Blue Collar Scientist

The second issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is available on the Springer site.

The irritating and user-hostile necessity of downloading every article separately as a PDF has not been resolved for the new issue. But it is still well worth reading it if you are teaching this subject.

Over the last fifteen or so years, physics instructors have done a good deal of research on how students think about physics, and what sort of misconceptions they are prone to. They have used the results of this research to improve the quality of physics teaching - they’ve come up with workshop activities, demonstrations, and other teaching tools, all of which do a much better job of informing students about physics than previous, more traditional methods.

As (primarily) an astronomy outreach instructor, some of this has trickled down to my awareness, and changed how I talk about and teach concepts in astrophysics.

Today, by far the biggest apparent crisis in science education is in biology. The foundational knowledge of biology is evolution. The theory is so well confirmed, so powerful in its predictive abilities, and so wide-ranging and integrating that evolution dominates parts of many other disciplines as well - including biochemistry, ecology, genetics, paleontology, geology (especially stratigraphy), and so forth. Despite this, evolution is casually dismissed as untrue by religious extremists who want it to be untrue for complicated reasons relating to their desired religious hegemony - because, in short, they believe knowledge leads to poor morals. Their propaganda confuses the issue for otherwise sound-thinking individuals.

From my own experience I feel comfortable asserting that biology students, at least at the high-school level, often do not appreciate the nature of biological processes at the cellular level. The tendency is to believe that cellular processes are directed. This belief has in common with evolution denialism an insufficient appreciation of the character and power of random occurrences, and a lack of awareness of where randomness ends and direction begins. However, I have not previously been aware of any research supporting this notion.

Now, much like physicists, biologists have begun to do research on student misconceptions about their subject area. A paper in last month’s PLoS-Biology, Recognizing Student Misconceptions through Ed’s Tools and the Biology Concept Inventory, details some interesting methods and results of such research.

The research began with the construction of a concept inventory, which was done by asking students several open-ended questions about biological processes. Responses to the questions, as well as interviews with the students, were analyzed in order to determine where student misconceptions were rooted.

Results from the BCI indicate a striking lack of understanding on two questions related to randomness, even after three major’s courses in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder—we suspect that similar results would be found widely.

(Emphasis mine.) Misconceptions on randomness do not surprise me; high school students are the raw material of college freshmen. But I was surprised that the misconceptions persisted after three college courses in the subject.

A common observation … was that students were unwilling to see random processes as capable of directed effect in themselves—they routinely seek alternative rational explanations, the dominant one being the presumption of drivers that are actually responsible for the observed effects.

It will be noted that this amounts to the cognitive strategy adopted by intelligent design creationists - deny, without having a reason, that randomness can produce an effect, and then go make something up to fill the void.

This research therefore serves as a very large arrow pointing at where biology, presumably including outreach, is having educational failures. It also points out that these failures are in the same concept domain that intelligent design creationists are having propagandistic success.

In discussing the cognitive effect of these misconceptions, the authors note:

From an evolutionary perspective, it leads to “just-so” stories that project meaning onto every variation, whether meaningful or not, and obscures the basic mechanisms that make evolutionary theory so valuable.

This strokes a pet peeve of my own, which is that those doing biology outreach frequently overemphasize selection, sometimes misleading students into believing that selection is the cause of variation.

The paper authors make some concrete recommendations, including one that I believe would have high value:

From the perspective of course and curriculum content, we need to provide students with opportunities to work with random systems, and explicitly state (and confront) their assumptions.

At the level of late gradeschool and middle school students, I can imagine a demonstration involving a clear acetate box, with, say, 20 ping-pong balls inside. Four of the ping-pong balls have velcro on them. Shaking the box will result in a pretty stochastic motion of balls, and yet the four balls should stick to one another in fairly short order. This sort of demonstration might address something like the authors’ description of a student misconception that ATP synthase seeks out and grabs ADP - appropriately simplified for the grade level. (Such a demonstration has the virtue of allowing bright colors, loud noises, and vigorous physical activity into the classroom, which tends to appeal to this age group.)

The paper is focused on college-level students and instructors, but it nevertheless suggests several strategies for outreach and educators in lower grades. It is recommended reading for anyone doing outreach that touches on biology.

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This blog post is about:

Klymkowsky, M.W., Garvin-Doxas, K. (2008). Recognizing Student Misconceptions through Ed’s Tools and the Biology Concept Inventory. PLoS Biology, 6(1), e3. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060003

Evolution education in this country (the United States) is in some serious trouble. As is well known, we have a large population of people whom the schools have failed, who believe that the theory of evolution makes claims that it does not. In place of the reality of evolution, they have chosen to believe the creation myth of a bronze-age middle eastern religion, which was largely plagiarized from four earlier Mesopotamian myths. The worldview of this “alternative” asserts that knowledge is essentially undiscoverable and unchangeable, that observations of the universe must conform to limits that are pre-defined by these myths, and that people who do not agree with the repressive system of “morality” that accompanies these mythic beliefs are unfit to exist in society.

Accordingly, it is very nice to find a free periodical resource designed to aid those doing education and outreach on the topic of evolution. Springer has a journal called Evolution: Education and Outreach, designed to help instructors of K-16 with their activities. And they have decided that during 2008, anyone may receive the journal free online. This is stale news; somehow I missed it when it was launched last November.

Free access is good, very good indeed! And Springer should be commended for this.

On the other hand, they’ve made it painfully difficult to get a copy of the journal online. As far as I can tell, it is actually impossible to get a copy of the journal online.

What you can do instead is get a separate copy of each article in the journal, requiring at least 21 separate downloads for a single issue of the journal.

To do this, go to the very counterintuitive page that apparently lists issues of the journal. As I write, there is only one issue of the journal available. But don’t be confused by the link to “Online First,” because that’s not it. What we’re looking for is Number 1 / January, 2008 - click on that instead.

Once you have done that, you’ll be on a page that lists the articles in this issue of the journal. At the top of each section are the article titles. Other than the title, there’s no way to determine what the article is about. If you click the title, you don’t get the article - you get an abstract (sometimes), and you get some information about who, if anyone, has cited back to that article. Clicking the title is about as expensive in terms of effort and download time as just downloading the article and skimming the first couple paragraphs to learn if it is topically relevant with what you are doing. So there’s no real point to clicking on the title.

To get the article, you need to look a few lines below the title, to the “Text:” field, and click on either PDF or HTML, depending on which format you want to read the article in. I’ve now read a few articles in each format. Strangely, PDFs download a lot faster than HTML (sometimes HTML articles simply won’t load at all). And if you click on the HTML link, you may wonder why nothing happens, depending on what browser you are using and how it is configured - the HTML link insists on opening a new tab or window without telling you, and this can be puzzling if the new page opens hidden behind another one.

Anyway, if you do all this properly, you can read the whole journal only after an absolute minimum of 24 clicks (and 21 save-as dialogs if you are saving PDFs locally to read offline). Everywhere else on the web, one click would do to read a PDF version of a journal. And don’t fool around with the “save this item” or “download this list” icons, because they don’t do what normal web users think.

This system sucks, and it will obviously discourage people from reading. I know Springer is a journal publisher, and I know publishing journals in this way makes sense when your readers are highly focused on specific topics. But they’re publishing an EPO aid in this case, not a research journal, and most of its audience is not going to be savvy to Springer’s proprietary online journal publishing system. Nor will they find its bells and whistles useful.

The contributors to and publishers of this journal need to take a look at what we’re up against: a horde of ignorant evangelists who enjoy single-click downloading of articles at their primary “research” sites such as Answers in Genesis.

The resource content is actually pretty good. I recommend going and reading it if you are doing science EPO that ever touches on evolution, as I am.

Springer: Single-click download, please. Until then, you get a D-.