One of the March LSE webinars was “Exploring the Anatomy of a Research Study” with several authors and moderated by Dr. Cynthia Brame. The discussion with the authors Drs. Rebecca Price, Clark Coffman, Danielle Jensen-Ryan, and Jennifer Jo Thompson was based on their article: Becoming a “Science Person”: Faculty Recognition and the Development of Cultural Capital in the Context of Undergraduate Biology Research. The article has been annotated as part of “Exploring the Anatomy of a Research Study” and worth reviewing!
Jensen began by explaining their previous research focusing on how undergraduate research experiences contribute to the development of science identities. Jensen’s slide had a statement that I had not considered: “Recognition by “meaningful” others is important for building science identity.” This was part of a long longitudinal multi-institutional study that has qualitative interviews and coding using Atlas.ti. The researchers compared how students recognize themselves and how faculty recognize them. They identified areas of misalignment. Dr. Thompson talked about reviewing the literature about science-related cultural capital. Thompson mentioned that often social capital hasn’t been developed because the students have not been exposed to circumstances to develop this aspect of cultural capital. They interviewed twenty students for this study. Thompson explained how they used different domains of cultural capital (interest in science, education & career aspirations, family science exposure, research access, practicing science, scientific ownership, leadership in the lab, scientific collaboration, performing science, using social capital, and embeddedness in lab & field) and then used a heat map to visualize low, medium, and high capital for select students. Dr. Becca Price then showed the Anatomy of a Research Study for their article and clicked on the different learning lens options. They highlighted only instructional tips, for example, and then hovered over the pink annotations to view annotations. This is awesome, and I have been telling Thea Clarke and others from ASCB how useful this is! Coffman then described the goals of Anatomy of an Education Study annotations. I appreciate how Coffman mentioned that as they annotate they try to use open-source resources and work with authors to make annotations useful. I would love to learn how to do this! Coffman mentioned that there are seven papers annotated so far. The system is based on the highly successful Science in the Classroom initiative.
The session moved on to a moderated series of questions about decisions made during the annotation process. It was interesting to learn about the rationale for using keywords or explaining background information to take full advantage of the article. Also, Thompson mentioned how it helped her reflect on their process and methods. Jensen explained how using the cultural capital framework helped provide recommendations based on the rich dataset. Importantly, Thompson talked about how you challenge your theory to make sure your study is appropriate and robust. The concept of “saturation” in qualitative research to evaluate whether you have collected a robust dataset was useful to learn. One question addressed the risk of students identifying themselves in the study and the choices between composites and spotlighting student profiles. It was really fascinating to hear the perspective of the researchers on why composites were not used because they felt they could not extrapolate their findings that much. A follow-up question was about uploading raw interview data (de-identified) to further mine the wealth of information in qualitative data. Thompson mentioned a very important consideration: the trust participants have in how their data is shared. As someone. who today felt compelled to double-check with IRB on whether we can use an IRB agreement from another institution, I think this is very important!
The final part of the webinar was a conversation about how they annotated the article. Price mentioned that they aim to supplement and not repeat what the authors say with their annotations. The goal is to enrich the conversation rather than reemphasize. We have been thinking about student annotations, and these ideas resonate with me: how can we use some of this information to help students annotate better!
