A colleague in one of the courses that I support sent this (Clark IE, Romero-Caldero ́ n R, Olson JM, Jaworski L, Lopatto D, et al. (2009) ‘‘Deconstructing’’ Scientific Research: A Practical and Scalable Pedagogical Tool to Provide Evidence-Based Science Instruction. PLoS Biol 7(12): e1000264. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000264) out to a group of us today. Not being from an Education journal, it doesn’t have the usual references, but it does take an interesting approach to teaching high level concepts to introductory level students:
During the deconstruction phase, the students identify hypotheses from the seminar, explore the experimental approaches used, and actively analyze the data — a collective exercise that deconstructs a complex research seminar into manageable portions. As concepts and techniques are introduced to them, stripped of jargon, the students begin to see the logic of the research. In the process, they follow the story of the seminar and experience discovery moments as the implications of each experiment become clear.
The part that hooked me of course was the “story of the seminar”. The “chunking” is something that should be familiar to most Ed people, but chunk->story angle seems to be novel, at least to me as is the removal of jargon.
Thinking about what some of this high level research might sound like, I can only assume that the biggest wall that the students would come up against is the language that is used and the need to be able to deal with the presentation as a complete package with this incomplete vocabulary. Portioning the wall into more manageable chunks is a technique that may seem logical, but removing the language barrier is something that may not have been so obvious. Science, as with any other discipline is very protective of it’s language and rightfully so, but stripping the jargon is something that lowers the entry barrier quite quickly without overly impacting the proper vocabulary.
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