Matthew Kloser

Toward a Conceptual Framework for Measuring the Effectiveness of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences in Undergraduate Biology.

Recent calls for reform have advocated for extensive changes to undergraduate science lab experiences, namely providing more authentic research experiences for students. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) have attempted to eschew the limitations of traditional ‘cookbook’ laboratory exercises and have received increasing visibility in the literature. However, evaluating the outcomes of these experiences remains inconsistent and incomplete partly because of differing goals and conceptual frameworks on the part of those both teaching and assessing the courses. This paper synthesizes existing literature on CUREs and assessment practices to propose a framework for how researchers and practitioners may better align the goals and evaluation practices of CUREs in order to provide a more consistent view of these reformed laboratory courses for the field.

Context matters: volunteer bias, small sample size, and the value of comparison groups in the assessment of research-based undergraduate introductory biology lab courses.

The shift from cookbook to authentic research-based lab courses in undergraduate biology necessitates the need for evaluation and assessment of these novel courses. Although the biology education community has made progress in this area, it is important that we interpret the effectiveness of these courses with caution and remain mindful of inherent limitations to our study designs that may impact internal and external validity. The specific context of a research study can have a dramatic impact on the conclusions. We present a case study of our own three-year investigation of the impact of a research-based introductory lab course, highlighting how volunteer students, a lack of a comparison group, and small sample sizes can be limitations of a study design that can affect the interpretation of the effectiveness of a course.

Middle and High School Students' Conceptions of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies.

Both scientists and policy-makers emphasize the importance of education for influencing pro-environmental behavior and minimizing the effects of climate change on biological and physical systems. Education has the potential to impact students’ system knowledge – their understanding of the variables that affect the climate system – and action knowledge – their understanding of behaviors that can impact the system. Research on climate change education has largely focused on system and action knowledge that address mitigation while overlooking equally necessary adaptive responses. This study used a pre/post-test format to identify aspects of middle and high school students’ climate system knowledge and action knowledge of both mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Results indicate that adolescents currently conflate climate change mitigation strategies with unrelated environmental problems far less than in previous surveys. However, students demonstrated limited understanding of adaptive responses to climate change. After engaging in an instructional unit on climate change, students expressed stronger system and action knowledge, but significant misconceptions remained that conflated mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.

Teaching the Practice of Leading Sense-Making Discussions in Science: Science Teacher Educators Using Rehearsals

ABSTRACT Rehearsal is an increasingly important teacher education pedagogy. We explore how 3 science teacher educators thought about and used pauses within rehearsals to support secondary science teacher candidates in learning to facilitate sense-making discussions. Video data indicated that the most common purposes for pausing a rehearsal were to provide feedback about the candidate’s practice and to problem solve with the candidates. Substantively, the most common foci were attending to student thinking and attending to the use of language. Interview data indicated that teacher educators responded to candidates’ needs when making decisions about pauses. These findings suggest that rehearsals can provide rich learning opportunities for teacher candidates in ways that are interactive and responsive to students’ ideas.

Alternate text types and student outcomes: an experiment comparing traditional textbooks and more epistemologically considerate texts

ABSTRACT Inscriptions and texts are central to the practice of science and determining how science ideas are presented in high school biology classrooms. Traditional textbooks have been criticised for their expository nature, their difficult lexical structure, and for their lack of evidence to support claims. Recent frameworks for science education in the United States emphasise the need for students to engage texts that better reflect the scientific enterprise. This study uses a randomised experiment to compare high school student outcomes – interest, comprehension, and learning – when reading traditional biology text accounts and when reading more epistemologically considerate (EC) accounts that provide developmentally appropriate narratives of scientific experiments, including data and evidence for claims made within the texts. Results indicate that students in the two conditions may not differ in their interest in or comprehension of the texts, but that students reading the more EC texts show some higher achievement on transfer tasks. Furthermore, students in the treatment condition show that when epistemic resources are made available within a text, they are more likely to attend to data and evidence and are less likely to rely on the authority of the text when determining the trustworthiness of claims.