t like physics: it’s perceived as boring, with signficant mathematical demands; the passive teaching methods used in many classrooms are off-putting; and the curriculum is crowded. They also noted that teachers‘ perceptions  are important as they can affect students’ subject choices, and so they sought the help of physics teachers in Singaporean secondary schools, noting that

[physics] teachers are in a position to this debate [around declining interest in studying physics at university] as the intent to study or not to study physics is made by students at the school level – the influence of physics teachers on students taking physics cannot thus be underestimated.

In addition to collecting data on teaching experience and educational background, Oon & Subramaniam asked the teachers (all 166 of them) for suggestions on how this might be turned around:

Suggest one way in which more students can be encouraged to study physics at the university.

Several key points came up again and again in the teachers’ responses to that open-ended question: reviewing the current school physics curriculum, “making the teaching of physics fun”, improving graduates’ career prospects, publicising career opportunities, and running enrichment programs.

Now, the NZ physics curriculum was recently redeveloped, as part of the rewriting of the National Curriculum document; more recently, the Achievement Standards were rewritten to align them more closely with that document. So, if that redeveloped curriculum doesn’t “go beyond the classical topics and include more modern topics which are related to current applications” (& Marcus can probably give more informed comment on that than I can), then we may have missed the boat on that one. Of course, the teachers’ suggestion that more modern topics be included means that – when we do get the chance to spring-clean – that it may be necessary to drop some ‘traditional’ content. Otherwise we’d simply be cramming the curriculum ever fuller – and the perception of an overloaded curriculum can make the subject seem more difficult (a problem that Biology shares), and which other research has found to be a definite turn-off for students. There’s also the ‘fun’ aspect to consider – how do we address that?

It’s hard to see how the universities can improve physics graduates’ career prospects (something that probably needs a push at government level, if the government of the day is serious about the importance of studying the sciences) but we can certainly help to promote those options that are available. Among other suggestions, the teachers thought that the following could help: careers talks emphasising the value of physics, roadshows fronted by high-profile research scientists, better marketing by university physics departments, and enhanced career guidance (at both secondary and tertiary level). On the career front, Oon & Subramaniam point out that “Wall Street has a high concentration of physicists”, which suggests that career opportunities are more diverse than many students might think.

As for physics enrichment programs – again, a significant majority of the teachers surveyed felt that the following steps would be valuable:

• creating opportunities for physics researchers and lecturers to go into schools to promote the subject;
• running workshops in schools to raise awareness of the importance of this subject;
• offering ‘popular’ physics seminars;
• running on-campus physics enrichment camps;
• and developing outreach programs supporting and promoting physics.

The teachers felt that university-level teaching also needs a review (ie, the problem of declining enrolments won’t be solved solely by changes in & support for physics teaching in schools):

One of the most striking findings from this study is the urge by teachers for a rebranding of the university physcis curriculum. Creating innovative interdisciplinary programs at the undergraduate level – for example, marrying physics with other disciplines (eg, finance, management etc) to meet the growing needs of current market demand, deserves consideration… For example, students can gain scientific training in physics and technical skills in finance if physics is integrated with finance… It is a win-win solution with minimum sacrifice… [that] will not only increase the employability of physics graduates but will also further the attractiveness of undergraduate physics programs.

The researchers note that such interdisciplinary programs are already being offered at some overseas instititutions, and certainly we are beginning to see an increasing emphasis here in New Zealand on the value of interdisciplinarity.

Oon & Subramaniam have definitely provided some food for thought. And given the nature of the problem, perhaps it’s time for physicists around New Zealand to work together to address it?

P-T Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) Views of physics teachers on how to address the declining enrolment in physics at the university level. Research in Science and Technological Education 28(3): 277-289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2010.501749

** Having said that, Michael Edmonds has just drawn my attention to this talk (shown on Youtube) by UK physicist, Professor Brian Cox.

how do kids learn about dna?

My significant other is forever telling me that Facebook is a total time-waster. Sometimes I do tend to agree – but also, one can Find Out Stuff! Like the study I’ve just heard about via Science Alert, on how children get information about genetics and DNA – things we might regard as being in the ‘too hard’ basket & so best left for senior high school students to grapple with. That grappling begins in year 11, when one of the NCEA Level 1 Science standards asks that students be able to “demonstrate understanding of biological ideas relating to genetic variation”.

Is that too late? Jenny Donovan and Grady Venville suggest that it is, arguing that with the rapid growth of knowledge in and applications of molecular biology,

[citizens] of the future will be called upon to make more decisions, from personal to political, regarding the impact of genetics on society. ‘Designer babies’; gene therapy; genetic modification; cloning, and the potential access to and use of personal genetic information are all complex and multifactorial issues. All raise ethical and scientific dilemmas.

They give the example of jury trials, where jurors may hear quite complex information about DNA and be asked to consider this in coming to a verdict, and note that people may have acquired a range of misconceptions around DNA from sources such as the popular program CSI and its various spin-offs.

Children, for example, have a lot of opportunity to hear about genes, DNA, & their uses well before we start formally teaching these concepts at school. Donovan and Venville already knew (from their own previous research) that by the end of their primary schooling many students were already developing misconceptions about genetics; for example, the idea that ‘genes and DNA are two totally separate entities.’ This time, they wanted to examine the impact of the mass media on children’s conceptions (& misconceptions) around this subject. The misconceptions part is particularly important because misconceptions, once formed, can be extremely persistent – affecting learning into the tertiary years.

Using a combination of interviews and questionnaires about media use, the researchers found that their subjects (children aged 10-12) spent around 5 hours a day using various media (TV, radio, print media, movies, & the internet), with most of that being watching television. This included crime shows, and the children felt that they gained most of their ‘knowledge’ of genetics from TV. Donovan & Venville chose to question children from this age group because, with falling numbers of Australian students taking science subjects in upper secondary school, ‘exposure to genetics may be their sole opportunity to develop scientific literacy in this field’ – where ‘scientific literacy’ encompasses literacy both within and about science.

So, what did they find out?

Most children (89%) knew [about] DNA, 60% knew [about] genes, and more was known about uses of DNA outside the body such as crime solving or resolving family relationships than about its biological nature or function. Half believed DNA is only in blood and body parts used for forensics.

Very few – only 6% – knew that DNA and genes were structurally related. Around 50% of the children surveyed felt that DNA & genes are found in only some tissues & organs. (I was half expecting them to say that DNA is found only in genetically-modified organisms – with GMOs in and out of the news, it’s odd that this didn’t come up.) And 80% of them felt that TV was ‘the most frequent source of information about genetics (with teachers confirming that the subject hadn’t been taught at school). As a result of these findings, Donovan & Venville argue very strongly that instruction in genetics should take place much earlier in students’ time in school, noting that other researchers suggest that

giving students opportunities to revisit science ideas and build deeper understanding over time, enables them to grasp and apply concepts that typically are not fully understood until several years later… [and that] students need to be exposed to background knowledge from early ages in order for them to make sense of what they absorb from the world around them.

So, if kids are going to watch programs like NCIS, CSI, and Bones on a regular basis, then maybe early teaching around genetics concepts could use

lively discussions around what they have seen and heard about genetics in the mass media [as this] may ultimately help children to make informed decisions in their future lives.

An interesting suggestion – and one which reinforces yet again how important proper resourcing and support of science teaching are, if we are to develop real literacy in and about science.

J.Donovan & G.Venville (2012) Blood and bones: the influence of the mass media on Australian primary school children’s understandings of genes and DNA. Science & Education (published online 23 June 2012, doi: 10.1007/s11191-012-9491-3

charter schools (from letters to the editor)

Usually when I choose to base a post on the ‘letters’ section of a newspaper, it’s because something that someone’s written has rather got my goat. This time - this time, it’s because I agree with the sentiments & feel they warrant a wider audience & further analysis.

The Government wants to introduce charter schools, apparently, to solve issues of under achievement. It points to students failing to achieve NCEA Level 2 as justification for this policy. In fact, if the Government actually bothered to look at NCEA data, it would see that pass rates have been rising over the past decade, something achieved without charter schools.

And in fact, the NZ Herald ran a story on this in early 2011.

Studies clearly show that the most effective way to assist schools to lift achievement levels is employing trained teachers and providing quality professional development. Charter schools can employ untrained teachers and the Government has cut funding for much of the professional development it offered.

As I’ve said previously, it’s hard to see how using untrained teachers is going to improve teacher quality.

New Zealand has a very good education system. In countries with poorer education systems than ours, with greater academic under achievement, charter schools have failed to make any significant improvement to under achievement. So, if the Government wants to make a dent in education under achievement, why import policies that have failed overseas. Failure simply replicates failure.

The evidence on success (or otherwise) of charter schools is mixed. In some US states, for example, they seem to have a marked positive effect on learning outcomes for their students. In others, not so much. We’re told that in NZ, charter – sorry, ‘partnership’ – schools will be run following best overseas practice; it would be useful to hear more about what that will entail, sooner rather than later.

In that last post, I also expressed concern about the potential for charter schools – which, let us remember, will be state-funded – to include subjects such as creationism in their curricula. A ‘Stuff’ piece by Kelsey Fletcher expands on this, describing the intention of one group keen to run a charter school to use the ‘In God’s Word’ philosophy (something that would somehow still be able to be ‘marked’ against the Cambridge curriculum – presumably only if the evolutionary underpinnings of the biology curriculum component are ignored). Associate Education Minister, John Banks, tells us we don’t need to worry (the following is from the ‘Stuff’ item):

John Banks said the ministry had received a lot of correspondence, including complaints about public funding of faith-based education. He would not comment on the trust’s charter plans. “There’s no proposed partnership to consider, because we haven’t received any formal applications, and none have been called for,” Banks said. “The first schools open in 2014, and expressions of interest will be called for next year.”

I would feel more sanguine about this whole process if the nature of charter schools, and what they can and cannot offer in their curriculum, was set out clearly well in advance. Finding out after the event is not an appropriate option.

 

more on active learning in the biology classroom

At the moment I’m up in Auckland at Scicon (the national secondary science teachers’ conference. There’ve been some great presentations, including a lovely on on bioluminescence by fellow sciblogger Siouxsie Wiles (did you know that our very own NZ glow worms mate for hours & then die of exhaustion? Or that 4500 people die oftuberculosis every day? Yes, there really is a link to bioluminescence there.). I gave mine this morning & could then focus on enjoying everything else that’s going on.

My talk was about the ‘flip teaching’ idea that I wasintroduced to by Kevin Gould, &  which I’ve written about previously. Actually it wasn’t really a talk, as I simply gave a bit of background & a summary of some of the recent research, & then asked participants to do the activity themselves. At which point everyone got involved & the chatter started – & it was hard to get them to stop at the end! But we managed a show-&-tell & some great discussion before our time was up.

One of the things people really picked up on was something I really hadn’t thought much about: using it to underpin development of students’ writing skills. That’s in addition to conceptualising, discussing & drawing their organism: there are also things like annotating that diagram,  & writing descriptive paragraphs about the various ideas they’ve used. Really integrated learning!

And there’s also the issue of creativity – exercises like this are an excellent way to show students that science can be creative, & that this creative side is an important part of ‘doing’. science :-)

writing rubrics shouldn’t be an imposition

I had an interesting conversation with a couple of colleagues yesterday, concerning the value of rubrics. I write them routinely (must be my background as an examiner at the national level), but my friends really didn’t seem to see the point. ‘You just get a feel for what’s a good essay & a bad one,’ they said, ‘and anyway we don’t have time to write a whole bunch of model answers; it’s quicker just to get in there & start marking. Besides, you can never include every possible answer. ‘ ‘And,’ they said – we were talking about rubrics for someone else to use in marking – ‘it’s far more consistent just to do it all yourself.’

I do agree that some essays spring out as being absolutely wonderful (the very first exam script I marked yesterday was a case in point: a beautifully-constructed answer to a ‘design-a-plant’ question) while occasionally you’ll also come across one that makes you feel like banging your head on the desk. But how can you be sure that you’re treating them consistently? After all, with a big class you’ll likely be marking exam scripts for several days, & your concentration & energy levels are going to vary over that time! Constructing a marking rubric before beginning the marking task will help with that.

It doesn’t have to take a heap of time either, because a rubric is most definitely not a detailed model answer. (I’ve copy-pasted one of my own from last year’s ‘cellular & molecular biology’ final exam – itself adapted from an earlier Schol Bio exam – at the bottom of this post **.) The ones I use identify the key concepts/ideas that I’m looking for, plus usually a non-exclusive list of possible examples, & the mark weighting. I’ll often change them when I’m actually doing the marking, if students are writing good answers that include options I hadn’t considered (yes, it happens!). If my team’s marking term essays, then such changes are made in consultation – something that helps ensure consistency across markers. Moderation helps there, too – check-marking a couple of papers from each of the top, middle, & bottom cohorts will quickly show if another team member’s marking is consistent with mine.

And that ability to ensure consistency is important – not only so that students can be sure that their work has been marked fairly and well, but also so that if an individual’s marking is ever questioned (let’s say, for example, that a student’s not happy with their final grade & opts for a re-mark of their year’s work), then the rubrics can be made available to a new marker to use.

I should add that, when I set the term essay questions (which I really must do Very Soon Indeed), I write the rubrics at the same time & both are available to students from the beginning of the semester.You might ask, why? And I’d say, why not? Having a good rubric to hand helps the students in so many ways, in terms of learning how to structure an essay & an argument, & also in learning some of those key critical thinking skills: they need to assess the information they’re gathering & decide what’s relevant & what’s not, & how to pull it all together. The last thing I want to be reading is a series of brain dumps, where a student’s simply written everything they know in a rather incoherent manner. Nor do I have time to help each individual student who does that sort of thing – & we used to see quite a few, before I started using rubrics in this way. Providing a marking scheme in advance saves both parties time & helps the students acquire some desirable skills. (The old adage about leading horses to water still applies, alas!)

I hasten to add that the essay rubrics don’t include information on content in the way that an exam marking rubric does! I’ve added an essay example below as well ***, so you can compare the two :-)

 

**Final exam question & rubric

Mammoths are closely related genetically to African elephants and similar to them in body mass. Although mammoths became extinct around 20,000 years ago, a number of individuals have been found frozen in the Arctic permafrost. Some scientists believe that it is technically possible to clone mammoths from cells in these frozen bodies, thus ‘bringing mammoths back to life’ and producing a self-sustaining wild population.

Describe how this cloning could be done – including identifying a likely species to provide surrogate mothers – and discuss the genetic and evolutionary issues associated with such work. You could consider the impact of genetic drift, inbreeding and inbreeding depression on such a population of mammoths, and their long-term prospects for survival.

Describe how cloning could be done: Basic description of method (3 mks) Identifies African elephant as likely surrogate (1 mk) Explains reason for this choice (2 mks)	6
Genetic drift Gives definition (2) Describes impact on population gene pool (2)	4
Inbreeding Gives definition (2) Describes impact on population gene pool (2)	4
Inbreeding depression Gives definition	2
For all three of the above, Discusses impact on population’s prospects for long-term survival from a genetic perspective. Could include eg effects of decline in heterozygosity, decreased ability to respond to evolution of pathogens/parasites, decreased fecundity	4

***Term essay question & rubric

On the basis of fossil remains, Neanderthals are viewed as a sister species to Homo sapiens. Now new data from molecular biology are changing our understanding of human evolution.

Discuss the validity of the biological species concept in the light of recent molecular data from sapiens, neandertalensis, and the Denisova hominins.

 

Introduction – should include a definition of the biological species concept, and the nature of ‘sister species’.	/4
Briefly explain why Neandertals and modern humans have previously been viewed as sister species. How does this relate to the ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis for modern human origins?	/3 /2 /5
Outline the results of comparing neandertalensis and sapiens genomes, and the implications of these results.   What is the significance of the Denisova remains? (This should refer to the DNA analyses and their results.)	/3 /2 /5
How well does the biological species concept apply to Neandertals and modern humans, in the light of these findings? What are the implications for the ‘out-of-Africa’ hypothesis?	/6
Mark for content of essay	/20

thinking about academic reviews

In a couple of months I’m going to be involved in a review of another institution’s academic programs. So, as you might expect, the subject of reviews has been much in my mind, & it came up again yesterday when I was discussing paper content with a couple of colleagues.We were talking about a 3rd-year paper where, as it turns out, about half the class doesn’t have any formal background in a particular topic. (We will so not go into the ‘whys’ of this at the present point in time, but they have to do with alternate routes into & through a program.) This places obvious constraints on what the lecturer for this topic can actually cover, & they give a ‘review’ session at the start to try & cover the basics – really helpful for the ‘newbies’, and a quick refresher won’t do any harm to those who have encountered the material previously, either. But it also begs the question: how do we do our best to ensure that all students in that paper will have had previous exposure to some of the relevant concepts, albeit at a lower conceptual level?

And the obvious answer is, the program that this paper’s part of needs a review of its own. If a particular set of concepts are deemed important in developing a student’s understanding of the topic/subject, discipline, then we need to make sure that they’re introduced and then regularly reinforced – at progressively higher levels – as students progress through that program. And we need to look at where that information would be most apt.

As an example, let’s take part of the content I’ll be helping students to master next semester: the ideas around the Hardy-Weinberg equations. (These allow you to calculate allele and genotype frequencies in a population, given a set of assumptions about that population, & so to determine if it’s undergoing evolutionary change.) None of my first-years will have encountered this material before, so I give a broad-brush introduction & explain why the H-W equations are useful in population genetics, & that anyone intending to go on in ecology is going to encounter them again at third-year.

Which is fine, but then as a result of that inital conversation I sat down & had a think about where & when that particular set of concepts is going to be reinforced & further developed. I know that the lectures at 3rd-year are much higher-level than those I deliver, so what’s the link, the progression, between the two? Is the best place our second-year evolution paper? Probably not, as not everyone in that paper will have taken the first-year paper I’m about to teach. (So should we make it a compulsory prerequisite? I’m not convinced, as that would close off access to people with only the one biology paper but a keen interest in the history & evolution of life on earth, & I believe that would be a Bad Thing.) What ab0ut the second-year ecology paper? This is the most logical place to do that progressive build on the first-year intro, & it would segue well into the 3rd-year paper. H-W gets a mention there, but is it enough to further scaffold students into the requirements of the following year’s paper? And if the answer is ‘no’, then how do we address it – without impacting on the students’ acquisition of all the other relevant material???

I feel another review coming on…

the great class-size debate

Here in New Zealand, the compulsory education sector has recently received a lot of media & political attention (see here & here, for example), culminating in the reversal of a Ministerial decision to change pupil-teacher ratios in our primary, intermediate & secondary schools. Part of the money ‘saved’ by this move was to have gone towards improving teacher quality, a praiseworthy goal but one that so far lacks any clear mechanisms to support it (apart from a Ministry of Education statement that “[r]aising the quality of teaching will be helped by attracting higher quality applicants, raising the entry criteria for becoming a teacher and improving the quality of programmes of learning in ITE [Initial Teacher Education].”

Like most educators I know, I was concerned at the now-reversed proposal, for a number of reasons.

First up: the cuts in teacher numbers would have impacted hardest on intermediate schools with technology units – units offering technology classes both to their own students & in many cases to students from smaller ‘client’ schools. These classes give students the opportunity for a range of hands-on experiences – including science-based experiences – that they’d otherwise miss out on. At a time when primary schools have been reproached because many pupils miss out on quality learning in science, it did seem strange to put intermediate schools into a similar position by incorporating technology staffing for students in years 7 & 8 (the ‘intermediate’ years in NZ) into the curriculum staffing rations for years 2-10, with the end result that some schools stood to lose several teachers in this important learning area.

Secondly, part of the rationale for raising pupil-teacher ratios at all – and I recognise that for many schools there would probably have been little change – seems to have been the idea that class size doesn’t matter; that ‘teacher quality’ (however it’s defined) is more important. However, it’s clear from meta-analyses carried out by Prof John Hattie (then at the University of Auckland) that smaller classes do see appreciable changes in “[a]chievement, attitude, teacher morale and student satisfaction” – in classes of 10-15 students, with little effect when class sizes change from around 40 to 20. This was the case across all subjects & levels of student ability, in both primary & secondary schools. And it’s likely that one of the key factors involved in these improvements is time: the fact that in smaller classes teachers have the opportunity to spend more time with each individual student, providing feedback & reinforcement on a one-to-one basis.

For Hattie has found that

the most powerful single moderator that enhances achievement is feedback. The simplest prescription for improving education must be “dollops of feedback” — providing information how and why the child understands and misunderstands, and what directions the student must take to improve

where ‘feedback’ includes things like “reinforcement, corrective feedback, remediation and feedback, diagnosis feedback, and mastery learning” (based on that feedback). And giving that sort of feedback takes time, & quite a lot of it.

Funnily enough, just about every year when the paper & teacher appraisal results for my papers come in, my lowest score is for the statement “this teacher regularly provides me with feedback about my progress”. Now, I suppose you could say that in a class of ~200**, the opportunities for me to provide this are limited, but in fact students get feedback in class via things like pop quizzes; on Moodle – for example, through ‘common errors’ feedback almost as soon as essays are submitted; in writing, on test papers & written assignments; & face-to-face. Last year I asked the class about this – it turned out, to my surprise, that most of this was not recognised as ‘feedback’: many of them saw only verbal, face-to-face responses as feedback! This was a timely reminder that teachers and their students don’t necessarily have a common understanding around common classroom terminology.

And thirdly – well, the proposed changes did rather seem to be putting the cart before the horse, in that we seemed to be lacking a common, public, understanding on just what constitutes teacher quality, let alone how we should measure it. (For our national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, the latter is done on the basis of portfolios submitted by those nominated for an award: a daunting task where there are some dozens of portfolios. I can’t imagine doing anyone the same for the 52000+ teachers in our compulsory education sector!) Despite all the heat around issues such as class sizes & performance pay, what we haven’t had is just that public discussion around what constitutes an excellent, expert teacher. There are studies (again, including work by John Hattie) that identify the attributes of such teachers. What we seem to lack is any agreement on how to apply these studies to the classroom in order to identify & esteem those experts – or any substantive discussion*** on how to encourage and support our very many other experienced teachers to join their ranks.

**The NZ Herald has covered the whole story in some depth. One of the silliest comments I’ve seen was in response to an op-ed piece by Dita di Boni, when F Max remarked that

And amazingly kids can go from a class of 30ish to a university lecture of 300+ learning far more difficult concepts. So why is the teacher ratio argument ignored at uni? Apparently our universities are in crisis and everyone must be failing. Or maybe it’s less about numbers and more about quality, something most of our teachers greatly lack.

Apart from impugning the professionalism of our classroom teachers, & ignoring the fact that the students in university classes are different in many ways from those in a primary or secondary classroom, F Max seems unaware that uni lecturers like me don’t just stand up in front of a class & lecture at them. Tutorial classes of 10-30 students give much better opportunities for feedback & one-on-one instruction – opportunities that many classroom teachers may only dream of.

*** Perhaps this is something that individual Ako Aotearoa Academy members might be interested in contributing to?