quality counts – except when it doesn’t

A few weeks ago, writing about the ‘great class size debate’ that we have been having in New Zealand, I also touched on the question of quality teaching. There’s no question – at least, there shouldn’t be – that children deserve the best possible learning experiences, and one of the requirements for that is quality teaching by excellent, expert teachers. It’s quite tricky to pin down just what defines that excellence, but at least our current system of state sector teacher training and subsequent registration goes some way to ensuring that the people teaching our youngsters have been trained in how to go about the multitude of tasks that teachers encounter every day: planning, classroom management, assessment, pastoral care & general admin, and have gained experience in said tasks…. (and that’s before we even get to the actual teaching!).

But a couple of days ago, Minister of Education Hekia Parata & Act MP John Banks announced that charter schools – oops, sorry, ‘partnership schools’ – would be able to employ at least some non-registered teachers, along with setting their own curricula & deciding on things like the length of the school day, term dates, & teacher pay rates. This is strange – to say the least! – following as it does on a recent meeting of the Ministerial Cross-Sector Forum on Raising achievement, which “discussed… improving teaching practice with a focus on priority learners.” As well that discussion, the meeting heard from the Chief Education Review Officer, who

presented the latest Education Review Office findings on how to raise the quality of practice in New Zealand Schools.

His remarks focused on three dimensions: assessment for learning; student centred learning; and responsive school level curriculum.

Minister Parata, who chairs the Forum, commented that

The Forum will continue to discuss ideas around how we can achieve quality teaching practice.

It’s not exactly clear how allowing charter schools to use some unspecified proportion of non-registered teachers will achieve this. Concepts and practices related to assessment for learning and student-centred learning are best acquired before arrival in the classroom, not on a learn-as-you-go-when-you get-there basis. (Yes, state schools can already employ non-registered staff, under a ‘limited authority to teach’ provision, but that’s temporary and for a limited period.)

Some real contradictions here…

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The freedom of charter schools to set their own curriculum also concerns me somewhat. We already have ‘special character’ schools which teach creationism in their classrooms, for example (see here, here, andhere, for starters). It is rather irking to gain the impression that state funding could support the same in charter schools – and to date I’ve heard nothing to say this will not be possible.

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 :-)

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?

the ero on primary school science: ‘should do better’

The Education Review Office’s report on primary school science is all over the news today: here at Yahoo, for example. You’ll find the original paper, Science in the New Zealand Curriculum: Years 5 to 8, on the ERO website. It does not fill me with joy and the following quotes from the report’s Overview should show why:

Effective practice in science teaching and learning in Years 5 to 8 was evident in less than a third of the 100 schools [surveyed for the report]. The wide variability of practices between highly effective and ineffective practices was found across all school types.

And

Few principals and teachers demonstrated an understanding of how they could integrate the National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics into their science programmes. In the less effective schools principals saw science learning as a low priority. They struggled to maintain a balance between effective literacy and numeracy teaching, and providing sufficient time for teaching other curriculum areas, but particularly science.

And

Knowledge-based programmes were evident rather than interactive thinking, talking, and experimenting approaches… Student involvement in experimental work was variable.

So – I was saddened by the report, & I wasn’t exactly surprised either. I’ve written previously (here, for example) about the problems and challenges faced by primary school teachers wanting to enhance their students’ understanding of & engagement with science. Back in 2010, Bull et al presented data showing that the average NZ primary school student spends 45 hours a year studying science (it was 66 hours in 2002), with only 6 other countries of those surveyed spending less time on the subject.  The other worrying point was that the number of students reporting that they never did experiments increased between 1999 & 2007. At the time I commented that it could simply have been that the students didn’t always recognise when they were involved in science activities, but also that at least some primary teachers might lack confidence in teaching science & so omitted it from any integrated lessons. And indeed, the 2010 ERO report cited by Bull & her colleagues found that

most primary teachers did not have a science background and that low levels of science knowledge and science teaching expertise contributed to the variation in quality of science teaching across schools… [and] that many teachers had not learned about science in their pre-service teacher training.

Nor am I surprised that schools & teachers struggle to balance the literacy & numeracy requirements of National Standards with encouraging students to a deeper understanding of science. After all, it’s not that long ago since schools lost the services of school science advisers, who’d been tasked with supporting science education and teachers’ professional development in this area. That loss makes it rather ironic that this latest ERO report recommends that the Ministry should look at ways to provide such support and ongoing professional development in areas including:

• integrating literacy and numeracy into science teaching and learning
• considering the place of National Standards for achievement in reading, writing and mathematics across all learning areas, including science
• developing an approach to inquiry based learning that maintains the integrity of different learning areas, including science.

A ‘back to the future’ prescription, in a way. And, if we accept that science and technology and engineering and mathematics are crucial to our future, it’s a prescription that needs to be met. Students who have positive, engaging experiences of those subjects at primary school might just be more likely to want to continue their engagement at higher levels. Including going on to study at university level. In light of today’s statement by the Tertiary Education Minister, Stephen Joyce, that the Government intends to “rebalance tertiary education toward science, technology, engineering and maths”, then all science educators (primary through tertiary) need to look at how to support teachers and students in developing that engagement.

And in that same light: next week is NZASE National Primary Science Week, set up to offer both engaging activities for primary students and free professional development opportunities for their teachers. There’s a lot going on in the regions, and they’re a brilliant opportunity for scientists in the universities, research institutions, and industries to help deliver the support that our colleagues in the primary schools desperately need. So, a question for my colleagues: what can you do to support this event, if not this year, then next? It could just make a difference, in your own classroom or workplace, in the future!

A.Bull, J.Gilbert, H.Barwick, R.Hipkins & R.Baker (2010) Inspired by science: a paper commissioned by the Royal Society and the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), August 2010

Education Review Office (2012) Science in the New Zealand Curriculum: Years 5 to 8.

‘scientists anonymous’ write to me about ‘programming of life’

In some ways this is quite a way off from what I usually write for this particular blog (it’s from my Bioblog). I’ve republished it here because it’s something that I do want to get out to science educators – especially biology educators – as widely as I can.

I’ve written about the group who call themselves ‘Scientists Anonymous (NZ)’ before, in the context of determining the reliability of sources. At the time, I commented that I would have a little more confidence about the information this group was putting out there if the people involved were actually identified – as it is, they are simply asking us to accept an argument from (anonymous) authoriry. (I was rather surprised to actually receive a response to that post, albeit its authors remained anonymous.) Anyway, this popped up in my inbox the other day, and was subsequently sent to me by several colleagues in secondary schools:

TO: Faculty Head of Science / Head of Biology Department

Please find a link to the critically acclaimed resource (http://programmingoflife.com/watch-the-video) dealing with the nature of science across disciplines/strands.

Interesting to see an attempt to link it into the current NZ Science curriculum with its focus on teaching the nature of science.

 PROGRAMMING OF LIFE

• The reality of computer hardware and software in life
• The probabilities of a self-replicating cell and a properly folded protein
• Low probability and operational impossibility
• The need for choice contingency of functional information

Freely share this resource with the teaching staff in your faculty/department.

Yours sincerely

Scientists Anonymous (NZ)

So, I have been to the website. I intend to watch the video tonight (from a comfy chair), but the website itself raises enough concerns, so I’ll look at some of them briefly here. And I’ll also comment – if they really are ‘doing science’, then it’s not going to be enough to simply produce a list of ‘examples’ of the supposed work of a design entity (because that’s what all the computing imagery is intended to convey) & say, see, evolution’s wrong. That would be an example of a false dichotomy, & not scientific at all. They also need to provide an explanation of how their version of reality might come to be.

Its blurb describes the video as follows:

Programming of Life is a 45-minute documentary created to engage our scientific community in order to encourage forward thinking. It looks into scientific theories “scientifically”. It examines the heavy weight [sic] theory of origins, the chemical and biological theory of evolution, and asks the extremely difficult questions in order to reveal undirected natural process for what it is – a hindrance to true science.

The words ‘undirected natural process’ immediately suggest that this is a resource intended to promote a creationist world-view. I would also ask: if the documentary is created to ‘engage our scientific community’, then why did Scientists Anonymous send it to secondary school teachers in biology and not to universities & CRIs across the country? The blurb goes on:

This video and the book it was inspired by (Programming of Life) is about science and it is our hope that it will be evaluated based on scientific principals [sic] and not philosophical beliefs.

Unfortunate, then, that they wear their own philosophical beliefs so clearly: ‘undirected natural process’ as a ‘hindrance to true science’.

As well as linking to the trailer for the video, & the full video itself, the Programming for Life website also presents a bunch of ‘tasters’. One of these is the now rather hoary example of the bacterial flagellum (irreducible complextiy, anyone?) The website describes ‘the’** flagellum thusly:

The bacterial flagellum is a motor-propeller organelle, “a microscopic rotary engine that contains parts known from human technology such as a rotor, a stator, a propellor, a u-joint and an engine yet it functions at a level of complexity that dwarfs any motor that we could produce today. Some scientists view the bacterial flagellum as one of the best known examples of an irreducibly complex system. This is a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts manufactured from over 40 proteins that contribute to basic function, where the removal of any one of those parts causes the entire system to fail.

** As noted on my link for this example, there is no such thing as “the” bacterial flagellum as the sole means of bacterial locomotion: different prokaryotes get around in different ways. Nor is the flagellum a case of design; its evolutionary history has been quite well explained. The lack of quote closure (& of citation) is in the original.

 Mitochondria have their own executable DNA programs built in to accomplish their tasks.

Well, yes, & no. Several key mitochondrial genes are actually found in the cell’s nucleus – something that allows the cell to control some aspects of mitochondrial functioning (& incidentally prevents the mitochondria from leaving!). There’s a good review article here. That the number of nuclear-based mitochondrial genes differs between taxa is a good argument for evolution; for design – not so much.

Much like the firewall software on your computer the membrane contains protein gate keepers allowing only those components into the cell that belong and rejects all other components. The membrane is thinner than a spider’s web and must function precisely or the cell will die.

Well, d’oh – except when it doesn’t. Viruses, and poisons that interrupt cellular metabolism, get in just fine. They really are pushing the boundary with this computer metaphor.

The human eye is presented as an amazingly complex ‘machine’ – yet we have a good explanation for how that complexity evolved. And more telling (but omitted from this presentation): the eye’s structure isn’t perfect – it’s a good demonstration of how evolution works with what’s available,but hardly an argument for the wonders of directed design. The same can be said for the human skeleton, which is also in the taster selection, along with the nucleus, DNA, & ribosomes (which come with more, lots more, of the computer software imagery).

As I said earlier, if this video is not simply another example of the use of false dichotomy to ‘disprove’ a point of view with which its authors disagree, it had better provide more than metaphor. That is, I’ll be looking for a strong, evidence-based, cohesive, mechanism by which these various complex features sprang into being. Otherwise, we’re not really talking ‘nature of science’ at all.

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I was going to stop there (for now) but then I noticed the ‘Investigate the facts’ heading. It links to a list of various papers & articles that supposedly support the ‘design’ hypothesis. Richard Dawkins’ name caught my eye – he’s there for writing that

Human DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.

I had a couple of thoughts; a) metaphor is a wonderful thing, & b) Dawkins is a biologist & science communicator, but not necessarily big on programming. (If I am inadvertently doing him a disservice, I apologise!). Someone else had the same thoughts.

in the rush to ‘e-learning’, are we losing sight of our goals?

One of the ‘big things’ in schools these days seems to be the increasing expansion of e-learning. I’ve written previously on one school’s decision to require all its new students to have iPads, or similar tablet-style computers. At the time I worried about whether, in the rush to embrace new technology, the question of whether its use would enhance student learning was being left behind.  And a friend of mine who’s a secondary teacher recently said something similar: these technologies can be tools for learning but do not & should not replace the need for linking our teaching to a student-inquiry-based experiential and cognitive-conflict-based learning (which requires a lot of forethought & planning from teachers!).

That concern resurfaced yesterday as I was reading the NZ Herald‘s on-line edition (on my iPad, lol), & found one story citing a couple of US reports suggesting that perhaps e-learning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The first of the Herald‘s references was to this report at Education News Colorado, which examines the performance of students who are taught entirely on-line (for a range of reasons, that could include having dropped out of  ‘regular’ schooling, living in an extremely isolated area, or for philosophical reasons. At this point I need to note that the news report is based on an analysis of on-line school data, & so far doesn’t appear to have been published in the science education literature. (However, the Colorado Department of Education annual report, from which the data are drawn, can be found here.) Nonetheless, the analysis does appear to highlight some rather worrying trends:

• Online students are losing ground. Students who transfer to online programs from brick-and-mortar schools posted lower scores on annual state reading exams after entering their virtual classrooms.
• Academic performance declined after students enrolled in online programs. Students who stayed in online programs long enough to take two years’ worth of state reading exams actually saw their test results decline over time.
• Wide gaps persist. Double-digit gaps in achievement on state exams between online students and their peers in traditional schools persist in nearly every grade and subject – and they’re widest among more affluent students.

Now, one reason put forward by education officials for the apparently wide differences in results was that on-line education was pretty much an option of last resort, & certainly at least one Colorado virtual school does appear to target at-risk students who may well be behind on many educational indicators. However:

The analysis of state data shows, however, that most online school students do not appear to be at-risk students. Only about 120 students of the more than 10,000 entering online programs last year were identified as previous dropouts returning to school, and only 290 entered online schools after spending the prior year in an alternative school for troubled youth.

The obvious question is, why? Because there does appear to be something going on. And it’s relevant to NZ even though fully on-line teaching is a long way from the use of iPads & their like in a bricks-&-mortar classroom: we’re still looking at two stages on a continuum here.

Part of it could be that kids are not really as tech-savvy as we’d like to think. Putting them in front of a desktop computer, or giving access to things like tablets, doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily use the technology to its best advantage. They may well need to learn that skill. And those using the technology to teach also need to think about how well it fits their learning objectives – is it there because it’s ‘there’, or because it enhances learning in some way.

Coming back to the full-blown exclusively on-line learning thing: there are also issues of community & pedagogy. In a real (as opposed to virtual) school, students are part of an actual community that includes both their peers & their teachers, & which can extend into the community outside of school. It can be rather isolating to be a distance student, & not be a part of that (this was certainly my experience when I was studying extramurally for my teaching qualification).

Which is where the pedagogy comes in. Certainly from a university perspective, we haven’t always been terribly successful at moving from the face-to-face to the on-line teaching environment. However, technologies like vide0-conferencing, skype, moodle & panopto can help to give some sense of belonging to a learning community – as can tailoring teaching materials to this alternative means of teaching & learning, instead of simply uploading everything in the format that’s used in ‘normal’ classes. Are some of the students in the Colorado study missing out on that sense of community?

And the Herald‘s second reference? It was to this story (from September 2011) in the New York Times, which carried out what looks like a fairly extensive investigation on the use of technology in schools, before concluding that

schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

Now, that’s talking about the current status quo in parts of the US. New Zealand’s a long way back from what the NYT is describing, both in the extent of our technology roll-out & in the amount of money we have available for it.  And the research into the effectiveness of on-line teaching & learning is certainly being done (here, here, here & here, for example). (There’s also an interesting review of ‘virtual schools’ available here, which uses New Zealand as one of its examples.)

But still: technology, in education as elsewhere, is a useful tool, but not necessarily a panacea for all ills.

the status & quality of year 11 & 12 science in australian schools

My reading assignment today was a report just out from the Australian Academy of Science(the AAS) on science in Australian secondary schools (Goodrum, Druhan & Abbs, 2011). Not what you might expect on a reading list in the week before Christmas, but I was up to speak (briefly) about it on Radio NZ & needed to have an idea what the report contained.

It’s a really thorough study of the state of senior school science across the Tasman, based on an extensive literature review, a survey of students (both those taking science, & those who aren’t) in NSW, South Australia & the Australian Capital Territory, a phone survey of senior science teachers in the same states, and a series of focus groups involving not only teachers and students but also scientists & members of the wider community. This allowed Goodrum & his colleagues to describe the ideal state of senior school science education in Australia (my marginal note at this point says ‘Wonderful! but does it/can it happen?) in terms of students & the curriculum, teaching as a profession, the resourcing of science teaching & learning, and the value of science education. They describe the last item thusly:

Science and science education are valued by the community, have high priority in the school curriculum and science teaching is perceived as exciting and valuable, contributing significantly to the development of persons and to the economic and social well-being of the nation.

And then… they identified the actual state of affairs, “by focusing on different dimensions of the school experience: the students, the curriculum, the pedagogy, the teachers and finally the resources.”

I must say that I think we are well ahead of the Australian state of play in terms of the curriculum document as discussed in the AAS report: Yes, the NZ curriculum is probably still too content-heavy, but at least the clear understanding and expectation is that senior school science should do much more than simply prepare a relatively small cohort of students for university. (This is something that I believe the universities need to be much more aware of, as otherwise we will continue to have a disjunction between lecturer expectations and the actual prior learning experiences of our new first-year students.) Also, the NZ Science curriculum explicitly requires that students be given the opportunity to learn about the nature of science; it’s not all about content knowledge. However, the AAS survey found that both students and teachers in the Australian school system believed that

Year 11 and 12 science is constructed to prepare students for university study. This university preparation perspective has resulted in an overcrowded content-laden curriculum. WIth the amount of content to be covered there is little room for flexibility from either the teacher or student.

Goodrum & his colleagues also found that most senior science teaching** in the schools they surveyed is done using the transmission model (teacher talks or writes on the board – or uses powerpoint – & students simply write it all down); that teacher demonstrations are common; and that practical sessions tend to be of the ‘cook-book’ variety where the outcomes are already known and the students are simply following a pre-determined method. Where there isopportunity for more inquiry-based learning in labs, teachers reported that these really sucked through the time & that this in turn led schools using open-ended student projects to advise students not to take all three sciences as the demands on their time would be too great.

So what did they find when they looked at levels of participation in senior science: the proportion of students in each year’s cohort who were enrolled in science subjects in their final 2 years of secondary school? The news was not good, and it’s news that’s obviously generating a lot of concern: looking at the proportion of students enrolled in each discipline in each year, they found that

[s]ince 1991, the percentage of students enrolled in Biology, Chemistry and Physics has been gradually falling. For Biology the fall has been from 35.9% in 1991 to 24.7% 2007, for Chemistry 23.3% in 1991 to 18.0% in 2007, and for Physics 20.9% in 1991 to 14.6% in 2007. While the fall has slowed there is no indication that it has stopped.

(The proportion taking Psychology, on the other hand, has almost doubled – from 4.9% in 1991 to 9.2% in 2006. Geology – this in a country where mineral resources are so significant to the economy – has remained at a fairly constant 1% throughout the study period.)

And looking at total science enrolments in Year 12:

there has been a dramatic fall in the percentage of students studying science in Year 12 from a height of 94.1% in 1992 to a low of 51.4% in 2010

with a particularly large drop-off in the period 2001-2002. The researchers weren’t able to identify any reason for this in terms of policy changes. Part of the decline may be linked to how students perceive science in schools – something that probably needs to be addressed in junior schools, because

Some non-science students report that if science was more ‘interesting and relevant to their lives’ then they would consider enrolling in it… Many, however, think so poorly of their experience and achievements in junior secondary science** that they won’t consider senior science under any circumstances.

This is a real pity, as the community members surveyed clearly felt that all students need to study science throughout their schooling – it shouldn’t be just for those who need it for their careers. They felt that science in schools

should be relevant… and demonstrate how science understanding and process impacts daily life.

Which is great – but I did wonder if those sentiments are shared by the wider school community as a whole (parents, teachers, students, the works). Schools do seem to be under pressure to broaden their curriculum, which places time constraints on teachers in the various subjects, & at least some of that pressure comes from the communities in which the schools are situated.

So how do the Australian data stack up compared to senior science education in New Zealand? I gathered from my radio host that the PM’s Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, will be soon releasing a report on just this issue. Watch this space.

** The researchers make the point that this is different from the teaching methods used in junior (our years 9-11) science classes, and suggest that “[p]erhaps this more enlightened approach in the junior years should influence how science is taught in Years 11 & 12.” (Some students obviously gained a different impression…)

D.Goodrum, A.Druhan & J.Abbs (2011) The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools. A report prepared for the Office of the Chief Scientist.

using pseudoscience to teach science

The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here (& also on my ‘other’ blog) by kind permission of the editor.

We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever before. It is  important that people have at least some understanding of how science works, not least so that they can make informed decisions when aspects of science impinge on them. Yet pseudoscience seems to be on the increase. While some argue that we simply ignore it, I suggest we use pseudoscience to help teach the nature of science (and I recommend Jane Young’s excellent book, The uncertainty of it all: understanding the nature of science,(2010) as a resource).

The New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) makes it clear that there’s more to studying science than simply accumulating facts: Science is a way of investigating, understanding, and explaining our natural, physical world and the wider Universe. It involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence – including by making observations, carrying out investigations and modeling, and communicating and debating with others – in order to develop scientific knowledge, understanding and explanations (p28). In other words, studying science also involves learning about the nature of science: that it is a process as much as, or more than, a set of facts. Pseudoscience offers a lens through which to approach this.

1. Check the information
Students should be encouraged to think about the validity and reliability of particular statements. They should learn about the process of peer review. They should ask: has a particular claim been peer reviewed; who reviewed it; where was it published? There is a big difference between information that’s been tested and reviewed, and information (or misinformation) that simply represents a particular point of view and is promoted via the popular press (and Internet).

‘Cold fusion’ is a good example. Cold fusion was a claim that nuclear fusion could be achieved in the laboratory at room temperatures. The claim was trumpeted to the world via a press release, but was subsequently debunked because other researchers tried, and failed, to duplicate its findings.

Thus checking the source of the information is vital. There is a hierarchy of journals, with publications such as Science considered prestigious, and publications such as Medical Hypotheses considered less so. The key distinction between these journals is the peer review process. For example, papers submitted to Science are subject to stringent peer review processes (and many don’t make the grade), while Medical Hypotheses seems to accept submissions uncritically, with minimal review.

By considering the source of information students can begin to develop the sort of critical thinking skills that they need to make sense of the cornucopia of information on the Internet. When viewing a particular Internet site they should ask (and answer!) questions about the source of the information: has it been subject to peer review (you could argue that the Internet is an excellent ‘venue’ for peer review, but all too often it’s simply self-referential), does it fit into our existing scientific knowledge, and do we need to know anything else about the data or its source?

2. Analyse the information
The following example is excellent for a discussion around both evolution and experimental design, in addition to the nature of science. There is an online article entitled Darwin at the drugstore: testing the biological fitness of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (Gillen & Anderson, 2008) where the researchers tested the concept that a mutation conferring antibiotic resistance rendered the bacteria less ‘fit’. Note: There is an energy cost to bacteria in producing any protein, but whether this renders them less fit – in the Darwinian sense – is entirely dependent on context.

The researchers used two populations of the bacterium Serratia marcescens: an ampicillin-resistant lab-grown strain, which produces white colonies, and a pink, non-resistant (‘wild-type’) population obtained from pond water. ‘Fitness’ was defined as ‘growth rate and colony “robustness” in minimal media.’ After 12 hours’ incubation the two populations showed no difference in growth on normal lab media (though there were differences between 4 and 6 hours) but the wild-type strain did better on minimal media. It is difficult to know whether the difference was of any statistical significance as the paper’s graphs lack error bars and there are no tables showing the results of statistical comparisons. Nonetheless, the authors describe the differences in growth as ‘significant’.

The authors concluded that antibiotic resistance did not enhance the fitness of Serratia marcescens: wild-type [S.marcescens] has a significant fitness advantage over the mutant strains due to its growth rate and colony size. Therefore, it can be argued that ampicillin resistance mutations reduce the growth rate and therefore the general biological fitness of S.marcescens. This study concurs with Anderson (2005) that while mutations providing antibiotic resistance may be beneficial in certain, specific, environments, they often come at the expense of pre-existing function, and thus do not provide a mechanism for macroevolution (Gillen & Anderson, 2008).

Let us now apply some critical thinking to this paper. Your students will be familiar with the concept of a fair test, so they will probably recognise fairly quickly that such a test was not performed in this case because the researchers were not comparing ‘apples with apples’. When one strain of the test organism is lab-bred and not only antibiotic-resistant but forms different coloured colonies from the pond-dwelling wild-type, there are a lot of different variables involved, not just the one whose effects are supposedly being examined.

In addition, and perhaps more tellingly, the experiment did not test the fi tness of the antibiotic-resistance gene in the environment where it might convey an advantage. The two Serratia marcescens strains were not grown in media containing ampicillin! Evolutionary biology predicts that the resistant strain would be at a disadvantage in minimal media. This is due to it using energy to express a gene that provides no benefit in that environment, making it short of energy for other cellular processes. And, as I commented earlier, the data do not show any significant differences between the two bacterial strains.

Also, the authors work at Liberty University, a private faith-based institution with strong creationist leanings, and the article is an online publication in the ‘Answers in Depth’ section of the website of Answers in Genesis (a young-Earth creationist organisation). This is not a mainstream peer-reviewed science journal. This does suggest that a priori assumptions may have coloured the experimental design.

3. Verify the information
Your students should learn how to recognise ‘bogus’ science. To begin with, students should scrutinise information presented via the popular media (including websites) and ask: why is this happening? Another warning sign is the presence of conspiracy theories.

One conspiracy theory worth discussing relates to the validity of vaccination programmes: “Is vaccination really for the good of our health, or the result of a conspiracy between government and ‘big pharma’ to make us all sick so that pharmaceutical companies can make more money selling products to help us get better?”

Dr A. Kalokerinos is often quoted on anti-vaccination websites as saying: My final conclusion after forty years or more in this business is that the unofficial policy of the World Health Organisation and the unofficial policy of ‘Save the Children’s Fund and almost all those organisations is one of murder and genocide. They want to make it appear as if they are saving these kids, but in actual fact they don’t.

This quote is a good example of how conspiracy theorists often use an argument from an ‘authority’. Yet it is easy to pull together a list of names with PhD or MD after them to support an argument. Try giving your students a list of names of ‘experts’ and see if they can work out their field of expertise.

Recently, New Zealand schools received a mailout from a group called ‘Scientists Anonymous’ offering an article purporting to support ‘intelligent design’ rather than an evolutionary explanation for a feature of neuroanatomy. The article was authored by Dr Jerry Bergman.

A literature search indicates that Dr Bergman has made no recent contributions to the scientific literature in this field, but he has published a number of articles with a creationist slant. So Dr Bergman cannot really be regarded as an expert authority in this particular area. Similarly, it is well worth reviewing the credentials of many anti-vaccination ‘experts’ – the fact that someone has a PhD by itself is irrelevant; the discipline in which that degree was gained, is important. Observant students may also wonder why the originators of the mail out feel it necessary to remain anonymous.

Students need to know the difference between anecdote and data. Humans are pattern-seeking animals and we dohave a tendency to see non-existent correlations where in fact we are looking at coincidences. For example, a child may develop a fever a day after receiving a vaccination. But without knowing how many non-vaccinated children also developed a fever on that particular day, it’s not actually possible to say that there’s a causal link between the two.

Another important message to get across to students is that there are not always two equal sides to every argument, not withstanding the catchcry of “teach the controversy!” This is an area where the media, with their tendency to allot equal time to each side for the sake of ‘fairness’, are not helping. Balance is all very well, but not without due cause.

For example, apply scientific thinking to claims such as the health benefi ts of homeopathy. Homeopathy makes quite specific claims concerning health and well-being. How would you test those claims of efficacy? What are the mechanisms by which homeopathy – or indeed any other alternative health product – is supposed to have its effects? Claims that homeopathy works through mechanisms as yet unknown to science don’t address this question, but in addition, they presuppose that it does actually work.

Students will have some knowledge of the properties of matter and the effects of dilution, and senior classes may be aware of Avogadro’s number. They could apply this to the claim that homeopathic remedies become more effective at higher and higher dilutions, something that, if correct, would overturn our understanding of basic chemistry and physics. The 10:23 Campaign – in which people take ‘overdoses’ of homeopathic remedies – is a humorous way of highlighting the improbability of such claims.

Finally…
If students can learn to apply these tools to questions of science and pseudoscience, they will become better equipped to find their way through the maze of conflicting information that the modern world presents, regardless of whether they go on to further study in the sciences.

A.Campbell (2011) Using pseudoscience to teach science. New Zealand Science Teacher 128: 38-39

prior learning & university success in biology

Like the previous post (in fact, like most of my posts!) this is something I originally wrote for the Bioblog. Much of what I write there is on biological issues of one sort or another, but it’s nice to be able to share the teaching-focused ones here :-)

One of the sessions at FYBEC – on the changes in NCEA Achievement Standards in order to align them with the 2007 Curriculum document – generated a lot of discussion. It was great to have this session, as a heads-up to the changes in prior learning that we’ll see in students coming in to uni-level biology from 2013 (genetics will be moved to year 12, for example). Not least because I think many tertiary educators are still not really clear on how NCEA (the National Certificate in Educational Achievement, for my non-NZ readers) & the curriculum work, in the sense that there is plenty of room for flexibility in which (& how many) standards schools may decide to offer. From the uni perspective, this means that there will be a lot more diversity in prior learning among that 2013 cohort. (Even more than exists now, that is.)

I think it’s fair to say that at FYBEC responses to this information were quite wide-ranging. At one end there were those who found this quite worrying: surely schools should be given guidelines on just what they should be teaching those year 13 students, so that they all came to uni with the same general background in biology? This is certainly something that’s been discussed before, but my own opinion is that if we went down that route, it would suggest that we’re out of touch with what’s going on in the secondary schools. It also ignores the fact that a lot of year 13 students are not actually going on to university study, & schools have a responsibility to prepare all their students for their future lives & careers, not just the uni-bound cohort. Plus, the new curriculum actually encourages schools to offer a mix of standards that suit the needs of their own students & community (eg it’s possible to combine standards in chemistry & biology so that students can focus on biochemistry).

The thing is, while the current changes in standards & curriculum may increase the diversity in student backgrounds, that diversity is actually nothing new. A reasonably large number of students in my own first-year bio classes will have last studied biology in year 12, for example, and there’s usually a smattering of people who’ve not studied the subject beyond year 11 (if that). But research has shown that this doesn’t really matter: by the end of the semester there’s no real difference in levels of achievement between those different groups -provided we adapt our teaching accordingly (eg Buntting, Coll & Campbell, 2005).

So when my friend Pip gave me a paper entitled Prior learning in biology at high school does not predict performance in the first year at university, by Elisa Bone & Robert Reid (2011), I was eager to read it.

There are many factors that can affect a student’s transition from secondary school to university life, and Bone & Reid expected that one predictor of academic success in biology classes would be prior study in the subject. They set out to look for any correlation between students’ results in a paper on cellular & molecular bioloty wtih their school results, predicting that students with prior learning in biology would have higher results than those without it, but that chemistry might also be important (for students in this particular paper, anyway). The research was carried out at the University of Adelaide which (as is the case in New Zealand) has no requirement for previous study in biology or chemistry for students intending to enrol in the paper.

Now, introductory classes typically cover a lot of material (see my previous post on the issue of content), fairly quickly, & so it’s reasonable to expect that some prior learning in that area would be beneficial. Other factors that might affect success include the need to get used to large class sizes & the expectation from teaching staff that students are, or are becoming, independent learners; the need to adapt to high workloads & to become enculturated into the sometimes rather impersonal life of an academic institution; and  things outside the institution’s control, such as family responsibilities or work (Bone & Reid, 2011; Zepke et al., 2005).

In the period 2004-2007 the paper’s organisers had streamed students, with everyone having the same lectures & labs but students who hadn’t completed the final year of bio at school attended a 2-hour long tutorial each week (as opposed to the normal 1-hour class). The idea was that the students would have extra time to ask questions & work on problems but – I suspect rather to the surprise of the organisers – overall this intervention had no significant effect on either student success or retention. So, for students in the 2007-2009 cohorts, Bone & Reid looked at student performance for 3 groups: those who’d taken biology but not chemistry, those who’d completed chem but not bio, & those who’d done both subjects right through their final year of school.

Much to the researchers’ surprise, they found no difference in outcomes for students who had, or hadn’t, studied biology in their final year of school – unless they’d also studied chemistry:

[There] were no differences between final… grades [in the cellular & molecular paper] for students who completed biology in Year 12** and those that had not, whereas students who completed chemistry in Year 12 performed better… than those who had not.

(** In Australia year 12 is the equivalent of year 13 in New Zealand.)

Deeper analysis showed that around a third of students who studied biology weren’t taking any other science, while those who took chemistry were highly likely to take another science (most commonly physics). Bone & Reid wondered if the chemists were likely to have a higher level of scientific literacy & that this was more likely to influence success than prior experience in biology. Now that would be a very interesting question to delve into! But presence or lack of prior learning in biology was not a predictor of success in the subject at university.

Because prior learning in the sciences seemed to be most important, the researchers felt that a comparison of secondary and tertiary curricula in biology would be useful – and indeed it would. For a start, students don’t come to us as blank slates, & without some idea of their prior learning experiences, how on earth can we help them develop a schema that lets them build new knowledge onto that previous base?

They also noted that, while lecturers might often expect students to read the primary literature, “the language of science as presented at secondary school level may be very different to that used in the primary scientific literature”. This is almost certainly true – and to be expected considering that schools are necessarily catering to a much wider range of needs. But it does imply that first-year teachers might need to develop ways to help students learn the language of academic discourse – and maybe also teach them how to read a scientific paper.

What’s more,

[much] secondary school science teaching also aims to focus on broad conceptual understanding and the application of concepts to real-life experiences, whereas in the tertiary environment educators may place less emphasis on these applications and more on the learning of fundamental, potentially abstract principles… [This] change in teaching styles could lead to a decrease in student engagement.

As Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman showed for physics students, there’s no “could” about it. And – while large class sizes are pretty much the norm at university, this doesn’t mean that university lecturers can’t use a range of techniques to engage, encourage, and support students in their learning – and to maximise their students’ chances of success regardless of background in the subject.

Bone & Reid conclude that

educators and administrators cannot expect students to be suitably prepared for first-year biology simply because they have completed biology at the senior high school-level… In addition, first-year educators face continuing issues as a result of the mismatch and need to tailor their teaching activities to suit students with widely varying levels of background knowledge.

To which I respond: hear hear!

E.Bone & R.Reid (2011) Prior learning in biology at high school does not predict performance in the first year at university. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(6): 709-724

C.Buntting, R.Coll & A.Campbell (2005) Using concept mapping to enhance conceptual understanding of diverse students in an introductory-level university biology course. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Australasian Science Education Research Association

N.Zepke, L.Leach, T.Prebble, A.Campbell, D.Coltman, B.Dewart, M.Gibson, J.Henderson, J.Leadbeater, S.Purnall, L.Rowan, N.Solomon & S.Wilson (2005) Improving tertiary student outcomes in the first year of study. TLRI report, NZCER Distribution Services.

engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering

This is another little something that I originally wrote for the Bioblog. It’s a look at a new report published by Ako Aotearoa, the organisation charged with promoting and enhancing tertiary teaching excellence here in New Zealand.

My eye was caught by that title to a paper just out on the Ako Aotearoa website (click here for the summary document & here for the full report). The sub-title is The pathway from secondary to university education, a topic that is dear to my heart.

Tim Parkinson & his co-authors were keen to get a handle on just how university students make the transition from secondary school to university, and how they become/remain engaged with science during that process. The project’s underlying aims were to:

• improve student engagement in the study of science at university;
• improve the transition from the school learning environment to that of university;
• identify and promolgate pedagogical ‘best practice’ for science education in the first year at university.

(I know this is nit-picking, but surely the aim was to provide information that will help universities enhance student engagement and transition, using a range of ‘best practice’ options identified during the project. They weren’t looking at whether particular interventions actually had that result.)

In order to know how to make these changes, you really need to know what’s currently happening – and also how lecturers & students percieve what’s happening in their classrooms. We already know (eg Buntting, 2006) that there’s a mismatch between lecturer & student perceptions about prior knowledge, in biology at least, so I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the same mismatch exists around perceptions of teaching quality and engagement. The research team looked at all this using a combination of questionnaires & focus groups, working with secondary school science students (N=421), university students in their first year of a science degree (N=630), school science teachers (N-33) and uni science lecturers (N=69). Each of the four groups in the study answered the same questions, although the wording differed a bit depending on the group. For example,

Teacher questionnaire: I give students the opportunity to influence the way that they are taught. Student questionnaire: I am given the opportunity to influence the way I am taught.

(Parkinson et al, 2011; answers were scored on a 5-point Likert scale.)

As you might expect, it turns out that lecturers’ style, personality & enthusiasm had a big impact on students’ engagement with science at university, and on their ability to move smoothly from secondary school to higher-level study. But the lecturers’ abiltiy to present information in contexts that students see as relevant to their own specific interests is also important – not least because this would allow students to fit that information into their own internalised understanding of & knowledge about science (their ‘schema’). In addition

learning science in a contemporary context… stimulates engagement, and students enjoy learning when it is connected with a sense of discovery.

And there were definitely notable differences in perceptions related to teaching and learning. For example, the team commented that

… school and university students thought less highly of the abilities of their teacher in [the area of teacher qualities ie things like presentation skills, quality of feedback] than did the teachers and lecturers themselves. For example, university and school learners perceived their lecturers’ qualities to be of a moderate standard, whereas lecturers themselves reported that their own lecturing qualities were of a high standard.

Something that I found intriguing was that none of the groups felt that self-directed learning was a significant facet of classroom activity – its reported frequency fell around ‘sometimes’ and ‘rarely’. Our graduate profile document indicates that we expect students to be independent learners by the time they complete their degree – developing the necessary skills must surely begin in first year! Surely there’s a need – noted by the researchers in their summary, to make sure that we reward such things as critical thinking and other higher-order learning skills (which of course has an impact on how we assess our students’ learning).

It is tricky for uni staff though, for our students come into class with a wide range of previous learning experiences, depending on what subjects and which standards they’ve studied at school. This means that we’re a bit between a rock & a hard place, needing to extend able students with a lot of existing content knowledge without losing those who might not have the same skills or learning experiences. Parkinson & his colleagues suggest that universities – certainly university staff engaged in first-year teaching – need to become much more aware of the learning outcomes gained by students in their NCEA studies. This would mean that those lecturers would be able to

build on the diversity of knowledge that results from the standards-based NCEA high school education.

It occurs to me that doing this would send a powerful message to students – that their lecturers really do care about helping manage the transition from school to uni and are personally interested in their learning outcomes. (I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t, only that students may not perceive things that way!) And that can have a big impact on how students perceive and approach their studies.

C.Buntting (2006) Educational issues in tertiary introductory biology. PhD thesis, University of Waikato.

T.J.Parkinson, H.Hughes, D.H.Gardner, G.T.Suddaby, M.Gilling & B.R.MacIntyre (2011) Engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering (full report) Ako Aotearoa ISBN 978-0-473-18900-6 (online)