Socratic Seminar with Data: A Strategy to Support Student Discourse and Understanding.

A Socratic seminar can be a powerful tool for increasing students' ability to analyze and interpret data. Most commonly used for text-based discussion, we found that using Socratic seminar to engage students with data contributes to student understanding by allowing them to reason through and process complex information as a group. This approach also provides teachers with insights about student misconceptions and understanding of concepts by listening to the student-driven discussion. This article reports on Socratic seminar in the context of a high school type 2 diabetes curriculum that explores gene and environment interactions. A case study illustrates how Socratic seminar is applied in a classroom and how students engage with the process. General characteristics of Socratic seminar are discussed at the end of the article.

How Do You Like Your Science, Wet or Dry? How Two Lab Experiences Influence Student Understanding of Science Concepts and Perceptions of Authentic Scientific Practice.

This study examines how two kinds of authentic research experiences related to smoking behavior-genotyping human DNA (wet lab) and using a database to test hypotheses about factors that affect smoking behavior (dry lab)-influence students' perceptions and understanding of scientific research and related science concepts. The study used pre and post surveys and a focus group protocol to compare students who conducted the research experiences in one of two sequences: genotyping before database and database before genotyping. Students rated the genotyping experiment to be more like real science than the database experiment, in spite of the fact that they associated more scientific tasks with the database experience than genotyping. Independent of the order of completing the labs, students showed gains in their understanding of science concepts after completion of the two experiences. There was little change in students' attitudes toward science pre to post, as measured by the Scientific Attitude Inventory II. However, on the basis of their responses during focus groups, students developed more sophisticated views about the practices and nature of science after they had completed both research experiences, independent of the order in which they experienced them.