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Home > Workshops and Classes > Schedule of Events > Winter 2012 > Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club

Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club

The Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club will continue during winter term exploring methods for improving teaching and increasing students science literacy. We will discuss how to apply these ideas to our classrooms. Participants are invited to join the whole series or stop by for a specific conversation.

We will have two meetings for participants to choose from each week:

Thursdays at 9:00 am in 225 Streisinger Hall (Novick Room)
OR
Fridays at 4:00 pm in 240D Willamette Hall (OCO Conference Room)

Please join us for our first meetings Jan. 12 or 13, where we will discuss our focus for the rest of the quarter. Send any questions you may have to jmueller@uoregon.edu

(NOTE: The below links will open in a new browser window or tab)

To read about and continue the weekly discussions see the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club blog here at: http://scilit.uophysics.com/.

Week 2:
Faculty Focus, 11 Strategies for Getting Students to Read What’s Assigned,The Teaching Professor Newsletter, Internet: http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/11-strategies-for-getting-students-to-read-whats-assigned/

Roberts, J.C. and K.A. Roberts, Deep Reading, Cost/Benefit, and the Construction of Meaning: Enhancing Reading Comprehension and Deep Learning in Sociology Courses, Teaching Sociology 2008 36: 125. Internet: http://tso.sagepub.com/content/36/2/125.full.pdf

Week 3:
This week in the Thursday section of the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club we will continue our discussion of how to motivate students to read. Our readings this week are from the book Gamification by Design, by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham. Steve Fickas from the UO’s Department of Computer Science suggested these very interesting chapters. Chapter 2, Player Motivation, discusses factors important in motivation and considers different types of “players” and how they approach games. Chapter 3, Game Mechanics: Designing for Engagement (Part I), discusses point systems, levels, and leaderboards. We will start on Thursday by considering Chapter 2 and trying to apply to our “players” (the students) some of the exercises it contains to see if some aspects of gamification can be worked into courses to help motivate students to learn.

Please contact Julie Mueller for information on how to access these chapters.

Week 4:
This week we will continue our exploration of how to motivate students to read and understand the materials assigned in courses. Steve Fickas has again suggested some interesting materials, this time dealing with a method called Reciprocal Teaching (RT). In this method, students work in conjunction with the instructor (at first) to understand a text, using four strategies: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting. Our reading for this week will include a Wikipedia article about reciprocal teaching, material from the Reading Rockets website describing a K12 implementation that could be applied to university courses, and an article by Yu-Fen Yang published in Computers and Education containing a description and evaluation of an implementation at the university level that uses minimal class time.

Week 5:
Last week people raised some questions about simulations and animations in learning- are they effective, are complicated models and animations better than more simple models, and are “3D” models on a computer as useful as actual physical models, e.g. molecular models students can build and hold in their hands. This week we will look at some of these questions in more detail. Our reading will be Design Factors for Educationally Effective Animations and Simulations, a review paper by J. L. Plass, B. D. Homer, and E. O. Hayward that appeared in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education (J Comput High Educ (2009) 21:31-61). The paper reviews research on effectiveness of learning from animations and simulations and looks at design principles that enhance learning from those representations.

Week 6:
This week at the Thursday meeting of the Science Literacy Journal Club we will extend our study of effective animations and simulations and their role in teaching and learning by creating a simulation that follows the design factors laid out in last week’s reading: Design Factors for Educationally Effective Animations and Simulations, a review paper by J. L. Plass, B. D. Homer, and E. O. Hayward that appeared in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education (J Comput High Educ (2009) 21:31-61).

To prepare for the activity, please be familiar with the paper and have a look at simulations and animations available on the web to see if they follow the directions for effective design. Suggestions for places to look: the Phet website, the extensive list of links at North Harris College. Some textbook publishers have animations available as well. Have fun playing!

Week 7:
This week in the Thursday meeting of the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club we will discuss an interesting technique for helping students understand how primary evidence is used to construct scientific knowledge. In the method known as research deconstruction, a research scientist presents a standard-level research talk to first- and second-year undergraduates, who understand little of the presentation. Over the next 10 contact hours of classroom instruction, each class meeting focuses on approximately 5–10 minutes of the seminar, allowing the instructor to approach each fragment independently from many different angles and explore the fundamental concepts underlying the creation of the data. After this treatment, students are able to discuss the experiments intelligently and critically, and can apply the techniques they learned to hypothetical scenarios involving scientific research within as well as outside the field of the seminar presentation. The technique is discussed in “Deconstructing” Scientific Research: A Practical and Scalable Pedagoglical Tool to Provide Evidence-Based Science Instruction, by I. E. Clark, R. Romero-Calderon, J. M. Olson, L. Jaworski, D. Lopatto, and U. Banerjee, PLoS Biology, vol. 7, 2009.

Week 8:
This week in the Thursday meeting of the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club we will start to investigate the use of non-textbook materials as information sources in class. For this week we will focus on couple of articles dealing with the use of science fiction movies in science classes. Many students feel that they learn science from these movies but, not surprisingly, it turns out that what they learn often is not accurate. Critical discussion in the classroom of the science in movies can be a useful tool for helping students to gain a more accurate understanding of concepts. It can also induce them to be more critical in the future- a key goal for science literacy. There are two articles this week: Does Students’ Source of Knowledge Affect Their Understanding of Volcanic Systems? (T. L. Parnham, et al. , J. Coll. Sci. Teach. Vol. 41.1, September-October 2011, p. 100)- Attached, and Using Science Fiction Movie Scenes to Support Critical Analysis of Science (M. Barnett and A. Kafka, J. Coll. Sci. Teach.

Week 9:
In the Thursday meeting of the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club this week, we will continue our discussion of the use of non-textbook materials as sources of information in class. Wikipedia plays a valuable role as an information source today. What role, if any, should it play in science courses?

To get some background about the issues and controversies surrounding Wikipedia, as well as tips if you want to make your own contribution, please have a look at the following articles:
Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head, by Jim Giles, Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005). An early comparison of the accuracy of science articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Undue Weight of Truth on Wikipedia, an opinion piece by Timothy Messer-Kruse in the Feb. 12, 2012 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education
Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia, Logan DW, Sandal M, Gardner PP, Manske M, Bateman A (2010), PLoS Comput Biol 6(9): e1000941. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941

Week 10:
This week in the Thursday meeting of the Science Literacy Teaching Journal Club, we will continue our exploration of the use of non-textbook materials as sources of information in class. Many instructors use popular science books and articles and even science news articles in their courses, sometimes as supplements to traditional textbooks, sometimes because an appropriate textbook is not available, and sometimes for other reasons. How does the writing in popular science books and articles affect students’ learning and views of science, and how does it affect their science literacy after graduation? How can these materials be incorporated into courses so as to promote the development of critical thinking skills?

Our readings this week consist of:
The use of popular science articles in teaching scientific literacy (Jean Parkinson and Ralph Adendorff, English for Specific Purposes 23 (2004), 379). This is a long article, but the material of main interest to us is in section 8.

A written media review project that reinforces introductory biology topics & promotes critical thinking (J. Michael Guill, American Biology Teacher 68(6):365-367. 2006)