Thursday Seminar
Date: 12 January, 2017
Time: 15:30 - 16:30
Venue: Main Building Lecture Room - G1
Coordinator: Prof. Jyotsna Vijapurkar
Title: Designing pedagogy based on secondary data analysis for undergraduate biology students,
Speaker: Deepti Gupta,
Abstract:
In most undergraduate colleges in India, the mode of biology teaching has been primarily instructor centric, based on age old designed curricula. Most unfortunately, the severance of research from teaching has led to an arduous systemic gap. While “learning by doingâ€, is an established method for deep learning, it is not feasible to model all concepts based on primary research at the undergraduate level. Thus, utilization of existing data, published research articles or public databases, for pedagogical designs may provide a viable option for the instructors with limited time and resources. Secondary data analysis is an exercise that applies similar basic research principles as studies utilizing primary data and follows systematic methods with procedural and evaluative steps. However, at the undergraduate level, it may be challenging for the students to comprehend research article or utilize data without a contextual and conceptual scaffold. Hence, teaching case studies built out of published research and curated data are proposed which may provide an anchoring for concept building. The students are exposed to real scientific problem which requires them to understand a concept and use the data in the referred research articles to solve the problem. An appropriate choice of research story may allow for multiple articles to be used as pieces of a puzzle, arranged in the order of increasing conceptual complexity. Besides, case study writing is a productive exercise for the instructors for updating their content knowledge and since teaching case studies are publishable as such, it may be a motivating factor for the teachers.