Evidence-based professional development of science teachers in two countries

The focus of this collaborative research project of King’s College London, and the Weizmann Institute, Israel. project is on investigating the ways in which teachers can demonstrate accomplished teaching in a specific domain of science and on the teacher learning that is generated through continuing professional development programs (CPD) that lead towards such practice. The interest lies in what processes and inputs are required to help secondary school science teachers develop expertise in a specific aspect of science teaching. It focuses on the design of the CPD programmes and examines the importance of an evidence-based approach through portfolio-construction in which professional dialogue pathes the way for teacher learning. The set of papers highlight the need to set professional challenge while tailoring CPD to teachers' needs to create the environment in which teachers can advance and transform their practice. The cross-culture perspective added to the richness of the development and enabled the researchers to examine which aspects were fundamental to the design by considering similarities and differences between the domains

Examining, Correcting, and Failing to Correct Politically Biased Judgments and Memories in Real-World Contexts

This dissertation brings together three projects at the intersection of politics, bias, memory, and decision making. The five studies in total explore how people come to political judgments, when they might be biased in those judgments, how their memory might be affected, and what real-world consequences this can have.The first chapter describes a longitudinal study conducted over the course of the 2016 presidential election. The study collected data from 602 U.S. citizens on Amazon Mechanical Turk during the presidential primaries in May 2016, with questions focused on voters’ feelings towards, and preferences for, the candidates seeking each major party’s nomination. A follow-up survey was sent to participants again in October 2016 just before the general election to see how their attitudes changed and what they remembered about their past preferences. Participants were re-surveyed once more in January 2017 just before the inauguration to look at their reactions to the election, feelings towards the former candidates, and memory of past attitudes. Across a variety of questions, people’s memory for their past attitudes was strongly influenced by their present attitudes; more specifically, those who had changed their opinion of a candidate remembered their past attitude as being more in line with their current feeling than it actually was. This was especially strong among people who were more confident in their memory and their own rationality. I also investigated the presence of false memory, and found high rates of participants remembering news events that didn’t happen and misremembering what candidate they had supported.In the second chapter, three studies are presented in the domain of political polling, looking at how the placement and order of questions can create contexts that appear to increase or decrease political polarization. In all three studies, each with over 800 people, participants had to make judgments about similar accusations against two politicians, one Democrat and one Republican, with each rating on a separate page. On the first judgment, partisans provided strongly disparate ratings, with both Democrats and Republicans giving low credibility to the accusations against their in-group politicians and high credibility to the accusations against the out-group. On participants’ second ratings, however, the groups were much closer together. This is because, after making their first rating, participants’ second rating was more in line with their judgment of the first, similar accusation. In one study (but not others), this consistency was increased by first having participants commit to relevant, general principles about whether people should believe this type of accusation in general.Finally, Chapter 3 takes a look at the growing problem of politically-oriented “fake news,” or completely false stories or headlines. In the real world, such fake news stories are designed to appeal to specific groups of people and be shared widely within these groups. Previous studies found that adding a warning tag to false headlines has minimal effect in reducing belief in these falsehoods. The chapter starts with a secondary analysis of prior data showing a partisan congruency effect, where warnings may help reduce belief in news that goes against a person’s political orientation, but shows less effect when the news supports a person’s political orientation. Following up on that, I conducted a study with over 400 online participants, testing a modified warning that comes before people read false headlines and comparing it to warnings presented at the same time as or after the headline. Participants were shown a series of news items, with the false ones labeled as such with one of the three warning types, and then asked two weeks later how true they thought each headline was. While the before-headline warning was initially very effective, and showed some stronger effects than the other warnings, the follow-up survey two weeks later showed both high levels of belief in the articles and a partisan congruency effect where people were more likely to believe the news that fit with their political orientation, even when they had known just two weeks ago it was false.Across these three chapters, I look at the effects of politics, bias, and motivation on our memory and judgment in real-world political contexts. The effects of political allegiance are apparent not only on our opinions of politicians, but also on our memories of ourselves and the world around us. These effects are incredibly strong, and far too often we are unaware of them. Some manipulations were effective at reducing differences between ingroup and outgroup judgments, while others were not. These studies add to our understanding of the role of political allegiances on our judgments and memories by identifying some sources of these effects, showing how they play out in real-world contexts, and testing solutions that are more and less likely to show long-term impact in these divisive contexts

Practical work : Its effectiveness in primary and secondary schools in England

We report here on the first of two evaluations of a national project (Getting Practical: Improving Practical Work in Science – IPWiS) designed to improve the effectiveness of practical work in both primary and secondary schools in England. This first baseline evaluation of the effectiveness of practical work is based on a study of a diverse range of 30 practical lessons undertaken in non-selective primary (n = 10) and secondary (n = 20) schools prior to the teachers undertaking a training intervention designed to improve their effective use of practical work. A multi-site case study approach employing a condensed fieldwork strategy was used in which data were collected, using audiotape-recorded discussions, interviews and observational field notes. The analysis, based on work by Millar et al. and Tiberghien, considers what students do and think relative to what their teacher intended them to do and think. In both primary and secondary schools the widespread use of highly structured ‘recipe’ style tasks meant that practical work was highly effective in enabling students (n = 857) to do what the teacher intended. Whilst tasks in primary schools tended to be shorter than in secondary schools, with more time devoted to helping students understand the meaning of new scientific words, neither primary nor secondary teachers’ lesson plans incorporated explicit strategies to assist students in making links between their observations and scientific ideas. As such, tasks were less effective in enabling students to use the intended scientific ideas to understand their actions and reflect upon the data they collected. These findings suggest that practical work might be made more effective, in terms of developing students’ conceptual understanding – an aim of the IPWiS project – if teachers adopted a more ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ approach and explicitly planned how students were to link these two essential components of practical work

Perceived strength of forensic scientists’ reporting statements about source conclusions

Three studies investigated lay people’s perceptions of the relative strength of various conclusions that a forensic scientist might present about whether two items (fingerprints, biological samples) have a common source. Lay participants made a series of judgments about which of two conclusions seemed stronger for proving the items had a common source. The data were fitted to Thurstone–Mosteller paired comparison models to obtain rank-ordered lists of the various statements and an indication of the perceived differences among them. The results reveal the perceived strength of several types of statements, relative to one another, including verbal statements regarding strength of support (e.g. ‘extremely strong support for same source’), source probability statements (e.g. ‘highly probable same source’), random match probabilities (e.g. RMP = 1 in 100 000), likelihood ratios, and categorical statements (e.g. ‘identification’). These comparisons in turn provide insight into whether particular statements about the strength of forensic evidence convey the intended meaning and will be interpreted in a manner that is justifiable and appropriate

The laboratory in science education: the state of the art

Abstract: For more than a century, laboratory experiences have been purported to promote central science education goals including the enhancement of students' understanding of concepts in science and its applications; scientific practical skills and problem solving abilities; scientific 'habits of mind'; understanding of how science and scientists work; interest and motivation. Now at the beginning of the 21 st century it looks as if the issue regarding learning in and from the science laboratory and the laboratory in the context of teaching and learning chemistry is still relevant regarding research issues as well as developmental and implementation issues. This special CERP issue is an attempt to provide up-to-date reports from several countries around the world. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2007, 8 (2), 105-107

The Characteristics of Open-Ended Inquiry-Type Chemistry Experiments that Enable Argumentative Discourse

One of the key goals of science education is to provide students with the ability to construct arguments -  reasoning and thinking critically in a scientific context. Over the years, many studies have been conducted on constructing arguments in science teaching, but only a few of them have dealt with studying argumentation in the science laboratory in general and in the chemistry laboratory in particular. Our research focuses on the process in which students construct arguments in the chemistry laboratory while conducting different types of inquiry experiments. The experiments that were assessed for their argumentation level differed in their level of complexity. It was found that the more complex experiments served as a better platform for developing arguments as well as regarding their relative numbers. Moreover, we identified a number of characteristics during the discourse that serve as a catalyst for raising arguments: asking questions and unexpected results obtained in the experiments

Evidence-Based Professional Development of Science Teachers in Two Countries

The focus of this collaborative research project of King?s College London, and the Weizmann Institute, Israel. project is on investigating the ways in which teachers can demonstrate accomplished teaching in a specific domain of science and on the teacher learning that is generated through continuing professional development programs (CPD) that lead towards such practice. The interest lies in what processes and inputs are required to help secondary school science teachers develop expertise in a specific aspect of science teaching. `It focuses on the design of the CPD programmes and examines the importance of an evidence-based approach through portfolioconstruction in which professional dialogue pathes the way for teacher learning. The set of papers highlight the need to set professional challenge while tailoring CPD to teachers? needs to create the environment in which teachers can advance and transform their practice. The cross-culture perspective added to the richness of the development and enabled the researchers to examine which aspects were fundamental to the design by considering similarities and differences between the domains

Fool me twice: How effective is debriefing in false memory studies?

Deception is often necessary in false memory studies, especially when the study aims to explore the effect of misinformation on memory. At the end of the study, participants are debriefed, but does this eliminate the influence of misinformation? In the current study, we followed up 630 participants six months after they participated in a study in which they were exposed to fabricated political news stories. We compared the memories of these â continuing participantsâ for both novel and previously seen news stories to the memories of 474 newly recruited participants. Relative to new recruits, continuing participants were less likely to report a false memory for a story that they had been previously exposed to, and they were also less likely to report a false memory for a novel fake news story. Continuing participants were more likely to report a memory for previously seen true events than novel true events. Both groups of participants reported enjoying the experience and feeling confident that they understood which stories were fabricated. Importantly, this study did not find any negative long-term effects of participating in our false memory experiment, and even exhibited some positive effects