Research Students' Annual Conference (RSAC) 2010 - School of ...

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Room 2 / St George Room1 / Great Woodhouse School of Education Research Students’ Annual Conference (RSAC) 2010 24 November, University House, University of Leeds Abstracts Name Email Title 10.00 – 10.25 Parallel sessions 1 Nahieli Greaves nahielig@yahoo.com Decision-making on pseudoscientific issues: the role of the nature of science It has been argued that a sophisticated understanding of the nature of science (NOS) can help students distinguish between science and pseudoscience. However, up until now the role played by the NOS in decision-making about pseudoscientific issues remains controversial. As part of this study, the role played by the NOS in decisions about pseudoscientific issues, and whether its use is itself influenced by the context, were assessed. Three scenarios were designed to probe students‘ decision-making and its underlying rationale: weight-loss pills, Aids denialism and quantum medicine. The first two touched upon topics students were familiar with, whereas the last was new to them. 128 undergraduates were asked to make, and justify, a decision about whether to use a therapy or health product. They tended to reject the claims made by Aids denialists and weight-loss pills sellers, while remaining open to the claims of quantum medicine advocates. Whenever students used the NOS to justify their decisions, they rejected the pseudoscientific claims. In contrast, justifications outside the scope of the NOS led students to accept them. These findings suggest that the NOS is useful in distinguishing science from pseudoscience, independently of the context. Name Email Title 10.00 – 10.25 Parallel sessions 2 Michael Hepworth edmdh@leeds.ac.uk The teaching and learning of spoken argumentation in ESOL classrooms What is argumentation? How do teachers and learners engage with it in ESOL classrooms? In this session I will present a short stretch of data gathered as part of my investigation into the teaching and learning of argumentation in an ESOL context. This data will form the basis of the rest of the presentation and some discussion. 4
Room1 / Great Woodhouse Room 3 / Beech Grove School of Education Research Students’ Annual Conference (RSAC) 2010 24 November, University House, University of Leeds Name Email Title 10.00 – 10.25 Parallel sessions 3 Maria Tress edmbt@leeds.ac.uk Resilience in Academia: A study of Latin-American academics coping in their workplace in the UK Fundamentally, resilience in the workplace can be considered as the ability to bounce back from adversity while maintaining personal and corporate integrity (McDargh, 2002). Most of resilience research has focused on children, adolescents and clearly disadvantaged individuals, paying few attention to the Higher Education sector. Hence this study focuses on the resilient attitudes of 20 Latin-American academics within various universities in the United Kingdom. Through in-depth interviews, it is expected to reveal what kind of challenges and/or demands these academics face and the ways that they cope with such challenges in their work life. Even though this study is a still at the data collection stage, findings obtained from a preliminary analysis will be discussed. References: McDargh, E. (2002) The resilient spirit: Heart talk for staying rightside up in a world that's upside down. USA: Loch Lomond Press Name Email Title 10.30 – 10.55 Parallel sessions 1 Luis Jiro Suzuri-Hernandez Ijsh500@york.ac.uk Exploring school students’ views of the nature of science As part of a larger project to develop and validate an instrument suitable for the summative assessment of 16-year old students‘ understandings of the nature of science (NoS), fourteen focus groups were conducted with English and Mexican students with the aim of exploring their views. The aspects of the NoS covered in the focus groups were: (a) difference between data and explanation; (b) theory-ladenness of data; (c) role of imagination in coming up with explanations; (d) nature of the scientific method; (e) underdetermination of explanation by data; (f) grounds for belief in an explanation; and (g) tentativeness of scientific knowledge. Results suggest that students tend to have an inconsistent understanding of the NoS: while their views about a particular aspect might be nuanced and/or developed, those of another might be naïve and/or equivocal. Furthermore, students appear to lack an adequate supply of scientific examples—historical or contemporary—upon which to base their thinking. These findings have important implications for future research on, and the teaching of, the NoS: adequate views do not warrant the assumption that students possess consistent or more than superficial understandings of the NoS. 5
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