Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum Report of a Convocation (2015) / Chapter Skim
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3 Promising Practices and Ongoing Challenges
3 Promising Practices and Ongoing Challenges
Pages 17-30
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From page 17... ...
Course-based research also can build on a rapidly growing knowledge base in the learning sciences. In the first panel of the convocation, four presenters examined promising practices in coursebased research and some of the challenges that remain in learning about effective approaches.
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From page 18... ...
Hundreds of bacteriophage genomes have been deposited in GenBank, and thousands of genes have been described, including many with novel features. A variety of assessment tools have demonstrated substantial learning gains, greater retention in STEM fields beyond the first year, and better academic performance in other classes (see data in Jordan et al., 2014)
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From page 19... ...
The question is how to capture best practices so as to offer design principles for people who want to start new courses. In her own teaching, Linn had computer science students in the 1990s working on big and fundamental problems rather than on simple demonstration programs.
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From page 20... ...
Linn challenged the field to rethink undergraduate research as a continuous process, saying: "How can we promote lifelong learning of science practices by engaging students in research experiences from their first course through to their final capstone course? " One way to make research experiences a continuous process, Linn proposed, is to start by introducing research dilemmas as case studies in introductory courses.
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From page 21... ...
. Learning about the Epistemology of Science Troy Sadler, professor of science education at the University of Missouri, and his colleagues have been studying the potential for research experiences to teach students about the epistemology of science -- how science operates, the nature of scientific knowledge, and the ways in which scientific ideas build, develop, and change over time.
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From page 22... ...
In addition, research experiences vary, and learning gains may be related to these variations, Sadler noted. Mediators associated with learning include the duration of the research experiences, the degree to which students focus on various aspects of epistemology, personal interest in the project, collaboration within the laboratory group, mentoring supports, explicit instructional supports and the amount and quality of reflection associated with the experience.
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From page 23... ...
Box 3-2 Synthetic Biology: Testing Hypotheses of Molecular Function Synthetic biology, which combines engineering, mathematics, computer science, chemistry, and biology to design and build new biological systems, is an ideal topic for course-based research, according to A Malcolm Campbell, professor of biology at Davidson College in North Carolina and founding director of the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT)
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From page 24... ...
Two examples of such national consortia are the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP) and Genome Solver.
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From page 25... ...
Genome Solver is currently developing a community science project to look at horizontal gene transfer between phages and bacteria. Learning goals for students are to apply comparative analysis to demonstrate that fitness for an environmental niche is determined by an organism's genome, to understand the process of genome annotation as it relates to gene structure and function, to examine the relationship between DNA sequence and predicted protein coding sequence, and to understand how homology to defined protein domains can infer function.
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From page 26... ...
The cognitive domain includes content learning, the behavioral domain includes demonstrations of skill acquisition, and the attitudinal domain includes how students feel about their education. How much the three domains overlap or correlate remains unknown, said Lopatto, which makes it difficult to predict how measures might correlate in the field.
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From page 27... ...
Blue squares indicate the mean for GEP students, while red squares indicate the mean for SURE summer research students, 2009. Error bars represent two SEs below and above the means.
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From page 28... ...
A group of sites can be in agreement about program goals, offer a common set of activities, provide common training for instructors or teaching assistants, have a central support site, and use a common set of assessment measures. This approach permits the detection of a successful treatment despite multiple sources of noise, enables the generation of relatively large data sets, tolerates departures from experimental control, and allows for subsequent replication, assuming that new members can join an ongoing consortium.
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From page 29... ...
Major strategies were to establish centralized undergraduate research offices and to create inventories of available opportunities for research, address faculty reward structures, and use the power of convening and messaging among participants. Faculty members were encouraged to align course-based research with their own research, as appropriate.
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From page 30... ...
Using natural language processing and machine learning takes advantage of computers to evaluate student responses -- a reasonable strategy especially when these evaluations are used not for grades but to guide further student thinking (Gerard et al., 2015)
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