Education Research Community Research Articles

Investigating the Influence of Assessment Question Framing on Undergraduate Biology Student Preference and Affect.

Nearly all undergraduate biology courses rely on quizzes and exams. Despite their prevalence, very little work has been done to explore how the framing of assessment questions may influence student performance and affect. Here, we conduct a quasi-random experimental study where students in different sections of the same course were given isomorphic questions that varied in their framing of experimental scenarios. One section was provided a description using the self-referential term "you", placing the student in the experiment; another section received the same scenario that used classmate names; while a third section's scenario integrated counterstereotypical scientist names. Our results demonstrate that there was no difference in performance throughout the semester between the sections, nor were there differences in students' self-reported stress and identity. However, students in all three sections indicated that they most preferred the self-referential framing, providing a variety of reasons that suggest that these variants may influence how well a student reads and processes the question. In addition, our results also indicate that the framing of these scenarios can also have a large impact on some students' affect and attitude toward the question. We conclude by discussing implications for the biology education research community and biology instructors.

Climate change and educational research: Mapping resistances and futurities

Given that human-caused climate change is one of the defining educational contexts in the 21st Century, we ask this question of ourselves and our educational research community: What is the role of education and educational research as we attempt to “cultivate equitable educational systems” in a world dominated by climate breakdown and related emergencies? We suggest our scholarly community needs to examine the systems and ideologies that are responsible for climate change: human supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and white supremacy, among others. The perpetuation of these ideas via educational institutions and practices is a significant part of the problem that has led to the current climate crisis. Therefore, the aim of this special issue of Research in Education is to draw together scholarship that can help map out potential roles of education in both the possibilities and resistances of addressing climate change. Collectively the papers map possible and much-needed educational futures where climate change is a matter of urgent superordinate concern including through enacting resistance to human-centrism, coloniality, racial capitalism, and their interconnections. In these futures, climate change education inquires - at multiple scales - into possibilities for materializing less extractive and more livable worlds through education policy and data infrastructures to youth coalitions and even the small everyday encounters with the more-than-human world. The papers also illustrate the potentials of climate change pedagogical orientations that are affective, interdisciplinary and intergenerational. We hope this special issue prompts our colleagues to consider how the collective work of educational scholarship might produce desirable futures amid a rapidly changing climate.

Scientific literacy: Its real origin story and functional role in American education

AbstractIt has been widely accepted in the science education research community that scientific literacy as a concept and phrase was introduced by Paul deHart Hurd in 1958. Recent research into the origins of the phrase, however, has shown this to be incorrect. Its first published use can be traced back, in fact, to 1945, and the phrase was frequently invoked in popular and research publications throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Exploring the historical circumstances of the phrase's introduction into popular discourse, it is argued, reveals that despite the rhetorical power and widespread adoption of the idea, scientific literacy (as others have pointed out) has proven to be little more than an empty slogan that offers no substantive guidance for thinking about the goals of science education. This essay argues that rather than continue to cling to the idea, the field of science education can more productively consider the most relevant and appropriate goals of science teaching by dispensing with the concept altogether.

Speech analysis under a Bakhtinian approach: Contributions to research on physics education

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Since the beginning of the 21st century, the appropriation of the sociocultural perspective by the physics education research community has represented a linguistic turn in the field, pointing out a promising path to overcome the dominance of the “individual paradigm,” both in terms of student learning and initial and continuing teacher training. This approach views science, science education, and research as human social activities embedded in larger sociocultural and institutional contexts, implying a significant theoretical importance to the role of social interaction and the context in which these interactions occur, viewing them as critical to a better understanding of the learning process rather than merely as a secondary role. In this theoretical framework, language plays a fundamental role as a mediator of human action, notably, it is the main system of signs used by humankind. Hence, we recognize the origin of sociocultural perspectives in Lev Vygotsky’s sociohistorical psychology. The neo-Vygotskian James Wertsch proposes a “continuity” of Vygotsky’s theory by emphasizing one of its unexplored assumptions: the characterization of human action as an activity mediated by signs and instruments. In this theoretical construction of a sociocultural approach to human action, the philosophy of language of Mikhail Bakhtin Circle becomes crucial. Data of discursive nature (oral and written speech of the instructor and their pupils, textbooks, or official documents) may be analyzed in physics education research, particularly those focusing on classroom situations (typically didactic interventions). We employed Bakhtinian analysis to avoid the text’s objectivist (positivist) stance and the structural deterministic idea of ideological interpellation suggested by Althusser and endorsed by Pêcheux’s discourse analysis. In order to contribute to a qualitative research technique for discursive data analysis, we explain the Circle’s theory and translate it into possible methodologies for research in physics education. We suggest an “analytical trajectory” based on this as a possible arrangement of the interpretation of discursive data under Bakhtin’s metalinguistic. Finally, we exemplify the use of this analytical trajectory in our research group’s works.Received 2 January 2023Accepted 1 May 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.010141Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasLearning theoryResearch methodologyPhysics Education Research

Confronting the ‘Coming Crisis’ in Education Research

ABSTRACT This paper examines the current crisis in education research and how we might confront it. It begins by arguing that the ‘coming crisis’ facing empirical sociology identified by Savage and Burrows (2007) applies equally – if not more so – to empirical education research. Education researchers can no longer lay claim to specialist expertise in the analysis of social institutions and our ‘tools of the trade’ are increasingly unviable. These developments are compounded by the dominance of the ‘cultural turn’ within British education research which has made it difficult for education researchers to develop a cumulative evidence base, leading to a lack of traction with policymakers and a privileging of cultural inequalities in education over economic inequalities. The paper discusses how the education research community might respond to the challenges and considers whether we might do worse than follow the suggestion offered to sociologists that they should take ‘a descriptive turn’. Taking such a turn will not be easy, but the alternative may be that education research in the UK will be even more marginalised as it becomes increasingly out-of-step with the developments in data, evidence and analysis being fostered outside the academy.

Analysis of News Communication Law Based on PSR Model

Abstract Based on the PSR model, the author proposes a research on news communication. PSR is a model proposed by OECD for system pressure, state and response analysis. On the basis of in-depth analysis of various factors in the process of coordinated development of the social, economic and natural environment composite system, the author constructs a kind of PSR composite model, by using the theory and method of system dynamics, the sustainable development of social, economic and environmental systems is studied, and the knowledge atlas is used to describe and evaluate the current situation and development trend of the education of news communication discipline, conduct a comprehensive and visual analysis of journalism and communication education research to show the frontier, hot spots, knowledge base and cooperation network of the discipline's education research, and try to clarify the relationship and interaction between various studies.

AI, Concepts of Intelligence, and Chatbots: The “Figure of Man,” the Rise of Emotion, and Future Visions of Education

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy. Focus of Study: The paper examines how different formulations of “human” became interwoven with the sliding signifier of “intelligence” through a series of violent exclusions, and how the shifting contour of “intelligence” produces uneven and unjust ontological scales undergirding both education and AI fields. Its purpose is to engage the education research community in dialogue about biases, the nature of ethics, and decision-making concerning AI in education. Research Design: This paper adapts a historical-philosophical method. It traces the effects of colonialism and racialization within humanism’s emergence through Sylvia Wynter’s historiography of “figure of Man,” especially via the invention of “intelligence,” which has linked education and computer science. It also investigates themes central to modern education such as justice, equity, and in/exclusion through a philosophical examination of the ontological scales of “human.” Conclusions: After outlining how “intelligence” has shifted from reason-as-morality to concepts of natural intelligence, we argue that current examples of AI in Education (AIEd), like classroom chatbots and social agents, constitute an intermediary point in the arc toward a new computational superintelligence—the emergence of man3—illustrating the opportunities, risks, and ethical issues in pedagogical applications based on emotion. We outline three differing visions of AIEd’s future, concluding with a series of provocations (onto-epistemological, practice-based, and purposes of schooling) that exceed such models and that, given rapid innovations in machine learning, require urgent consideration from multiple stakeholders.

Chemistry Education Research at a Crossroads: Where Do We Need to Go Now?

At the Biennial Conference of Chemical Education in August 2022, a symposium was held entitled Chemistry Education Research at a Crossroads: Where Do We Need to Go Now? The impetus for this symposium was to reflect on how our field has changed and grown substantially in the last 60 years and to challenge the chemistry education research (CER) community to think about how we could most productively continue to progress. As Cooper and Stowe highlight in their 2018 review of the development of research in chemistry education, the field has moved from personal empiricism, where ideas about teaching and learning of chemistry were guided by practitioner wisdom, to a field grounded in theories of learning that seeks evidence to improve teaching and learning. More recently, the COVID pandemic has forced a global rethinking of chemistry education, providing opportunities for systemic change in how CER is conducted, disseminated, and put into practice rather than returning to prepandemic status quo. To catalyze discussion about how to best capitalize on these opportunities, symposium speakers and attendees shared many ideas, challenges, and questions regarding the role that the CER community can or should play moving forward. This commentary aims to both document the ideas generated in the symposium by the presenters and the participants for the broader community and lay out one potential future direction and set of goals for CER as a means to inspire thoughtful conversation.

Curated collections for educators: Nine key articles and article series for teaching qualitative research methods.

Qualitative research explains observations, focusing on how and why phenomena and experiences occur. Qualitative methods go beyond quantitative data and provide critical information inaccessible through quantitative methods. However, at all levels of medical education, there is insufficient exposure to qualitative research. As a result, residents and fellows complete training ill-equipped to appraise and conduct qualitative studies. As a first step to increasing education in qualitative methods, we sought to create a curated collection of papers for faculty to use in teaching qualitative research at the graduate medical education (GME) level. We conducted literature searches on the topic of teaching qualitative research to residents and fellows and queried virtual medical education and qualitative research communities for relevant articles. We searched the reference lists of all articles found through the literature searches and online queries for additional articles. We then conducted a three-round modified Delphi process to select papers most relevant to faculty teaching qualitative research. We found no articles describing qualitative research curricula at the GME level. We identified 74 articles on the topic of qualitative research methods. The modified Delphi process identified the top nine articles or article series most relevant for faculty teaching qualitative research. Several articles explain qualitative methods in the context of medical education, clinical care, or emergency care research. Two articles describe standards of high-quality qualitative studies, and one article discusses how to conduct the individual qualitative interview to collect data for a qualitative study. While we identified no articles reporting already existing qualitative research curricula for residents and fellows, we were able to create a collection of papers on qualitative research relevant to faculty seeking to teach qualitative methods. These papers describe key qualitative research concepts important in instructing trainees as they appraise and begin to develop their own qualitative studies.

Teacher Pensions: An Overview

This article provides an overview for the special issue and a framework for thinking about the included papers. We begin by explaining why teacher pensions is a topic that should be of interest to the broader education research community and not just specialists in school finance or teacher compensation. Pension costs now account for 11% of K–12 operating expenditures—a share that has been steadily rising. The question for the education research community is whether these expenditures represent the best way to recruit, retain, and motivate high-quality teachers. We briefly review the current pension landscape with an explanation of how these plans work, trends in costs and expenditures, and changes that have been discussed or implemented. We then provide a brief literature review. Finally, we discuss how the articles in this special issue contribute to the literature on such topics as the influence of teacher pension policies on school staffing and workforce quality, teacher preferences for retirement plans, and the sustainability of plans.

Report on the First International Workshop on Data Systems Education (DataEd '22)

This report summarizes the outcomes of the first international workshop on Data Systems Education: Bridging Education Practice with Education Research (DataEd '22). The workshop was held in conjunction with the SIGMOD '22 conference in Philadelphia, USA on June 17, 2022. The aim of the workshop was to provide a dedicated venue for presenting and and discussing data management systems education experiences and research by bringing together the database and the computing education research communities to share findings, to crosspollinate perspectives and methods, and to shed light on opportunities for mutual progress in data systems education. The program featured two keynote talks, ten research paper presentations, a discussion session, and an industry panel discussion. In this report, we present the workshop's main results, observations, and emerging research directions.

Investigating the mangle of teaching oxidation–reduction with the VisChem approach: problematising symbolic traditions that undermine chemistry concept development

Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of Johnstone's triangle, how symbolic traditions undermine chemistry concept development, especially during lesson planning and teaching, is underexplored. To clarify this gap, we use the Mangle of Practice framework to unpack the clash between symbolicvs.particulate-focused instruction. We investigate teachers’ (n= 3) co-planning and micro-teaching of a redox learning design at the VisChem Institute-2 using a narrative approach and video research methods. Our results show that the traditions of redox instruction are problematically entrenched in chemistry symbols. Mnemonics, the single replacement reaction scheme, and the written net ionic equation all constrain instruction focused on chemical mechanism and causality in various ways. We assert that the nature of redox knowledge in terms of what is worth teaching and learning must first be re-evaluated for reform-based efforts to succeed. Implications and suggestions for chemistry teaching and research at both secondary and tertiary levels are discussed.

Learning Theories Use and Relationships in Computing Education Research

The use of established and discipline-specific theories within research and practice is an indication of the maturity of a discipline. With computing education research as a relatively young discipline, there has been recent interest in investigating theories that may prove foundational to work in this area, with discipline-specific theories and many theories from other disciplines emerging as relevant. A challenge for the researcher is to identify and select the theories that provide the best foundation for their work. Learning is a complex and multi-faceted process and, as such, a plethora of theories are potentially applicable to a research problem. Knowing the possible candidate theories and understanding their relationships and potential applicability, both individually or as a community of theories, is important to provide a comprehensive grounding for researchers and practitioners alike. In this work, we investigate the fundamental connections between learning theories foundational to research and practice in computing education. We build a comprehensive list of 84 learning theories and their source and influential papers, which are the papers that introduce or propagate specific theories within the research community. Using Scopus, ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar, we identify the papers that cite these learning theories. We subsequently consider all possible pairs of these theories and build the set of papers that cite each pair. On this weighted graph of learning theory connections, we perform a community analysis to identify groups of closely linked learning theories. We find that most of the computing education learning theories are closely linked with a number of broader learning theories, forming a separate cluster of 17 learning theories. We build a taxonomy of theory relationships to identify the depth of connections between learning theories. Of the 294 analysed links, we find deep connections in 32 links. This indicates that while the computing education research community is aware of a large number of learning theories, there is still a need to better understand how learning theories are connected and how they can be used together to benefit computing education research and practice.

Embracing or avoiding diversity? Yet another hostile policy against ‘non-Westerners’ in Denmark

This short commentary is intended to open a further discussion on diversity in Denmark, particularly in response to the announcement made by the Minister of Interior and Housing, Kaare Dybvad Bek, in 2021 regarding Denmark’s plan to restrict the number of ‘non-Western/non-White’ residents in any neighbourhoods to avoid ‘parallel societies’. This news was not surprising yet still disturbing, especially considering the recent taxi law requiring taxi drivers to speak Danish, along with migration, ethnicity and education research communities being accused of ‘pseudo-scientific’ research. In order to move toward a forward-thinking, socially inclusive, multicultural, sustainable and just society, I comment not only on the recent (re)surge of racism and ‘resistance to diversity’ but also on higher education’s stand and social scientists’ role in addressing these issues in Denmark, wider Europe and beyond.

Augmented reality in teaching about physics: first findings from a systematic review

Augmented reality (AR) makes it possible to overlay digital content onto our view of real-world phenomena. This potentially facilitates learning of physics by visualizing connections between concrete physics phenomena and abstract physics formalism. Here we present a part of our systematic review of earlier research on the use of augmented reality (AR) in school and university teaching physics topics. Our systematic review includes 60 articles published between 2012 and 2020, indexed in the Scopus and Eric databases. We analyzed the technological properties of AR for different content areas of physics as well as various methodological aspects of earlier AR research in physics education (e.g., educational level of participants, sample size, and research design). It has been shown that AR becomes increasingly popular in the physics education research community.

환경교육 정책 제안을 위한 교사들의 환경 인식 조사

Objectives The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers' perceptions of environmental education and to use the results as basic data for establishing environmental education policies in Jeollabuk-do.
 Methods To achieve this purpose, a questionnaire was prepared with 4 teachers belonging to the Environmental Education Research Community. The survey was conducted online. The contents of the survey are about environmental issues, overall perceptions of environmental education, and education policies.
 Results As a result of the survey, teachers are highly interested in environmental issues and environmental education, and at the same time, teachers used to teach environmental education integrated with school life rather than establishing a separate guidance plan. Teachers recognized that the support for environmental education was insufficient, and preferred methods of support such as program development and dissemination and expansion of teacher training as a support of The Office of Education.
 Conclusions Based on the results, we would like to suggest the environmental education policies that the Office of Education should support. First, it is necessary to develop a variety of programs that can be used for environmental education and build an easily accessible platform. Second, training contents, methods, places, and opportunities for environmental education that reflect the needs of teachers should be provided. Third, it is necessary to create an environment that leads to daily practice. This study is meaningful in that it confirmed the needs of teachers, who are actually implementing policies, not from the point of view of policymakers. Now is the time to prepare for the next step to put the proposal into action as a policy.

Principal Component Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis of the Mechanical Waves Conceptual Survey

Mechanical waves conceptual survey (MWCS) is a measurement tool established by the physics education research (PER) community to evaluate conceptual physics understanding of mechanical waves. A validation study is still needed to figure out the factor structure of MWCS using two data reduction techniques, namely exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and principal component analysis (PCA). The MWCS dataset in this paper was gathered from physics students (n = 419) from nineteen Ugandan secondary schools. The findings of this research suggested the single factor of the MWCS construct that has emerged from the dataset explored in this study. Several issues involved in the calculation of inter-item correlation within the dataset are suspected as the leading cause of the missing component solution or stable loading in the data. Moreover, there might be other issues that leave open space for future exploration. The findings reported in this paper could be the subject of further discussion in evaluating the validity of the MWCS as a research-based assessment (RBA) to measure students' conceptual understanding of wave mechanics within PER studies.

Bridging Educational Change and Social Justice: A Call to the Field

The education research community, both within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and beyond, could and should play a critical role in fundamentally transforming educational institutions and systems. Given its complexity, transformative change in education is best undertaken as a collective endeavor. Yet for researchers to be a valuable resource in educational transformation, we will need to bridge knowledge across subfields that currently have limited interaction. Through two illustrative examples, we demonstrate the need to link knowledge on educational change with knowledge on how to create more equitable, anti-racist, and decolonized spaces for formal and informal learning. While operating in different spaces and initiated at different entry points, the two change efforts exemplify a common set of commitments and actionable pathways for achieving transformational change. This article is a call to action for researchers to join together in supporting educational transformation that fundamentally challenges the inequitable arrangements persisting in educational organizations characterized by systemic racism and colonialism. Bridging knowledge bases and being accountable to serve and support communities and their intersectional identities are essential to making deep, scalable changes in education that promote social justice.

Leveraging existing education innovations to establish a community of practice to promote medical education scholar development

ABSTRACT Problem While some academic health centers have organizational structures to support educational scholarship, such as Medical Education Research Units (MERU), many education scholars may lack access to such institutional resources to support their research agenda and professional growth. Approach In 2014, as part of an externally funded education grant, three faculty educators established a unique education data management system Research & Evaluation Data for Educational Improvement (REDEI). Lacking an institutional MERU, they established an educational research community of practice (CoP) using REDEI as the research dataset. The senior faculty member’s effort to facilitate the group is funded by the Dean’s Office. Outcomes The CoP meets every 2 weeks to generate research ideas, discuss analytic approach and strategy, review analyses designed to address or explore a research question, and plans for manuscript development. Our CoP has grown from 3 to 18 members representing faculty educators, administrators, and staff across many departments in the School of Medicine. As of 2021, the REDEI system contains performance data on 1,246 students across all years of undergraduate medical education. To date, we have published 11 peer-reviewed educational research manuscripts. Five learners have served as coauthors (three medical students and two residents), three of whom were first authors. Eleven additional papers are in process. This community of practice supports productivity, provides mentorship, overcomes barriers, and is flexible enough for people to join when they can or when an area of interest is actively under development. Next Steps We are working on educational interdisciplinary research grant submission and creating collaborations with other institutions. Our focus remains on honing skills in grantsmanship, identification of impactful research questions, application of rigorous methods and instrumentation to address them, and refining process of budget development, timelines, and other planning strategies.

Do we all have to be “leftists”? A dialogue about antagonism and agonism in music education research

In this article, the tension between diversity and uniformity in our music education research communities is discussed as it relates to Thomas Piketty’s research on elites and shifting political leanings, Francis Fukuyama’s and Judith Butler’s reflections on identity politics, and Chantal Mouffe’s critical discussion of an antagonistic way of thinking, in which opponents are not defined politically but, rather, morally. We must establish an agonistic public sphere, Mouffe argues, a political sphere characterised by fights in which different political projects confront one another, accepting the fact that identity is relational. The article is the result of a series of ongoing dialogues between the authors and offered as an attempt at agonistic turn-taking that clearly identifies the two voices involved and their respective views.