Exploring the Academic/Creative Writing Binary

I began to work on this study in my ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines class during my junior year at Pace University. After being asked to write a paper on what writing looks like in my discipline, I realized that my perceptions of the kinds of writing done by faculty and students in a university English department were limited and constricting as a result of the binary way in which I viewed academic and creative forms of writing. For instance, I had trouble believing that my creative writing professor studied pre-med in undergrad. I continued my research on this topic by developing a study to discover how faculty and undergraduates think about writing in an English department. In conducting this research, I hoped to redefine and illustrate potential overlaps between academic and creative writing and to propose new (perhaps more fluid or capacious) ways of labeling and conveying the kind of writing students and faculty produce. Specifically, I wanted to explore whether these are terms or categories that either groups use, or whether faculty and students’ perceptions of academic and creative writing challenge these categories. I explored these concepts through a qualitative study. After obtaining IRB approval, I devoted one class of Meaghan Brewer’s English 201:Writing in the Discplines to a workshop where students in the class brought in samples of their own writing and then put them into categories and created labels. Students filled out a form giving a rationale for how they labeled different kinds of writing before having a class discussion. I repeated the same process in a composition faculty meeting in the English department. These activities are modeled on activities described in research by composition scholar Anne Ruggles Gere. This highly contextual, qualitative research is commonplace in composition studies and has been present in the majority of my initial literature review. In conducting this study, my largest obstacle was the small amount of time I had to analyze the results of my activities between drafts. However, the data collected exceeded my expectations in that, like in much of the research cited in this paper, I found students had binary views of academic and creative writing despite not using them often as labels. For the most part, they described academic as being constricting and reliant on structure whereas they saw creative as a freer style that allowed them to voice an opinion. On the contrary, faculty used these terms more frequently, but thought about them in less binary ways. After having a group discussion, both faculty and students appeared to have broadened the way they looked at writing which is what I was hoping to encourage with this study. My findings suggest that faculty members need to create curricula that encourage students to see genres in more complex ways. Future research might explore how expanding the approach to teaching genre could redefine student perceptions of college writing

An Exploration of the Cognitive Predictors of Perseverative Worry

The mood-as-input model of perseverative worrying is a conceptual model that has been developed to explain the perseverative aspect of worry inherent in Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) (Davey, 2006a). The first objective of this study was to provide additional empirical support for the mood-as-input model of perseverative worrying. A second objective of this study was to investigate the association between perseverative worry and GAD symptoms. The final objective of this study was to assist in generating a comprehensive model of worry that incorporated unique predictors of GAD. Results indicated that unique variables, such as ‘as many as can’ stop rules and beliefs about worry, were weak predictors of perseveration, but were significant predictors of worry and GAD symptoms. Therefore, these variables may still contribute to the processes inherent in perseverative worry. Results also indicated that the catastrophic interview was an overall weak predictor of worry and GAD symptoms, suggesting that the catastrophic interview might not be the most suitable measure of perseverative worry. In summary, the current study provides mixed support for the mood-as-input model of perseverative worrying. Future research should further examine the relationship of the catastrophic interview and perseverative worry. In addition, future studies should include measures of GAD symptoms as an outcome variable when studying the mood-as-input model. Keywords: worry, GAD, catastrophic interview, meta-cognition, stop rule

Collaboration and inquiry for the science classroom

Science is a collaborative endeavor, where most of the significantly influential advances are achieved by groups of scientists working together across varying institutions and disciplines. To reflect this, we should offer opportunities for our students to learn, research, and communicate with their peers. In this workshop, we share models that we have found successful for designing opportunities, as well as ideas for topics that promote real world application and cross disciplinary work for students, drawing from our experiences with the International Student Science Fair and other international strategies. We will help interested teachers in developing their own working groups to take ideas and plans back to their own institutions

Evolution - #2: Evolutionary Evidence and Inferences

The theory of evolution articulates elegantly a series of inferences from a vast collection of observations and evidence. We present some of those evidences here to stimulate in our students the sorts of scientific reasoning necessary to understand the presence and origin of diversity of life on the planet

Evolution - #8: Ecosystem disrupted

This is the culminating activity for the evolution unit. For this assignment, students must research into the impact human industry has on a small part of our world. Students have had a brief introduction to the history of the planet and the role that carbon dioxide concentration play in climate change. The role of climate and weather patterns is important in a discussion of a chosen place on the planet. Students have spent a large amount of effort in understanding evolutionary theory and mechanisms and seen it in practice as they read about speciation. With this assignment, students can synthesize all of their previous learning into one presentation

Evolution - #4: Genetic drift and Founder effect

Genetic drift is a term used to describe chance fluctuations in the allelic frequencies in a population over time. The effects of genetic drift tend to be very minor in large populations, but they can be quite significant in small populations. Alleles are different functional forms in which a gene might exist. Humans have two alleles, sometimes the same but sometimes different, of most of their genes. In any population, it is possible to determine the frequency of all alleles. If these alleles get passed on to the next generation at random, then we should expect to see approximately the same frequencies of alleles in the next generation. But due to chance, slightly more of one allele might get passed on, causing the allelic frequencies to change over generations. This affect will be more pronounced in a small population with a small number of alleles. Thus, the frequencies of the alleles in a population will tend to fluctuate or “drift” up and down over time

Evolution - #6: Selection simulation

A modern understanding of the theory of evolution revolves around the selection of certain types within a population that over long time periods eventually leads to change of the species. This descent with modification is modeled with this activity, and leads to a subsequent lesson that has students reading about research into examples of speciation

Evolution - #7: Speciation Jigsaw

This is a lesson intended to be complementary to the selection simulation. Whereas the simulation was used to develop a conceptual understanding of selection, the readings done here are used to allow students to see the application of their conceptualized understanding to researched examples of selection and speciation

Evolution - #0: Advanced Biological Systems

The first unit of Advanced Biological Systems is focused on the theory of evolution, the mechanisms of evolutionary change, and discussions of the biological species concept. We discuss briefly how biodiversity stabilizes ecosystems. A study of biological evolution is placed first in the sequence of our curriculum to establish a foundation that explains the diversity of organisms, as well as biochemical processes, and the ongoing change process we witness today. These concepts will later be utilized in our curriculum to highlight cellular and metabolic diversity, the development of cancers, the interactions of bacteria with the ecosystem of the human host, and society’s creation of a human-engineered ecosystem. We start with student research and presentation on the various eras in Earth’ history to establish a recognition that change has always occurred and is correlated with environmental changes. This is followed quickly by having students examine the evidentiary supports for the evolution of species from common ancestry. The samples under study run from models of fossil specimens, whole or parts of contemporary organisms, and protein and nucleic acid sequences. After evidence for evolution is provided, the mechanisms that drive biological evolution are discussed. Special attention is given to genetic drift and bottle neck effects to emphasize the roots of these changes found in random inheritance of traits, but also to highlight the outsized effects these mechanisms have on small populations. The unit ends with discussion on the biological species concept and the biological value of biodiversity. To support this discussion, we develop a considerable focus on reading primary literature

Evolution - #5: Globin Gene Evolution

For this lesson, students are guided through the steps necessary to compare nucleotide and amino acid sequences available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information that is maintained by the National Institutes of Health. The lesson starts with an examination of the alpha-globin gene. Alpha-globin is one of the proteins that constitutes hemoglobin. Student look at the various sequences of this gene that have been deposited at NCBI with a goal of determining alternative forms of the gene. The lesson then broadens the scope of comparison to include members of the globin protein family. Students create a phylogenetic tree that illuminates the similarities between some of the members of this protein family to explore how the human genome has developed over time. The results of a third sequence comparison highlight the use of the globin protein as a marker to create a phylogenetic tree of different species of animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses