Recently in scholarship biology Category

Just a heads-up for teachers & students: next month Chris Stringer will be giving public lectures on human evolution in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch & Dunedin. (No Hamilton talk! I am sad :-( I've got an all-day meeting that means I'd never get up to the Auckland  event in time.) From the latest Royal Society "Alert":

Professor Chris Stringer: ‘Origin of our species, Neanderthals and the Early Human Occupation of Britain and Europe’, February 2012

Professor Chris Stringer answers some of the big questions:  How can we define modern humans, and how can we recognise our beginnings in the fossil and archaeological record? How can we accurately date fossils, including ones beyond the range of radiocarbon dating? Has human evolution stopped, or are we still evolving? What can we expect from future research on our origins? 

Professor Chris Stringer is in New Zealand by invitation of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution and his public talks are supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand.  Details for booking tickets are available at http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/events/origin-of-our-species/

• Auckland, 6.00 pm, 22 February, Auckland War Memorial Museum;
• Christchurch, 6.00 pm, 23 February, C1 Central Lecture Theatre, University of Canterbury;
• Dunedin, 6.00 pm, 24 February, St David Lecture Theatre, University of Otago;
• Wellington, 6.00 pm, 25 February, Embassy Theatre, Courtenay Place.

The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor.

We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever before. It is  important that people have at least some understanding of how science works, not least so that they can make informed decisions when aspects of science impinge on them. Yet pseudoscience seems to be on the increase. While some argue that we simply ignore it, I suggest we use pseudoscience to help teach the nature of science (and I recommend Jane Young's excellent book, The uncertainty of it all: understanding the nature of science,(2010) as a resource).

The New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) makes it clear that there's more to studying science than simply accumulating facts: Science is a way of investigating, understanding, and explaining our natural, physical world and the wider Universe. It involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence – including by making observations, carrying out investigations and modeling, and communicating and debating with others – in order to develop scientific knowledge, understanding and explanations (p28). In other words, studying science also involves learning about the nature of science: that it is a process as much as, or more than, a set of facts. Pseudoscience offers a lens through which to approach this.

A few days back, Grant asked if I would follow up on my promise to write something on assessment. It would be great to get a discussion going around how & why we assess students, so after a bit of thought I decided to kick things off with the following post, derived from my own teaching portfolio document. (I rather feel that I need to be careful that too many of my posts don't become Oracian in length! Not that there's anything wrong with Orac's posts! Quite the contrary.)

For all teachers, the $64-question is whether students are learning (and, whether they're learning what we would wish them to learn!). Assessment is the usual tool for finding this out, although it may have unintended consequences when the nature of the assessment task shapes what and how the students learn. It took me a while to realise this - and it may be that many tertiary teachers still don't realise this, perhaps because they are focused on teaching the content in a particular discipline rather than on the best methods for doing that. 

This comes at an opportune time for those of you teaching the Human Evolution content - and for those looking around for some follow-up reading :-) The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a whole lot of free biology education resources available on line, and this upcoming webcast looks to be wonderful stuff: Bones, Stones, & Genes: the origin of modern humans. It's completely free; you just need to register for it. You can bet I'll be doing my best to be there!

And hat-tip to PZ, who as usual finds out about these things first :-)

I spent Saturday down in Hawkes Bay, running at Scholarship Biology preparation day at Lindsfarne College. (I would have spent Sunday happily idling through the lovely Art Deco parts of Napier, & visiting a few vinyards, but the weather forecast made me reconsider this option & I ended up driving back to Hamilton once the teaching was done. But I still managed a most excellent very late lunch at Crab Farm Winery, nomnomnom. The wines are also excellent.)

Anyway, we finished the session by working through one of the questions in last year's Schol Bio paper, on whether mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) could, & should, be brought back from the dead (as it were). As for the other two questions, candidates were provided with a lot of resource material about the biology, ecology and phylogenetic relationships of mammoths, and were asked to

Discuss how a modern biological technique could be used to bring mammoths back to life, and the implications of having mammoths living again. In your answer:

• explain biological techniques that could be used to bring back the mammoth and produce a self-sustaining wild population. Evaluate the likely success of this process.

• Analyse the evolutionary and ecological implications of having a population of mammoths living on earth again and justify whether or not we should bring back the mammoth.

Due to popular demand (Grant asked!) & also because I'm still a bit muzzy with the flu I picked up on my travels & don't want to attempt anything 'heavy', I thought I'd do a few posts about my experiences at the International Biology Olympiad. Overseas, this competition is a Really Big Thing - there's a huge amount of time, energy & resources poured into ensuring the event is as good as possible, and a lot of prestige hangs on doing the best you can (& ideally bringing home medals).

The esteem in which the event is held is obvious when you see that the Vice-President of Taiwan was a key speaker at the opening ceremony.

I often think it's a real pity that so many students seem to actively dislike learning about plants. Why is this? Is it because plants don't seem to 'do' anything interesting? I used some of the information described here in a test question this year - the results were a salutory reminder to spend more time working with students on how to read and interpret data sets.

One of the Biology Standards year 13 students [currently] study is called 'Describe animal behaviour & plant responses'. Now, if 'behaviour' = response to a stimulus, then that's really what plants are doing too. I guess it's just hard to think that something (usually) green, (usually) fixed in place, & with no nerves or muscles is able to behave - but plants do, & some of their behaviour is really quite subtle. You're probably familiar with plant responses to stimuli, including tropisms, circadian rhythms, & flowering in response to changes in photoperiod. But there's more: not only are there plants that actively hunt, but plants can also communicate - with each other, & in some cases with animals as well.

Often on Sciblogs someone ends up pointing out that another commenter's 'evidence' is anecdotal, and thus doesn't offer particularly strong support for a particular point of view. I'm kicking myself for not providing the link to this video, the last time it happened :-)

At least a couple of times I've made a comment along the lines of "the plural of anecdote is not data". Now here's an excellent video (courtesy of Evidence-Based Thought) that explains why not:

When I originally wrote this piece I'd been immersed in enrolments for the new (2009) year. The last week wasn't quite so bad as we were just dealing with the B semester, but nonetheless, the registrar & I have seen a lot of students needing program advice. So I thought I'd run through some suggestions here, that might help with your future study plans :-)

This post is really for students in year 12 (or 11) who are still finalising their subject choices. While I'm talking about Biology here, the same applies to other disciplines. Deciding at the last minute (ie when applying for uni) that you want to be an engineer is not ideal if you've never studied maths or physics. Not an unsurmountable problem, but the solution - additional, preliminary papers - will add to the length of time you'll be studying.

... as the ancient knight said to Indiana Jones **. Okay, I'm talking about choice of subjects, so the outcomes won't be as life-threatening as the choice Indy faced, but these decisions can still have a big impact on your future study courses.

(& I'm aware that if you're considering Scholarship this year, you've most likely made those choices, so this one's really aimed at students who aren't so far through the system.)