Why is responsiveness important in science

We also provide evidence that TAs could shift their attention from style and form to reasoning in response to moment-to-moment contextual cues. That means looking past simple canonical correctness—Did students get the right answers?

Are students finding gaps and inconsistencies and posing their own questions? Instructors can help students learn to reason scientifically by identifying, highlighting, and helping them refine the beginnings of such thinking. These studies have found that teachers can notice but that they require support in orienting their attention to value student reasoning.

This research has demonstrated that expertise in listening and responding to student ideas is not simply related to more experienced teaching. Even novice teachers can identify productive disciplinary thinking in their students if they understand it to be a worthwhile activity.

In giving priority to canonical correctness, this work has paid less attention to how students try to make sense for themselves. Moreover, lines of thinking that are well reasoned but canonically incorrect may receive less attention than those that communicate the expected correct ideas.

The lab was an experiment to measure the impact of various diets on the growth rate of tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta larvae. The tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta and the tobacco plant are a classic example of a plant—insect co-evolution relationship Orians, Tobacco plants contain alkaloid nicotine, a chemical toxic to some insects. Hornworms have developed a mechanism to digest nicotine, and are even able to use [it] for their own defensive functions, such as preventing spider attacks Kumar et al.

Recent studies indicate that the physiology in the digestive and nervous system allow the caterpillars to reduce their susceptibility of the nicotine, but the exact mechanism is yet to be identified Kumar et al. An experiment was designed and performed in order to demonstrate the use of secondary chemicals, specifically nicotine inducible and salicin, and observed the resulting effects on the growth of tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta.

Final caterpillar size has shown to be highly correlated with reproductive fitness, thus it has been determined that anything that limits growth also limits fitness Reynolds et al. Since nicotine is a source high in nitrogen and many insects have evolved to acquire mechanisms to metabolize alkaloids biochemicals, it could be predicted that not only will the caterpillars be able to consume nicotine, but also they might become significantly bigger due to the high nitrogen content of the metabolite Wagner, Salicin is included in the group of biochemical[s] with more variety and can be toxic to insects.

This variety would cause a barrier to evolution of insects to be able to survive the toxicity. It could be postulated that the salicin would cause the caterpillars not grow to be as large as the caterpillars on a nicotine diet. In conclusion, it is predicted that less growth will occur with newly introduced chemical, salicin, when compared with that of the natural diet, nicotine inducible.

The manual guided students to set up an experiment to measure the effect of chemicals on larval growth over 1 week, giving students choices among several possibilities. Note that this first paragraph essentially paraphrases information from the laboratory manual and from a published article. In the second paragraph, Micky introduced a new idea, that nicotine could also be a source of nitrogen for insect herbivores.

This idea is still in line with the main narrative of plant—insect coevolution, because it has hornworms reappropriating the secondary chemical for their benefit. However, it is not in the lab manual, and the hypothesis that hornworms would grow larger in the presence of a toxic chemical is unconventional. More, the TA could raise questions for her to consider: In what way does her prediction account for any costs associated with processing nicotine?

Does she have a reason to believe that hornworm growth is limited by nitrogen and therefore that larvae that ingest more nicotine would grow larger? Does she account for the nitrogen content of the other diets in her experiment? In the next section, Micky provided a possible explanation for why salicin might reduce larval growth. Could she elaborate on the link between variety and benefit?

Perhaps she was thinking the variety of structures within the phenol group makes it difficult for herbivores to evolve the necessary pathways to digest each version. What are the potential costs to producing chemicals of this type? Our point here is that, in order for Micky to improve her argument and develop it more fully, she would need to consider questions like this, and in order for her to consider these questions, instructors need to be looking for lines of argument that have potential but are in need of improvement—not just checking to see that students provided the expected story.

Second, we use it to illustrate the challenges in identifying these beginnings for instructors. Finally, we use it to highlight opportunities—to show how engaging with these beginning ideas could lead students to deepen their scientific thinking. There has been a great deal of work in K—12 teacher preparation focused on helping instructors develop abilities for eliciting, attending, and responding to student thinking.

This work encourages instructors to learn to notice student thinking van Es and Sherin, ; van Es, ; to elicit, recognize, and respond to student ideas Hammer and van Zee, ; Levin et al. For example, van Es and Sherin found that, with the help of a facilitator, teachers learned to notice student reasoning present in video recordings of classroom conversations. Without the distraction of other classroom-related events, the teachers could identify moments when student thinking was present.

Other work has examined the benefits to students of increased teacher noticing and responsiveness Robertson et al. This research builds on a substantial body of work that has demonstrated that the form of instructor feedback impacts student learning e. For example, open-ended questions tend to stimulate sustained engagement and deeper thinking than closed-structured evaluative responses. Research on teacher noticing and responsiveness highlights the importance of feedback that is focused around nascent disciplinary ideas and practices.

In science class, for example, feedback should be directed at those ideas that have the greatest potential to lead to scientific thinking Russ et al.

Such a focus can support a classroom culture that promotes engagement with authentic scientific practices. According to Rosebery et al. There has been less work focused on graduate student TAs, and that work is mostly situated in physics Goertzen et al.

The findings of these studies suggest that TA beliefs about learning and teaching affect how they respond to students, either in classroom discussions or on paper. They found that this behavior stemmed from a range of beliefs held by the TAs about whether their role in the classroom is more to support students struggling with concepts for themselves or more to guide them to canonical explanations.

Marshman et al. TAs were more likely to attend to conceptual understanding in an upper-division quantum mechanics class than in introductory physics, where they were more likely to attend to correctness. TAs are important to study in this context, because at many universities they provide much of the detailed feedback students receive on their lab reports. At the same time, they rarely receive pedagogical training that goes beyond the basics of university policies and basic classroom management Luft et al.

To make recommendations for TA training that addresses student reasoning, we first wanted to understand what biology TAs do without explicit training. We have two purposes in this article. The answer to that question, we show below for the TAs in our study, is mostly that they do not. We suspect this is true broadly at our university and others.

This generated our second purpose, to understand what influences TAs to attend and respond to student reasoning in lab reports. Progress in this respect could inform strategies for professional development and course design to promote TA attention and responsiveness to student reasoning. We conducted this study at a private liberal arts university in New England during the spring semester of Abby and Chris had taught lab sections for the Department of Biology in a previous year.

Abby had been a high school science teacher before entering the program. Betty, Dana, and Ed had no prior teaching experience. All had taken a required pedagogy course offered by the Department of Biology the prior semester.

That course met weekly and included readings and discussions to help TAs feel comfortable in the lab classroom setting, focusing on approaches to introducing topics and leading discussions, classroom management, lesson planning, and assessment of written work.

The course did not, however, address attention to student reasoning. The session on assessment emphasized attention to the learning goals of the assignment. In the labs we describe below, assessment focused mainly on style, form, and the correctness of information. Additionally, Abby had taken a course in the Department of Education on learning and teaching science.

The introductory biology course labs met weekly over the course of the semester, and students attended 10 labs. For this analysis, we focused on instructor feedback on lab reports written for a lab in which students investigated the impact of diet on the growth rates of hornworm larvae Manduca sexta. Students read background information about hornworms and plant secondary chemicals. For the lab, they chose two of five treatments: an artificial diet containing all necessary nutrients the control diet , a high-cellulose diet, or the control diet with the addition of one of three secondary chemicals nicotine, rutin, or salicin ; the treatments were selected to mimic what M.

The TA in each section guided students in setting up controlled experiments. Students collaborated in groups of three or four to conduct the experiments, but they prepared their own lab reports. The laboratory manual included tutorials on how to access and evaluate scientific information, develop and test hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze data.

Students completed these tutorials with TA guidance during class time or as homework in the weeks leading up to the experiment. The lab manual also devoted a section to explaining the purpose and organization of information within each section of a lab report. Students could elect to receive support for writing their lab reports in individual office hours with their TA.

Office hours—for the few who attended—typically focused on data analysis and proper formatting of figures and tables. The lab coordinator provided a rubric Supplemental Material 1 to TAs as a guide for grading but gave no explicit directions on how to use it. Our data included 1 student lab reports with TA comments and grades from each of the five TAs and 2 semistructured TA interviews about their thinking as they read over the marked reports.

Because of the in-depth nature of the data analysis, we analyzed four lab reports per TA section, with the reports being selected by the TAs during the interviews.

These made up the subset that underwent the full data analysis, although other lab reports for each participant were checked to ensure that markings included in this subset were typical of that individual, meaning that the number and type of comments made on other lab reports were similar to those found in the subset. During the interviews 60—90 minutes each , each TA was asked to speak aloud about what he or she noticed while rereading each of the four reports. The first author C.

She was a fellow graduate student not associated with teaching the course, and so not in a position to evaluate the TAs. Even so, she avoided providing any facial or verbal cues that could have been perceived as approval or disapproval. When necessary, C. For example, if the TA mentioned that something was important, C. We audio-recorded and transcribed interviews for analysis.

We developed a coding scheme to analyze TA markings on lab reports. These markings, as illustrated in Figure 1 , included symbols for punctuation, single words, and longer comments. Example of a lab report with original TA markings and how markings were coded by researchers in boxes. Our process for developing the coding scheme followed the constant comparative method Charmaz, We first separated comments into a spreadsheet that included the TA marking and the surrounding context of what the student wrote.

We then generated a set of categories from initial reads through the data set and two coders C. In some instances, it was difficult to decide between two or more possible categories. We discussed these borderline cases and used them to further refine the coding scheme.

In some cases, a comment fell into multiple categories, in which case the two coders discussed the comment, either coming to consensus on a single code or double-coding a response that fulfilled criteria for both categories. We iterated this process: describing categories, two coders applying them independently to data, comparing results, and refining categories to minimize ambiguity. Table 1 summarizes our final coding scheme, including explanations of our judgments in clear and in borderline instances.

A single coder C. TABLE 1. Examples of clear and borderline coding for each category. Our purpose in coding TA markings was to quantify TA attention to style and form, correctness, or reasoning. There was a great deal of variation in markings for each category, and we coded markings in the context of what the student wrote Table 1. We coded markings that addressed genre-specific elements of scientific writing as style or form. Style comments concerned, for example, conciseness, verb tense, formal language, parenthetical references to visual aids, appropriate acronym introduction and use, proper organization of sections, as well as requests to include or exclude specific details, such as background about the study organism.

Comments on form addressed flow, grammar and punctuation, spelling, and clarity of writing. By and large, we treated these two categories together, style and form, as concerning the formalities of scientific writing. Comments on correctness assessed the report for alignment with canonical knowledge, including use of terminology and specific, factual information about the study system.

By the last, we mean a marking that shows a specific attempt to interpret meaning. The second goal of this study was to understand what influenced TAs to attend and respond to student reasoning.

We conducted semistructured interviews to collect information about how TAs described their marking practices and motivations.

In our analysis, we aligned the interview transcript with the excerpts of student reports and the marking that the TA was referencing. This meant interpreting what TAs said in light of the lab report they were looking at, their own written comments, and, at times, the prompts and questions posed by the interviewer. Two TAs, Abby and Ed, made the highest proportion of markings coded as attention to student reasoning.

We chose to focus on them in follow-up qualitative case studies, because the data from their lab markings and interviews provided the most opportunities to see TA attention on student reasoning Supplemental Material 2 and 3. Studying Abby and Ed in more depth could help us understand what may initiate, sustain, or interrupt TA attention to student reasoning.

As we noted earlier, Abby had prior experience teaching high school. She was in her second year in the program, and this was her second time as a TA for this lab course. Ed was a first-year graduate student who had no previous experience as a classroom instructor. Both had taken the pedagogy course required and offered by the Department of Biology; Abby had also taken a seminar on student reasoning in the Department of Education.

We describe here two findings based on coding TA marking data: 1 as a group, the TAs mainly commented on style and form; and 2 within the group, some individuals noticed and responded to student reasoning more than others. There was a wide range in the total number of markings made by each TA Table 2. TABLE 2. Percent and number of comments each TA made on four lab reports. We focused on the moments when they were attending to student reasoning as a potential place to understand what influenced their attention.

When Abby and Ed attended to student reasoning in their interviews, what influenced their attention differed. It was not until after the interviewer inadvertently raised a question about a student idea that Abby shifted her attention to reasoning.

As in a scientific article, Ed expected to see evidence of student reasoning in the introduction and discussion sections, and so he discussed reasoning as well as style and form as he reviewed these two sections. He expected the methods and results to conform to style and formatting standards but to include less student reasoning.

Abby missed this idea—both in her initial reading and in reflecting on the report in the interview. Instead, Abby initially decided there was no reasoning to follow.

As Abby continued to read, she attended mainly to structural conventions of lab reports and the lack of clarity in the writing.

And the second half of this sentence makes that a little more clear. Supplemental Material 2, lines — Now I realize. Abby maintained this shifted attention in the next part of her interview.

She read another sentence aloud and then attempted, unprompted, to understand it. Here, Abby proposed that Micky could be making an argument that the variety in the structure of this group of chemicals would make it unlikely that insects could evolve a way to metabolize all of them. Abby noted a lack of evidence for nicotine as beneficial and pointed out that Micky was not able to actually test her hypothesis, because she did not include a control diet in her experimental design.

In the methods and results sections, Ed attended mainly to style and form. In reading her discussion, one of the first things he noticed was her novel idea about changing cellulose levels in plants as related to plant defense.

Supplemental Material 3, lines — Do plants produce more cellulose when attacked? Abby and Ed noticed ideas that were in some way out of the ordinary or confusing, breaking with their expectations of what a typical student report looks like.

Science and mathematics education researchers have studied responsive teaching—the instructional practices of attending and responding to what and how students are thinking—in classroom interactions.

This was variable according to TA and motivated us to try to understand why. The ability to attend to reasoning is continuous with the abilities they must use as learners themselves: reading and interpreting scientific arguments and engaging in discussions with peers. First, we give evidence and argue that TA attention is sensitive to context.

These contextual features can impact how TAs frame and enact their instructional activities Goertzen et al. We first describe contextual features that may support TA attention to reasoning. We then argue that various features of the course context may have the unintended effect of distracting TAs from attending to student reasoning. Finally, we turn to implications for lab design and TA professional development. Our findings overall show that TA attention to reasoning is sensitive to context.

There was some evidence of attention to student reasoning for every TA in our analyses of their written comments on lab reports. To understand when and how it occurs, we studied particular moments more closely. We chose Abby and Ed, because they presented us with the most opportunities to study moments of attention to student thinking. For Ed, too, the idea that caught his attention was one he had not expected: Nora was suggesting that, in response to herbivory, plants could increase the proportion of cellulose in their tissues.

Second, the focus is on the discovery and management of uncertainties as they appear along the project: before the innovation is introduced to society in its full scale with possible broad negative impacts. Asveld, ; Van de Poel, Among others, experimentation involves frequent collaboration with societal actors, supporting mutually responsive relations.

More specifically: experimentation explicitly includes the aim of learning i. Further, stakeholders can be given a chance to step out of the experiment, and to influence on the set up, carrying out, and stopping the experiment impact on innovation trajectory.

Based on the background case studies, we distinguished four such circumstances. This challenge of responding to future stakeholders is essentially linked to the definition of sustainability Brundtland, and intergenerational justice e. Second, stakeholders may be geographically distant in place , and yet being increasingly interconnected via complex supply chains e.

Third, and often related to geographical distance, stakeholders with very different backgrounds can be distant in discourse, e. Fourth, in all of the above examples, absent stakeholders can be represented by mediators such as interest groups or experts e. Delgado et al. In the meanwhile, Datashare involved particularly interested stakeholder groups more directly, thus giving more weight to some of potential business partners and to an extent to privacy CSOs.

Consequently, the resident-users had less impact on the problem-setting: In focus-groups, they were given roles as representatives of certain perspectives on the prototype that already incorporated a limited number of options.

Also, it is known to be challenging to arrange a reasonably manageable but not too homogenous amount of design options in practice Keates, To employ such awareness for enhancing stakeholder representativeness: Asveld and Stemerding suggest that experimenting with worldviews cf.

The identified perspectives and tensions regarding a specific topic can be connected to a manageable number of worldviews : a systematically assembled set of coherent value structures shared by a wide range of people in society. In summary : With pre sponsiveness, we draw further attention to stakeholders, who despite their current absence may still be affected by, or contributing to, the innovation at its later steps.

With the exception of the worldview approach, there is little practical advice in the present case studies for how to identify the needs or identities of these stakeholders.

However, experimental approach appeared as a potential ground in the private sector for further addressing stakeholder-related uncertainties, along with other indeterminate uncertainty. While product-responsiveness can diversify the understanding of responsiveness as a relation between producers and adopters, we also acknowledge needs for further discussions regarding the trade-off of increasing complexity.

Finally, we suggest pre sponsiveness as an expression of responsiveness as forward-looking responsibility , drawing attention to stakeholders whose unavailability at a given moment does not per se make them any less significant. While pre sponsiveness largely remains an open challenge, we identify experimentation as one starting point for identifying unavailable stakeholders and their needs. Finally, we realise that due to the limited number of available case studies, further research is needed.

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Adapt or perish? Download references. The authors wish to thank Vincent Blok for the support during the analysis and interpretation of the case study literature, and Ibo van de Poel for the insights during drawing the conclusions. The funding body has no direct involvement in the design and analysis in the study. All material that is not currently available via scientific article databases i. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. MS: As first author, the principal planner and executor in every step.

LA: Contributions to conception and design. Contributions in the analysis and interpretation of the literature applied. Participation in drafting the manuscript, participation in critical revision. Approval on the submitted version. LL: Contributions in the analysis and interpretation of the literature applied.

Participation in critical revision. PO: Contributions to conception and design. In addition, the authors agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Correspondence to Matti Sonck. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Reprints and Permissions. Sonck, M. Creative tensions: mutual responsiveness adapted to private sector research and development. Life Sci Soc Policy 13, 14 Download citation. Received : 09 February Accepted : 08 August Published : 07 September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search all BMC articles Search. Download PDF. Abstract The concept of mutual responsiveness is currently based on little empirical data in the literature of Responsible Research and Innovation RRI.

Introduction There are calls on companies to respond to the needs of societies within which they operate, beyond securing short-term profitability and complying with regulations. These contexts may partly capture different problematics and opportunities than the company environment Recently, Blok et al. Comparing The article will unfold as follows. Case studies We will discuss these guiding questions principally based on three case studies from RRI literature: one from the ICT sector Noorman et al.

Implementing mutual responsiveness in the private sector This section suggests process-responsiveness, product-responsiveness, and pre sponsiveness as further elaborations for the concept of responsiveness See Fig. Three elaborations for the concept of responsiveness in RRI.

Full size image. Article Google Scholar Asveld, L. Article Google Scholar Blok, V. In press Brundtland, GH. Google Scholar Cooper, R. Article Google Scholar Friedman, B. Google Scholar Keates, S. Article Google Scholar Owen, R. Article Google Scholar Pellizzoni, L. Article Google Scholar Pols, A. Article Google Scholar Robaey, Z. Article Google Scholar Stilgoe, J. Article Google Scholar van de Poel, I. Article Google Scholar Download references. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Vincent Blok for the support during the analysis and interpretation of the case study literature, and Ibo van de Poel for the insights during drawing the conclusions.

Availability of data and materials All material that is not currently available via scientific article databases i. View author publications. Ethics declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable. Consent for publication Not applicable. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. About this article. Cite this article Sonck, M. Copy to clipboard.

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