As someone who enjoys brainstorming, developing ideas for a research topic is not an issue for me. My struggle lies in bringing my big research dreams down into the realm of reality. However, I am currently focusing my attention on developing a workable research topic, and I will bring myself down to size later.
I am toying with two different plans for my research, but they both relate to a general research question: if students understand what they are studying and why they are studying it, will their achievement and retention of knowledge increase?
Integration of current events, ethical debates, and elements of popular culture with the biology curriculum is one way of explaining to students why they are studying a particular topic. In my own experience, courses with relevance to my life peak my interest in comparison to lecture courses discussing only topics that seem far-removed from reality. So, I am very interested in research involving the concept of integration.
I have also considered research involving what impact clearly outlining student expectations has on achievement. As a recent college graduate, I am very accustomed to getting a syllabus that outlines what is expected of me in a class, including a description of what is being covered, all assignments for the semester, and what areas of my performance factor into my grade. When I think back to high school, however, the majority of my teachers never clearly stated this vital information for their courses. A study of the impact of providing students with a well-designed syllabus on achievement seems to be an interesting area of research for the high school classroom.
As I said, I am a little worried about bringing either of these topics down to scale, or fitting them into the time restraints required, so I am open to suggestions.
4 comments:
Erin, The topic of relevance will fit nicely into a project for the methods course this fall. I will have you read an article by Moll about "Funds of knowledge." This concept may fit nicely into research on relevance if you define relevance as relevant to the student as opposed to relevant to teacher or society. Some researchers in science education have been focusing on student attitudes because of the need for more scientists. You might also consider investigating attitude toward science along with increased knowledge. I have used an attitudinal survey in some of my research that you might find helpful. John
Erin,I am glad you like brainstorming... I like your idea about integrating current events and ethical debates and pop culture. You may or may not be able to do that even on a small scale, but you could survey or interview teachers or students and see what they think about it.... I think that might be a better option than the impact of a syllabus because you probably couldn't implement that.
Erin, At the risk of sounding like a broken record I really like your idea of integrating current events into your biology classroom. I know for me, biology was fun because we did lots of labs, but I always wondered why, if science was so important, was I not told how it fit into the outside world? I would have loved it if my teacher had brought up points such as stem-cell research or cloning (I think that's biology haha) in class! It seems to me, in my little knowledge of the educational world, that being able to take what you are teaching and give it real world significance is always a benefit to the student.
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