Eliciting student thinking as resources for learning is central to productive sense making. Educators use pedagogical tools such as talk moves to direct classroom conversations toward and sometimes ...away from student learning. This mixed methods study describes how teaching assistants (TAs) use talk moves as pedagogical tools to elicit and work with student ideas in an undergraduate general biology laboratory course. We combined mixed‐effects modeling with micro‐level analyses of discourse using conversation analysis to describe quantitative relationships and qualitative sequencing in how TAs used ambitious and conservative talk moves to meet the pedagogical goals of a planned elicitation discussion. The two major contributions of this study are: (1) the specification of the relationship between the two parts of the TA talk move/student contribution adjacency pair in the context of elicitation discussions and (2) describing sequences of talk moves and other factors that provide insight to features of more or less rigorous elicitation discussions. These contributions have implications for future research to test hypotheses based on the qualitative findings and for informing TA professional development focused on elicitation discussions. We conclude with a discussion around common considerations in instructional decision making in light of the findings.
Orchestrating opportunities for students to engage in scientific talk in the classroom is challenging for most teachers and even more so for novice teaching assistants (TAs) who typically instruct ...introductory science laboratories at the postsecondary level. This study was designed to understand how TA moves are related to instances of scientific discourse in the classroom (meaning discourse that includes a high degree of explanatory rigor). For this, we examined the enactment of a planned “elicitation discussion” that took place in 26 sections of a general biology laboratory for nonscience majors. Our research was driven by two‐related questions: What patterns of discourse emerged? What TA discursive moves were related to high levels of explanatory rigor in student talk? Using conversation analysis, four distinct patterns of discourse were identified, each representing different levels of explanatory rigor. Regression analysis revealed that the type of question the TA used to initiate classroom talk was not significantly related to the students’ explanatory rigor. Rather, the most important aspect of TA talk for elevating the explanatory rigor of student discourse was TA responses to student contributions to TA's initiating questions. The implications of these findings for TA professional development are discussed.
For decades, biology education researchers have made efforts towards engaging undergraduate students in the process of science and assisting students in their development of deep approaches to ...learning in the field. Research indicates that students who adopt deep approaches or study strategies make meaningful connections with course material and as a result have higher academic achievement. Studies have identified several factors that influence student's adoption of an approach to learning. Given the context-dependent nature of approaches to learning, there is a growing need to understand how students approach learning in a discipline-specific contexts. This systematic review resulted in the analysis of 34 empirical articles that examined how researchers have measured approaches to learning in the context of undergraduate biology, and how the findings of these reports shape our understanding of how students study biology. Implications of this work support a broader consideration for how socio-cultural factors influence student approaches to learning biology, a need for an increased use of mixed-methodological approaches to research, and a clearer alignment between course assessment and desired student approaches to learning biology.
Data modeling practices are often invisible to students in introductory biology courses. However, developing a well-rounded understanding of these practices is critical for scientific literacy. ...Furthermore, introductory undergraduate science laboratory courses are often taught by graduate students or novice instructors with little autonomy, pedagogical preparation, and support to implement changes. In this manuscript, we describe three small instructional changes that can be used to create space for student reasoning about and interaction with data modeling practices. Additionally, we describe how these small changes fostered student thinking and discussions about variation in data, sources of variability, the importance of shared procedures, and predictions of sampling variability. We argue that instructors do not have to redesign curriculum to emphasize data modeling practices. Instead, this manuscript presents small instructional changes that can be implemented within a variety of undergraduate science classrooms and laboratories.
Discovered from soil in a flower planter in Pocatello, Idaho and using
, SallyK is a lytic bacteriophage with a siphovirus morphology. It has a 62,883 bp-long genome with 103 putative genes. Based on ...gene content similarity to actinobacteriophages, SallyK is assigned to cluster EG.
ABSTRACT
Discovered in Pocatello, Idaho, soil near a tomato garden, siphovirus KillerTomato infects
Microbacterium foliorum
NRRL B-24224. KillerTomato is a lytic cluster EE phage with a 17,442-bp ...genome and 68.6% GC content. Of 25 genes, 20 were assigned putative functions, including a putative tail assembly chaperone protein with a programmed frameshift and an endolysin.
Sara is a siphovirus with a linear 17,362bp genome containing 25 genes. Birdfeeder is a podovirus with a circularly permuted 53,897bp genome containing 52 genes. Sara and Birdfeeder were isolated ...from environmental samples in Plattsburgh, NY, USA and Forest Hill, MD, USA, respectively, using Microbacterium foliorum NRRL B-24224.
