Education, Faculty of
Educational Studies (EDST), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Lawrence, Vanessa
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis investigates the construction of “scientific research” in first-year undergraduate natural science courses. Building on literature examining the research-teaching nexus, this study focuses on research-oriented teaching, where the research process is the focus of instruction and students are not actively participating in research. The researcher examines how faculty explicitly and implicitly construct “scientific research” for students entering the academy, and how that construction is impacted by assumptions about teaching, research, and students. This is achieved through a multiple-case study of three courses, allowing comparison between teaching in the mainstream science curriculum and in specialized programs for first-year science students. The study concludes that the construction of “scientific research” is highly differentiated depending upon whether teaching research is an explicit outcome or component of a course. The depiction of research faculty aim for students to hold in courses which directly address research is more complex and complete. Teaching perspectives and practices used by faculty to construct research in first-year courses did not seem to align strongly with enculturation or induction into a community of practice, as posited in the literature. However, findings suggested that faculty teaching of research may vary across different stages or years of undergraduate study. Additionally, in these courses which explicitly teach research, faculty are able to recognize and address misconceptions of science research which students hold when entering undergraduate study. For students who do not encounter explicit teaching of research in their undergraduate studies, these misconceptions may remain unaddressed, and could possibly be reinforced if students participate in undergraduate research experiences.
AN EXPLORATION OF HOW SCIENCE FACULTY CONSTRUCT “SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH” IN FIRST YEAR UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING by Vanessa Lawrence B.A., The University of Guelph, 2011 M.I., The University of Toronto, 2014 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Educational Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2024 © Vanessa Lawrence, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: AN EXPLORATION OF HOW SCIENCE FACULTY CONSTRUCT “SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH” IN FIRST YEAR UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING submitted by Vanessa Lawrence in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Educational Studies Examining Committee: André Mazawi, Professor, Educational Studies, University of British Columbia Supervisor Marina Milner-Bolotin, Professor, Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member Cynthia Nicol, Professor, Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia Additional Examiner iii Abstract This thesis investigates the construction of “scientific research” in first-year undergraduate natural science courses. Building on literature examining the research-teaching nexus, this study focuses on research-oriented teaching, where the research process is the focus of instruction and students are not actively participating in research. The researcher examines how faculty explicitly and implicitly construct “scientific research” for students entering the academy, and how that construction is impacted by assumptions about teaching, research, and students. This is achieved through a multiple-case study of three courses, allowing comparison between teaching in the mainstream science curriculum and in specialized programs for first-year science students. The study concludes that the construction of “scientific research” is highly differentiated depending upon whether teaching research is an explicit outcome or component of a course. The depiction of research faculty aim for students to hold in courses which directly address research is more complex and complete. Teaching perspectives and practices used by faculty to construct research in first-year courses did not seem to align strongly with enculturation or induction into a community of practice, as posited in the literature. However, findings suggested that faculty teaching of research may vary across different stages or years of undergraduate study. Additionally, in these courses which explicitly teach research, faculty are able to recognize and address misconceptions of science research which students hold when entering undergraduate study. For students who do not encounter explicit teaching of research in their undergraduate studies, these misconceptions may remain unaddressed, and could possibly be reinforced if students participate in undergraduate research experiences. iv Lay Summary This research project looks at how faculty teach first-year undergraduate students who are studying science about scientific research. The research looked closely at three case studies of different first-year courses or programs for science students at an institution, and studied how teaching faculty introduced students to the idea of academic research within higher education. The study found that faculty teach about research differently if research is specifically included in the course curriculum. The teaching faculty believe that students have misunderstandings about science research when they begin undergraduate studies. If students don’t study in a course that specifically includes research in the curriculum, the misunderstandings might not be corrected. More research is needed to understand this possible problem. v Preface This study was not conducted as a collaboration. I identified and designed the research program, completed the data collection and analysis, and wrote the thesis. This study was approved by the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board, under certificate number H21-01446. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ ix List of Figures .................................................................................................................................x Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 Literature Review............................................................................................................ 3 1.1.1 The Research-Teaching Nexus and Undergraduate Research Experiences ............... 3 1.1.2 Student Understandings of Research .......................................................................... 5 1.1.3 Inducting Students into the Research Community...................................................... 7 1.1.4 Synthesis ..................................................................................................................... 8 1.2 Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................... 9 1.3 Research Problem and Questions.................................................................................. 16 Chapter 2: Methodology and Methods ......................................................................................19 2.1 Paradigmatic Approach ................................................................................................. 19 2.2 Research Design............................................................................................................ 20 2.3 Recruitment ................................................................................................................... 23 2.4 Selected Cases and Participants .................................................................................... 26 2.4.1 Case 1 ........................................................................................................................ 26 vii 2.4.2 Case 2 ........................................................................................................................ 27 2.4.3 Case 3 ........................................................................................................................ 27 2.5 Data Collection ............................................................................................................. 28 2.6 Methods of Analysis ..................................................................................................... 29 2.7 Limitations and Ethical Issues ...................................................................................... 30 Chapter 3: Findings and Analysis ..............................................................................................34 3.1 Case 1 ............................................................................................................................ 34 3.1.1 Teaching Research .................................................................................................... 34 3.1.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students ............................................. 40 3.1.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching ............................................................................ 40 3.1.2.2 Assumptions about Research ............................................................................ 44 3.1.2.3 Assumptions about Students ............................................................................. 47 3.2 Case 2 ............................................................................................................................ 53 3.2.1 Teaching Research .................................................................................................... 53 3.2.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students ............................................. 59 3.2.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching ............................................................................ 59 3.2.2.2 Assumptions about Research ............................................................................ 63 3.2.2.3 Assumptions about Students ............................................................................. 67 3.3 Case 3 ............................................................................................................................ 70 3.3.1 Teaching Research .................................................................................................... 70 3.3.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students ............................................. 75 3.3.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching ............................................................................ 75 3.3.2.2 Assumptions about Research ............................................................................ 77 viii 3.3.2.3 Assumptions about Students ............................................................................. 81 3.4 Cross-Case Analysis ..................................................................................................... 85 3.4.1 Teaching Research .................................................................................................... 85 3.4.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students ............................................. 88 Chapter 4: Discussion and Conclusions .....................................................................................93 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................105 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................109 Appendix A Semi-Structured Interview Guide ....................................................................... 109 ix List of Tables Table 1: Summary of Brew's (2001) models of faculty research views. ...................................... 10 Table 2: Summary of Pratt's (1998) teaching perspectives. .......................................................... 13 Table 3: Cases and participants in the study. ................................................................................ 26 x List of Figures Figure 1: My rendering of Jenkins & Healey's (2009, p.6) model of the research-teaching nexus.3 xi Acknowledgements I offer my thanks to the faculty, staff, and students within the School of Education and EDST department at UBC. Specifically, I owe deep gratitude to Dr. André Mazawi and Dr. Marina Milner-Bolton, my supervisor and committee member, respectively, who have offered extraordinary support and advice in my journey to complete this study. I also want to thank my university examiner, Dr. Cynthia Nicol, whose suggestions greatly improved my final thesis.1 Chapter 1: Introduction The intersection of research and teaching within disciplinary faculty activities is often conceptualized as the “research-teaching nexus” (e.g. Healey, 2005; Jenkins & Healey, 2009; Huet, 2018). In my experience as an academic librarian, I have observed that undergraduate students are increasingly encouraged to undertake undergraduate research experiences, making the intersection of teaching and research especially relevant for examination. Undergraduate research experiences, which may be course-based or extracurricular, involve undergraduate students conducting authentic scientific research (Linn et al., 2015). The 1998 Boyer Commission report, in its recommendations for American research universities to change and improve undergraduate teaching, encouraged a turn toward research-based education, with suggestions including an inquiry-based freshman year and capstone research project for undergraduate students (Boyer Commission, 1999). Institutional efforts toward undergraduate research may be centralized or, as is the case at the University of British Columbia (UBC), may transpire through multipronged approaches including awards, conferences, and work and volunteer positions (UBC Student Services, n.d.; Undergraduate Research Opportunities, n.d.; UBC Science, n.d.-a). This is a site of change and transformation for the research-teaching nexus, as institutions and researchers explore the possibilities of undergraduate research. My interest in the research-teaching nexus within science education arises from my professional experience as a science librarian in higher education. The significance of the topic is extremely timely due to changing political and cultural atmospheres, and the conditions imposed nation-wide and within higher education institutions by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The increasing 2 importance of undergraduate research activities in science education comes at a time when public and political controversies endanger trust in the foundations of institutional knowledge and research. The “debate” about vaccine safety (Larson, 2016) or some governments’ challenge to climate change (Waldman, 2019) demonstrate increasing politicization of scientific research in the public sphere. In this environment, science students may enter higher education with ambiguous understandings of research and scholarly knowledge creation. I argue that addressing the tensions between science teaching and the political controversies around science’s role in society is significant for higher education, particularly at the meeting point where faculty research and teaching activities inform and influence one another. Surprisingly, despite interest in the research-teaching nexus and undergraduate research experiences within the scholarly literature, to my knowledge there has been little examination of how faculty initially construct research as a concept in undergraduate teaching and for undergraduate students, prior to the students entering research experience programs. Langemeyer (2019) frames research-focused education as enculturation into science, a long-term process where students learn the modes of thinking necessary for full participation in scientific research. If this is the case, the implicit and explicit representations of scientific research which faculty use to bring students into the scientific fold may be useful strategies for defining scientific research to others outside the scientific community. In this time when doubt and distrust of science is highlighted in popular media controversies, the approaches used in the undergraduate classroom may be relevant for scientific communication to the larger community. 3 1.1 Literature Review 1.1.1 The Research-Teaching Nexus and Undergraduate Research Experiences Jenkins and Healey (2009), building on work by Griffiths (2004) and Healey (2005a; 2005b), examined the intersection of research and teaching, often referred to as the research-teaching nexus, and developed a matrix model of how research might be integrated into the higher education curriculum. Within this matrix, the curriculum of a class is evaluated on two axes: in terms of student participation (where students may act either as audience or participants), and in terms of the emphasis of learning (whether on content or on the research process and problems). The matrix thus captures four models of research and teaching intersecting, as represented in Figure 1. Figure 1: My rendering of Jenkins & Healey's (2009, p.6) model of the research-teaching nexus. Research-tutoredResearch-basedResearch-ledResearch-orientedResearch process and problems Content emphasis Students as participants Students as audience 4 In this matrix, research-led teaching involves a focus on subject content with students as audience members. Research-tutored teaching again positions subject content as the focus of teaching but involves students as participants in the reading and writing of research papers. Research-oriented teaching involves a centring of research processes and problems while students act as an audience, learning “processes for knowledge construction in the subject” (Jenkins & Healey, 2009, p. 6). Research-based teaching also foregrounds research processes, but positions students as participants through inquiry-based learning. static picture of practices which may change over time. Further, the authors’ primary goal was to encourage undergraduate research programs in higher education. They identified ‘undergraduate research’ programs as those programs prioritizing what the authors classify as research-based or research-oriented learning. Healey (2005a) claims that “students are likely to gain most benefit from research when they are actively involved in carrying out research projects” (p. 187). Between the two models of teaching which foreground research, Healey’s stance suggests a preference for research-based curriculum where students are positioned as active participants. The clear statement of a preference is an indicator that Jenkins and Healey’s work is prescriptive, rather than observing a phenomenon or uncovering faculty beliefs about teaching research. An important strand in the literature on undergraduate research focuses on student outcomes based on research-based learning experiences. Seymour et al. (2004) found that students who participated in undergraduate research experiences in the sciences reported positive perceptions and felt they benefited from the program. The researchers noted that research experiences solidified students' plans if they anticipated a scientific research career. This finding suggests that some or most students entered their research experience program with an established 5 conceptual understanding of scientific research, likely developed through their prior undergraduate courses. Lopatto (2004, 2007) similarly identified positive effects from undergraduate research experiences for science students, including better understanding of the research process. Lopatto stated that undergraduate research experiences for science students build interest and intention around pursuing postgraduate studies and careers in science research. The bulk of the literature on undergraduate research experiences builds on the concepts of undergraduate students benefiting from research-based educational experiences and viewing those experiences positively (e.g. Jiang and Roberts, 2011; Smyth et al., 2016; Adedokun et al, 2013). 1.1.2 Student Understandings of Research Several studies on the teaching of undergraduate research have noted or implied a lack of consideration in the literature regarding how undergraduate student conceptions of “research” are developed. Murdoch-Eaton et al. (2010) found that, while undergraduate medical students “are broadly aware of ‘research’, they are not necessarily clear about what it actually constitutes” (p. e158). Clarifying how faculty members introduce students to the concept of science research prior to participating in research projects, therefore emerges as a crucial aspect. Many students gain a greater understanding of the research process through participation and mentoring. Notwithstanding, in a review of studies of undergraduate research experiences, Linn et al. (2015) suggested that some student misunderstandings around scientific research may be reinforced through undergraduate research experiences. They recommend “greater emphasis on 6 integration of research experiences with the beliefs and expectations of undergraduates” (p. 4). This conclusion suggests that student conceptual understandings of scientific research prior to entering active research are a key component of their learning and may be a neglected component in practice. More directly related to the present study, Huet (2018) conducted a case study of a university STEM faculty. She interviewed academics, heads of schools, and institutional senior managers about research-based teaching, definitions of research, and the use of research-based or research-led activities in the classroom. Huet (2018) found that faculty views of research as knowledge creation aligned with the view that undergraduate students are not able to take part in this type of research in their early years. This provides some insight into faculty beliefs about teaching undergraduate students about research. However, while Huet asked faculty to describe classroom activities, how the concept of “research” was conceptually constructed within the classroom was not directly addressed. She concludes that most academics "believed that undergraduate students do not know what research is really about" (p. 736). Huet does not address the discrepancy between this belief that students do not understand research and the inclusion of research activities in the classroom. It is not clear whether faculty are unintentionally constructing “research” in their teaching, or if students are left to build on their ambiguous understandings of research independently. The studies undertaken by Murdoch-Eaton et al. (2010), Linn et al. (2015), and Huet (2018), illustrate a recognition within the literature that students’ understandings of research are formed before undertaking undergraduate research experiences. These studies, and more importantly the 7 questions they leave unanswered, also illustrate that our current models of the intersection of research and teaching in higher education do not address how faculty introduce the concept of research in their classrooms. 1.1.3 Inducting Students into the Research Community Brew (2003) presents two possible models of the research-teaching nexus in higher education. In one model, research represents a distinct activity that generates knowledge, while teaching involves the transmission of existing knowledge to students. Brew rejects this model, describing it as an old representation of how research and teaching previously and currently intersect – or rather, do not intersect - within higher education. Brew proposes an alternative model which she views as more suited to current conceptions and recommendations in the field of teaching and learning. Brew’s proposed model approaches research and teaching as core components within a community of practice, in which teaching is a process of conceptual change and “knowledge is more likely a process of construction” (p. 12). In this second model of integrated research and teaching, members of the community of practice “are responsible for the maintenance of the community of practice for inducting newcomers into it, for carrying on the tradition of the past and carrying the community forward to the future” (p. 12). Between the two models Brew describes, she endorses the community of practice as a new and preferred choice for teaching research. However, Brew described these two models of the research-teaching nexus in 2003, and the community of practice model may have been accepted and integrated into common teaching practices since this time. Further, additional modes of teaching research may be present in current practice. 8 The literature on science teaching in higher education refers to processes of enculturation (Langemeyer, 2019) and development of norms (Brady, 2017). This resonates with Brew’s depiction of research faculty introducing newcomers to a community of practice. Daston (2008) describes the process of scientific observation as one which can only be learned through experience and repeated exposure to the ontology of scientifically recognized objects, a process where collective vocabulary is developed through scientific training. Daston speaks to the importance of convergence for the “collective empiricism” (p. 107) of the scientific community, but Brew (2001) found that faculty held distinctly different conceptions of research. Within the scientific community, it is possible that individuals hold differing but mutually intelligible conceptions of research. If the concept of scientific research is also part of the ontology of the scientific community of practice, faculty may impart their distinct conceptions of research in their teaching. Within Brew’s (2003) community of practice model, “what researchers understand research and scholarship to be are key influences in how we conceptualise the nature of student learning” (p. 12). In terms of my study, identifying teaching practices which construct research may depend upon first understanding how each faculty member conceives research. 1.1.4 Synthesis The literature explored above indicates that students enter research experience programs with some pre-formed concepts of “research”. Undergraduate research experiences, the focus of the research-teaching nexus literature, encompass what Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) model refers to as research-based classroom experiences, grounded in student participation. However, little 9 attention has been paid to the explicit and implicit ways in which faculty construct science research for new undergraduate students. As undergraduate research experiences gain centrality in the undergraduate science curriculum, and trust in scientific research is questioned in popular media, the initial construction of the concept of “research” for undergraduate students becomes pivotal. Existing models of faculty conceptions of research and of research intersecting with teaching in the classroom may provide the vocabulary to infer that this research-oriented teaching moment occurs. However, this review demonstrates that the ways in which faculty introduce undergraduate students to the concept of scientific research require further exploration. Over the backdrop of the literature describing teaching research as a process of inducting students into a community of practice, my research attempts to illuminate how faculty’s own beliefs and assumptions influence teaching practices for constructing “research”. This cultural introduction to the world of scientific research goes beyond the skill development and career outcomes which are frequently addressed in the undergraduate research experience literature (Seymour et al., 2004; Lopatto, 2004, 2007). Examining faculty’s construction of research through the perspective that this construction consists of a transmission of community norms necessitates considering what beliefs and assumptions faculty hold about research, about teaching, and about their students and the courses within which they are teaching. 1.2 Conceptual Framework While a key topic in my proposed study is the concept of scientific research, I did not develop a single authoritative definition of this concept. The reason for this is that definitions and 10 conceptual approaches to research vary among faculty. Brew’s (2001) study of how faculty conceive of their own research work provides a vocabulary which was helpful in identifying these varying concepts within my study. Brew developed four models of how faculty view and describe their own research work, summarized in Table 1. In what was termed the “domino” model, faculty prioritize questions, answers, and solutions to problems as the core function of academic research and approach these problems and answers as a series of distinct, collected objects. The “trading” model foregrounds outputs such as publications and the social value and relationships generated in producing these outputs. A “layer” approach leads researchers to describe an initial layer of theories or data which the researcher moves beyond through an internal process, to uncover some new discovery. Researchers who fall under the “journey” approach to research describe personal discovery and transformation, integrating personal narrative into their perspective on academic work. Research View Characteristics Domino Research is a sequence of collected, linked objects including questions, answers, and solutions to problems. Trading Research is social, and researchers focus on publications and outputs for their social value. Layer Research involves moving past initial data or theories to uncover a new layer of ideas or explanations and bring them to light. Journey Research holistically transforms understandings of issues and the researcher, and the researcher’s career is central. Table 1: Summary of Brew's (2001) models of faculty research views. 11 Each of the four views of research summarized in Table 1 arose from researcher descriptions of their own work and processes in interviews. The collected results provide a vocabulary for categorizing and describing possible approaches to science research. However, Brew examined faculty conceptions of research as personal practice, and did not specifically examine how these conceptions connected to teaching practices. Identifying how faculty view their own research activities served as one step to help uncover assumptions faculty hold with respect to the research-teaching nexus, but the ways in which faculty view their research can differ from how they approach constructing research in teaching in an undergraduate context. It is possible that a faculty member who holds a “trading” view of research, and considers social connections with research grant partners as a core component of their work as a research, may not present the same focus to a class of undergraduate science students. The definitions outlined here served as a beginning framework for identifying different concepts of research, with room for expansion or adaptation as the study progressed. In the present study, I drew on social constructivist theory arising from the work of Piaget and Vygotsky (Palincsar, 1998; Fosnot & Perry, 2005). Under the constructivist perspective, cultural knowledge is “a dynamically evolving, negotiated interaction of individual interpretations, transformations, and constructions” (Fosnot & Perry, 2005, p. 28). This perspective on knowledge is well suited for my study, where the central concept of “research” may be understood or described differently by different faculty members. While much of the theory and literature surrounding social constructivism emphasizes the learning process, Palincsar (1998) identifies a sub-set of social constructivist discursive analysis within educational research which examine the role the teacher plays in the co-construction of knowledge. My study followed this 12 approach, in examining how faculty construct a representation of “research” in their teaching, permitting faculty and students to “cross cultural barriers” (Fosnot & Perry, 2005, p. 31) and generate new knowledge. The discursive practices and semiotics contributing to this construction may include written, visual, or spoken communication, or faculty practices which shape the learning context. Aspects of how faculty convey the concept of scientific research be implicit or explicit, including course curriculum. Eisner’s (2004) concept of an “implicit curriculum” is vital in this study due to the indications from the literature that research is taught through enculturation or apprenticeship. Eisner describes the implicit curriculum as fostering particular values and behaviours through the form and structure of schooling. Traditional forms and aspects of schooling engender values and virtues including compliance, competitiveness, and punctuality. This implicit curriculum is often associated with the larger structure and social function of educational institutions and is similar to the “hidden curriculum” concept described by Apple (1995). The implicit curriculum differs from the “explicit curriculum”, which is made clear to students and parents as the intended educational program. While faculty may make their teaching of scientific research explicit in their courses, the descriptions in the literature of teaching research as a process of conveying norms and bringing students into a community gestures toward the implicit curriculum playing a role. The implicit curriculum may be realized differently within each classroom environment, intersecting with instructor practices and choices. In the classroom context, Eisner’s conception of the null curriculum is also important – that is, what remains unaddressed within the explicit and implicit curriculum. The null curriculum may develop through intentional or unintentional decisions. In either case, within this study the 13 exclusion of certain content from the educational environment has implications for how students come to understand the concept of scientific research. Specifically, it would be significant in this study if the concept of “research” is part of the null curriculum, as this could lead to students not developing any understanding of research beyond those they hold when they enter higher education. Conceptions of the implicit and null curriculum account for the influence of educational structures and conventions, which will be present in the context of my study. However, I will be examining curricular choices at the scale of a particular course or classroom, and faculty beliefs and assumptions may also impact how the explicit, implicit, and null curriculum are realized in their particular teaching practices. Teaching Perspective Characteristics Transmission Focus on delivery of content from a who has mastery in the subject area. Apprenticeship Focus on socializing students into norms in an authentic context of application. Developmental Focus on students’ prior knowledge with an intention of developing new ways of thinking. Nurturing Focus on students’ self concepts and relationship between teacher and student. Social Reform Focus on a specific ideal with a goal of changing society. Table 2: Summary of Pratt's (1998) teaching perspectives. 14 The core focus of my research examined teaching practices. Pratt (1998) identified five different perspectives of teaching held by teachers of adult learners, which serve as a model within this study for understanding how faculty approach teaching the concept of “research”. The perspectives are summarized in Table 2. These perspectives are not intended by Pratt as an evaluating metric or a presentation of best practice, but "represent contrasting and sometimes competing views of teaching and learning, [thus] individuals must value some perspectives more than others" (Collins & Pratt, 2011, Suppl. para. 1). The five perspectives represent an array of “interrelated set[s] of beliefs and actions” or “lens[es] through which [instructors] view the world of teaching and learning” (Pratt, 1998, p. 33) which are not ranked in terms of validity or value. While these perspectives were developed to encompass views of learning in general, in my study I used this framework to describe how faculty view and approach the teaching of “research” as a concept. Two of these perspectives resonate with models of the research-teaching nexus presented by Brew (2013), suggesting that Pratt’s perspectives are applicable in the context of my research topic. Teachers committed to a transmission perspective of teaching are dedicated to content, have mastery of the subject matter, and lead students toward mastering content (Pratt, 1998). This transmission perspective seems to overlap with Brew’s (2003) first model of research and teaching in higher education, which she describes as current practice. For faculty teaching from this perspective, one might expect course content to be a primary focus in teaching, with little description of connections between faculty research and teaching activities. The apprenticeship perspective on teaching focuses on “socializing students into new behavioral norms and professional ways of working” (Collins & Pratt, 2011, Suppl. para. 4) within the “context of 15 application and practice” (Pratt, 1998). This description of apprenticeship, and introducing students to norms, resonates with Brew and other researchers’ description of research being taught through a community of practice or a process of enculturation. Faculty who view teaching research as a way of introducing students to the culture of science or preparing students for a career in research may hold this view. Pratt describes teachers holding the developmental perspective as attempting to understand students’ thinking and challenging them to develop more complex reasoning skills. Faculty holding this perspective might focus on students’ prior knowledge of research as a starting point, and may intend for students to develop a more comprehensive and complex understanding of research over time as an undergraduate student. Developmental perspectives may also align with teaching research through inquiry-based learning. The nurturing perspective integrates emotional support into teaching. This perspective places importance on student control of education and acknowledgement of effort and personal growth. Faculty holding these views may describe a general focus on nurturing students, but in the context of teaching students about research they may also describe mentoring individuals. The fifth perspective Pratt outlines is one focused on social reform, which aims to change society through teaching practices. Faculty holding these views may teach a critical perspective of research, with the goal of changing the culture or community of scientific researchers. Alternatively, they may view teaching students about research as a method of changing society beyond the bounds of the scientific community. While Pratt offers perspectives faculty may hold in terms of teaching research, the models of the research-teaching nexus described by Brew (2003) suggest that the most likely perspectives chosen in this context would be the transmission and apprenticeship perspectives. Pratt (1998) 16 also speaks to the fact that teachers express their commitment to teaching through different beliefs, intentions, and actions in instructional settings. Examining all three of these aspects will provide evidence about which perspective is dominant for an individual teacher. The models described here, which make up my conceptual framework for this study, offer some guidance in articulating the concepts and phenomena surrounding the teaching of scientific research as a concept. However, many of the models address teaching broadly. My research pursues an area not well discussed in the literature describing the research-teaching nexus in higher education. Applying these conceptual structures to the specific context of constructing “research” in the undergraduate classroom requires some adaptation or expansion. These concepts offer a foundation of others’ work, and serve as a starting point for data collection and analysis. 1.3 Research Problem and Questions The purpose of my study is to understand how natural science faculty construct “scientific research” when teaching undergraduate students who are new to the academy. Based on the literature reviewed for this study, it seems that instructors’ existing processes of constructing research are not commonly examined in the literature on the intersections of research and teaching. The literature around undergraduate research experiences implies that students are entering these educational experiences with established conceptions of research, which may be reinforced or changed throughout the experience. A key goal of my research is to explore how faculty help undergraduate students develop foundational understandings of “scientific research” 17 prior to students electively beginning research experience programs. Understanding this process and the connected phenomena involved examining intentionality, assumptions, teaching perspectives, and faculty’s personal conceptions of scientific research. Exploring the beliefs and conceptions faculty held offered a rich, contextual understanding of how faculty within the cases selected for the study introduce students to the scientific research community. My research questions for this study were: RQ1: How do faculty explicitly and implicitly construct the concept of scientific research in first-year university natural science courses? RQ2: How do faculty assumptions about research, teaching, and the students registered in first-year undergraduate courses influence their construction of “scientific research”? Faculty assumptions around teaching research in their undergraduate teaching may vary depending on the type of program a course constitutes. Some courses may be directed towards students enrolled in a particular major, or may be a component in specialized programs for students with particular educational backgrounds or goals, while other courses may be open to all enrolled undergraduate students. In order to meet my goal of developing a rich understanding of how faculty teach scientific research, I aimed to understand the construction of scientific research in multiple first-year natural science course contexts. A multiple case study methodology was selected in order to compare faculty approaches to teaching research in large introductory lecture courses and in small, specialized programs. This methodology was selected to help illuminate how assumptions, intentions, and actions that vary with context may influence 18 teaching practices in terms of constructing “research” in first-year undergraduate science courses. 19 Chapter 2: Methodology and Methods This chapter outlines the multiple case study methodology selected for the research project, selected in order to provide rich, contextual description of the construction of scientific research in first-year post-secondary science courses. The methods of recruitment are outlined, and the three selected cases are briefly introduced. The data collection and analysis methods are outlined. 2.1 Paradigmatic Approach I addressed my research questions through a case study approach, utilizing a multiple case research design. Diverse perspectives on how and why to utilize case study methodology exist in the literature (Yazan, 2015). I drew on Yin (2018) as a foundational text on case study methodology, as his detailed and organized steps for completing a case study offer a structured approach for an inexperienced researcher such as myself (Yazan, 2015). However, Yin’s advice on multiple case studies was limited. I therefore supplemented Yin’s stance with perspectives from Stake, another authoritative author (Yazan, 2015). For example, while Yin offered advice on methods for analyzing data, his description of cross-case analysis was limited. Stake’s (2006) description of processes and perspectives to take in comparing findings from multiple cases offered additional guidance on this topic. Completing research using a multiple case study methodology requires a degree of flexibility and a willingness to adjust the research plan if issues within a case present unexpected opportunities or issues (Yin, 2018; Stake, 2006). This flexible approach was well suited to examining a 20 phenomenon that is not well described in the literature, such as my research topic of the explicit and implicit construction of scientific research within first-year undergraduate science courses. Case study methodology allows for a contextualized examination of a complex phenomenon. The conceptual framework for my research, which involves several concepts which may intersect and impact one another, gestures toward a degree of complexity. A study which examines specific cases in detail is well suited for addressing the many factors involved. Additionally, Stake (2006) claims that case study researchers are often advocates, and one of the common ways this advocacy is realized in qualitative case studies is “organiz[ing] some of the study around issues of privilege” (p. 86). A goal for my research was to address potential issues of privilege or differentiated student access to understanding scientific research through my examination of faculty assumptions about research, teaching, and students. The multiple case study design allowed me to examine potential impacts of assumptions through comparison across different instructional case contexts. 2.2 Research Design My initial research design consisted of a multiple case study with two cases which aimed to contrast faculty construction of the concept of scientific research by locating them in distinct types of programs, each representing a distinct institutional context of instruction. Yin (2018) recommends using a multiple case design, “even a ‘two-case’ study” (p. 61) as a method of strengthening analytical conclusions and offering more compelling findings. However, as the study progressed and participants were recruited it became clear that the addition of a third case to the study would produce more complete findings. The description of the study that follows 21 presents the study as completed with three cases, rather than the initial intended design before this decision was made. The core guiding research topic or ‘quintain’ (Stake, 2006) of my investigation across cases was how faculty construct the concept “scientific research” within the courses or programs chosen as research cases. While the courses as delivered by faculty and instructors encompass many aspects and stakeholders, focusing on this phenomenon helped to narrow my study to the aspects most relevant for my research questions. Stake (2006) advocates for what Yin (2018) refers to as a case-based approach to cross-case synthesis. I attempted to follow Stake’s advice to approach data collection and analysis of a multiple case study with a focus on the issues pertinent to the case at hand, maintaining a separation between cases until cross-case analysis is performed. In practice as an individual researcher this separation was difficult to maintain, as compartmentalization through delegation of tasks was not possible. Some issues and points of analysis across cases arose which I found it impossible to ignore in my consideration of the findings. Stake (2006) advises that cases selected for a multiple case study should be relevant to the quintain, which is the phenomenon being studied. Cases should also provide diversity across the context of this phenomenon, and should provide opportunities to learn more about the complexity and contexts where the phenomenon appears. In my study the phenomenon or topic of focus, the construction of “research” within undergraduate science courses, guided my selection of courses or programs to act as cases. Stake recommends selecting both typical and atypical cases to capture the complexity of the quintain. Nevertheless, Stake stresses the time and 22 labour involved in each additional case involved in a case study. Taking this into consideration, I included three cases in my research design, two of which represented atypical institutional contexts of instruction. This provided a degree of variety and diversity aligned with Stake’s advice for developing a complex understanding of the quintain, without creating overwhelming labour. The cases selected for my study represent a typical case of a first-year undergraduate natural science course, as well as two atypical first-year undergraduate courses aimed at students in natural science majors. One case of a multi-section lecture-based first-year natural science course represents the typical context in which faculty construct “research” for first-year undergraduate students. This course is referred to as Case 2 within the study, and is identified as typical in that it is a required component of a standard science undergraduate degree at the institution, and is conducted as a lecture-based course with high enrollment. I also selected an atypical case of a small, specialized science program for first-year students, composed of multiple courses. This specialized program is referred to as Case 1 within the study. A second atypical case was a science communications course, which was offered both as an elective for first-year students in mainstream science programs and as a part of a small, specialized science program for first-year international students. This course, encompassing both delivery contexts, is referred to as Case 3 throughout the study. Both of the cases identified as atypical involve undergraduate science students selecting a non-required course or program within their curriculum at the institution. The bounds of each case encompassed faculty and instructors involved in delivering the course, course outlines, and materials. The context surrounding each case was examined to the degree 23 that it could provide further information about the teaching of research within the case. That context included the history of design and delivery of the course, departmental administration of the course, and institutional policies which may impact the course. I focused my examination on the most recent offering of each course as of Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, when my data was gathered. Due to this timing, the bounds of the case also included the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning, particularly adaptations made in the courses to transition toward virtual learning. Consideration of course changes made during this period was intentional, with the view that adaptations may have reflected faculty assumptions about the value of “scientific research” as a concept for undergraduate students. 2.3 Recruitment Recruitment for this study began through selection of specific cases – courses or programs within the institution being studied – which met criteria for the study design. The criteria for selecting cases necessitated courses or programs which were within natural science fields, which were listed at the first-year level within the institution’s publicly available course listings, and which appeared to be delivered primarily in lecture style or through classroom education, without a laboratory component. These criteria were used with the intention of selecting courses utilizing what Jenkins and Healey (2009) may describe as “research-oriented” teaching to construct research. Case selection also attempted to prioritize programs and courses where the publicly listed instructors included faculty members with research requirements as part of their employment within the institution. This secondary criterion, which was of a decreased priority, was included due to areas of the research-teaching nexus literature which described the teaching 24 of research as a process of enculturating students or inducting students into a community of practice (e.g. Brew, 2003). Once candidate courses or programs were identified, administrators or faculty who had recently taught those courses or programs were contacted through email with a call for voluntary participation in the study. One interdisciplinary first-year science program was selected, and was identified within the study as an “atypical” case of first-year undergraduate science teaching due to its interdisciplinary nature, small class sizes, and because students were required to submit an additional application to enter the program beyond the enrollment requirements for the institution’s standard undergraduate science programs. Additionally, a course was selected as a “typical” case of a first-year undergraduate science course without a lab component, as it was a lecture-based disciplinary course with a large class size. While this case was selected as “typical” within the study, and it was a required course for students within certain science programs, the course may be seen as atypical in some way as it was developed for non-majors in the taught discipline. Participants were initially recruited for those two identified cases, Case 1 and Case 2. However, there was some difficulty with recruiting faculty, perhaps due to the impact of the pandemic on faculty capacity to voluntarily participate in research. The number of participating faculty from each case was uneven. It was decided that it would be advantageous to include a third case, which presented an additional perspective on the construction of research for first-year students. A second “atypical” case was selected, Case 3, with the goal that it would offer the most robust information about the construction of scientific research and the study’s research questions, 25 rather than an additional typical case. The third case was considered “atypical” in that it was not a disciplinary or content-based science course, but a science communications course, offered to students either as an elective within a mainstream science undergraduate program or as a component of a specialized first-year science program for international students. An initial goal of the study was to select participants who were in a position where ongoing scientific research was part of their appointment as institutional faculty – for example, Research Stream Faculty at the University of British Columbia (University of British Columbia Faculty Association, n.d.-b). However, as cases were selected to meet criteria around inclusion of research and suitability for examining the research questions, this goal was deprioritized. Some faculty participants within the cases were appointed in roles with a teaching and curriculum focus, such as the Educational Leadership Stream Faculty at the University of British Columbia (University of British Columbia Faculty Association, n.d.-a). Some of the faculty in a teaching focused role pursue research in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Faculty within each role have completed research-based postsecondary education in scientific fields, and thus have personal experience with scientific research. This allowed for examination of their assumptions about and experiences with research, and the impact of those assumptions and experiences upon their construction of research within the cases. 26 2.4 Selected Cases and Participants Case Description Participants Case 1 Interdisciplinary first-year science program. Participant I Participant J Participant K Participant L Case 2 Lecture-based first-year Physics course for non-majors in Physics. Participant N Participant O Case 3 Science communications course offered as an elective and as a component of a specialized science program. Participant X Participant Y Participant Z Table 3: Cases and participants in the study. 2.4.1 Case 1 The program selected for Case 1 is an interdisciplinary program for first-year student in undergraduate science degrees. Multiple instructors from different disciplines teach in the program, which meets disciplinary learning outcome requirements equivalent to those of students in the mainstream or standard science courses at the institution. Four participants from Case 1 were interviewed for the study, referred to in this thesis as Participant I, Participant J, Participant K, and Participant L. In this study the disciplines taught by participants from Case 1 are intentionally not identified, out of concerns around identifiability. Case 1 is an easily identified 27 program, and refraining from identifying the specific disciplines taught by participants helps to anonymize which faculty members from the program participated in the study. The program includes a course specific to the nature of science, and students complete an original research project in the later half of the program. 2.4.2 Case 2 The course selected for Case 2 is a lecture-based first-year course in Physics aimed at non-majors in the discipline. This is a first-year, multi-section course taught by multiple instructors. Two participants from Case 2 were interviewed for the study, referred to in this thesis as Participant N and Participant O. 2.4.3 Case 3 The course selected for Case 3 is a lecture-based science communications course. The course is taught in two different iterations. Some sections of the course are available to students majoring in science as an elective communications course, which may meet a writing or communications requirement in their program. Other sections of the course are a required component of a specialized first-year program for international students entering the institution as science majors, with insufficient English scores to begin in a mainstream or standard science program. Instructors in both instances of the course are science faculty. Three participants from Case 3 were interviewed for the study, referred to in this thesis as Participant X, Participant Y, and Participant Z. 28 2.5 Data Collection Collecting multiple sources of data is sometimes considered a key attribute of case study methodology. This approach contributes to case studies producing in-depth and contextual understandings of a phenomenon (Yin, 2018). These multiple data sources allow for data triangulation, where converging analysis leads to corroboration of findings (Yin, 2018). Yin (2018) endorses triangulation as a means of increasing construct validity within a study. Stake (2006) notes that important findings within a case should have three or more confirmations or assurances, to ensure the study produces accurate descriptions. However, this was difficult with my small number of participants and varied cases. I collected course-related documents and conducted interviews to allow for some degree of triangulation and confirmation across multiple data sources. However, the small number of participants are a source of limitation for the findings of this study. The initial stage of evidence collection for each case involved gathering any course-related documents that were available through participants, including syllabi, official course descriptions, documented learning outcomes, course lecture slides, and course assignment documents. While many documents were collected, the primary sources of evidence analyzed in this study were semi-structured interviews with instructional faculty who have taught implementations of each case. Interviews focused on faculty members’ individual experiences with scientific research, their perspective on teaching research to students generally, their perspective on teaching research within the context of the cases, how they intend for students within the case to view scientific research, how they integrate these conceptions of research into the course, and 29 how any of these concepts and activities have changed during the pandemic. Interviews were conducted virtually using Zoom video calls. Recordings of those calls were transcribed by the student researcher manually, to increase familiarity with the interview contents and themes. In this study the decision was made not to interview student participants from any course. While students play a role in each course in observing faculty teaching actions, the purpose of this study is to establish an initial examination of the intersection of faculty research and faculty teaching, rather than the student learning process. 2.6 Methods of Analysis Interview transcripts were analyzed with the assistance of NVivo software. This software facilitates close analysis of text and identification of themes across multiple documents. Following guidance from Stake (2006) on performing multiple case study analysis, the case-based analysis involved developing case-specific findings for each case before performing cross-case analysis. Following this approach, this thesis is organized to present a description of each case and associated themes and findings prior to introducing cross-case trends. Within each case, interview transcripts were coded following Yin’s (2018) suggested techniques of pattern matching and explanation building. A pattern matching approach was used to identify how each interview fit within the models and concepts that made up the conceptual framework of the study, with a primary focus on Brew’s (2001) models of research and Pratt’s (1998) teaching perspectives. Codes were generated within NVivo to identify aspects of these models. Additional codes were generated based on the study’s research questions and intuitive themes 30 with the goal of working towards explanations for how the research question presented within each case. Collected coded evidence from each case was compiled and analyzed through the lens of the study’s research questions to develop preliminary, contextualized findings. Cross-case analysis was approached with consideration of Stake’s (2006) assertion that the purpose of a multiple case study is not to aim for comparative description, which often simplifies and removes context from findings, but to offer thick description of how the phenomenon being studied operates in different situations. That said, Stake recommends approaching cross-case analysis through a “merging case findings” (p. 58) technique in situations where generalizability is desirable, and when little is known about the quintain or guiding research topic. In order to achieve what Yin refers to as “analytic generalization” (2018, p. 38), shedding light on theoretical or conceptual views beyond the specific context of the case studied, I took this advice from Stake into account. Within this study, an attempt was made to “merge” findings when contexts were similar, while findings from individual cases were considered as relevant to their situation and context. 2.7 Limitations and Ethical Issues A key advantage of case study research, and one of the motivating factors for selecting this methodology for my study, is that case studies provide rich, contextualized information about a phenomenon. A common concern around case studies is that the findings may not be generalizable to differing contexts (Yin, 2018). I have attempted to counter this limitation through the selection of a multiple case study design, selection of typical and atypical contexts, 31 and a process of cross-case analysis which prioritizes describing the research topic over case-specific details. However, the findings produced by this case study are inherently connected to the contexts of the selected cases and the limitations of the participants. Stake (2006) argues that researchers should provide details about case contexts and actions so that readers can understand the situations where findings apply, and then “the responsibility of making generalizations should be more the reader’s than the writer’s” (p. 90). While generalization of multiple case study findings is possible, it places the burden of extrapolation on the reader. Despite these limitations around generalization, Yin (2018) notes that case studies allow for examinations of how and why phenomena occur in situations where control over events is not possible, leading to explanatory results. Case studies are “generalizable to theoretical propositions” (p. 20) and enable the expansion of theoretical propositions. This study examines the construction of “research” conceptually by faculty, an area not extensively examined in the literature reviewed for this study. The findings of this study may function as a foundation for further research into how “research” is communicated to students, how students are inducted into the scientific community of practice, and how the assumptions faculty hold inform their teaching of research. Some limitations exist around the scope of my study. This stems in part from the fact that this study constitutes a master’s research thesis. Multiple case studies are often undertaken by research teams with sufficient experience, resources, and time to meet the needs of their research project. As a lone researcher, I faced limitations in terms of analyzing the collected data from the study. While course documents and teaching materials for each case were collected to support 32 triangulation of specific findings, the primary analysis focused on interview transcripts in order to limit the scope of the project. Additionally, my findings must be expressed within the limits of a thesis manuscript. My research questions for this study, particularly RQ2 concerning faculty assumptions, could allow for expansive detail and study, and the limitations of my situation as a graduate student have offered some restrictions on the extent of analysis and consideration that could take place. This leaves room for further research to investigate the topic. An additional limitation on the scope of the study arose from participants’ identities and duties as faculty members within a university. University faculty members have many demands upon their time, and their willingness or availability to participate in the study restricted the participant pools and selected cases. Within each case, differing numbers of faculty who were candidates to participate in the study elected to do so. The small number of final participants in the full study offers some limitations to generalizability. Specifically, a very small number of participants were recruited from Case 2, which places constraints upon the reliability of the findings from that case. Case 2 represents the “typical” instructional context for my quintain, and the small number of participants limited my ability to triangulate data. Limitations in this study also arose from the focus of my research questions and the design of my semi-structured interview questions. In this study I did not address issues of Indigenizing or localizing the teaching of research, or the practice of research within institutions of higher education. While I asked participants to speak about their students, and the influence that student identities may have had on their teaching, I did not directly address Indigenous identities students may hold, or student experience or knowledge around Indigenous ways of knowing or 33 approaching scientific research. This limitation in how I framed my research questions and conducted my interviews allowed faculty to remain silent on Indigenization and colonial histories of the institution, higher education, and scientific research. Ethical concerns for this study arose from examining faculty assumptions and teaching practices. The aim of my study is to describe faculty teaching practices, and not to evaluate them. Participants and cases have been anonymized, although some context and descriptions of both cases and participants was included in order to provide complete and rich findings. 34 Chapter 3: Findings and Analysis This chapter presents the findings from the three cases examined in the research project. For each case, findings are organized into sections specific to how research is taught in the case, and into the assumptions and statements participants made about teaching, research, and students within the case. Following this, cross-case analysis examines similar and divergent findings in these areas across the three cases. Findings identified that many participants associate common teaching practices with teaching scientific research, although research is taught differently depending on whether it is an explicit outcome of the course being taught. Faculty perspectives on teaching were similar, while descriptions of their own research practices varied. Faculty assumptions about students focused on their motivation for enrolling in the course and their levels of engagement, among other factors. 3.1 Case 1 3.1.1 Teaching Research Case 1 is a multi-course specialized program for first-year students studying science. Within this program understanding scientific research is part of the explicit curriculum. One of the courses in the program directly addresses scientific thinking and scientific literacy as a content area. Within this course, explicit learning outcomes from the syllabus shared by Participant K included “Articulate what science is, and how it is done”. Other participants taught discipline-specific courses with learning outcomes addressing content areas in that discipline. All participants from 35 Case 1 addressed teaching students about science research as a high priority. Participant J said that “The objective in year one is to give them a realistic and useful understanding of what science is really about and how it works”. Participant L said that “Our goal is to get them thinking like a scientist”. The high priority given to this aspect of the program can be seen in the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. While Participant L noted that “this is obviously a highly disruptive event – particularly when COVID first struck and the university shut down to in-person learning”, Participant I said that her focus was on delivering the same lessons she would have taught in person, online. In her view “the way we talked about research within the course was similar” between courses before and during the COVID disruption, in contrast to a possible shift to focus only on disciplinary content objectives. Constructing student understandings of scientific research is an explicit and highly prioritized goal of the program, overall. Given the explicit intention to teach students about scientific research described above, the courses taught by participants from Case 1 could be described as research-oriented using Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) definition. In these classes, students are learning the process of research and discovery without being active participants in a research project. However, it’s important to note that the full program of all courses within Case 1 does involve a student research project, and the entirety of Case 1 may be described as research-based within Jenkin’s and Healey’s matrix. As Participant K described: The whole first term they've been learning a lot about scientific research of course through their various classes, they've been learning about the scientific process, they've been learning about you know what it means to be a scientist, how does scientific research work, they've got some little bit of experience by this point kind of looking at 36 some scientific research articles, so they know the general process that scientists go through when they're conducting a research project. But then in the second term with this big project, this is when they actually get to do it themselves Considering the complete program including both individual subject-based classes and the research project, Case 1 represents both research-oriented and research-based teaching. These are the two aspects of Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) matrix which foreground research processes and research questions in teaching. A goal of my study is to examine the construction of research through research-oriented teaching, and it may seem that Case 1 is not ideal due to this research project aspect. However, Participant K’s description of the full program highlights the distinct and separate implementations of research-oriented and research-based learning within the curriculum, and shows that this is still a useful case for my study. While the participants from Case 1 have an explicit shared agreement and program outcome to teach about scientific research in this research-oriented way, the determination of what that construction of research should be is less explicit. When asked if faculty within the program discuss a specific vision of scientific research to convey to students, Participant L said that “I think it does grow much more organically than that”, through participants working together in the program over multiple years. Participants sit in on classes taught by other faculty instructors in the program and give input to the class when relevant. While there may not have been direct conversations about how to construct research, participants addressed common objectives when describing how they wanted students to understand scientific research. Specifically, participants spoke about the importance of students understanding scientific research as complex or ambiguous. 37 Participant K said that “a lot of [students] come out of high school thinking that science is, it deals in a currency of facts”. In contrast he named several aspects of scientific research that he aimed to emphasize to students: “that science is a human endeavor, it doesn't occur in a vacuum”, that “it works through a gradual accumulation of evidence, and that there aren't just these irrefutable facts or truths that are obtained, but it's more, kind of weighing different options and thinking, okay, dealing with likelinesses”, and “that science is a slow and gradual process, so it's not just a single study that's been able to prove something, but rather we have a series of studies that build upon one another and kind of further our knowledge”. Overall, he aimed to show that “it's not as, ever as cut and dry as a lot of them kind of come in thinking that it is”. Other participants from Case 1 echoed Participant K’s sentiments. Participant I said she wants students to understand that in scientific research “There is nuance and uncertainty, and you have to become comfortable with that”. This participant spoke about “complexity, iterative, and things are going to change” as key themes for how students should understand scientific research. Participant L said that “trying to understand and describe some of that murkiness or muddiness in terms of our knowledge I think is, it might be uncomfortable for students who’ve, maybe are looking for absolutes, but it also does provide a realistic picture of what science is and how our research- how our knowledge does evolve”. While Participant J addresses the topic less directly, he spoke about countering students’ prior conceptions of scientific research: “We go through all this stuff about scientific method, earlier, and debunk the sort of thing that they did in high school”. For Participant J, students needed to move away from an understanding of science as a process of hypothesis testing toward an understanding that “in real research, you spend 90% of 38 your time doing exploratory observation before you ever get to the point of really being able to do a critical test of a model”. Here, Participant J aimed to move students from viewing scientific research as a direct and simple process toward a more ambiguous and uncertain exploration. Ultimately all the participants from Case 1 aim to construct research as complex and uncertain. Participants described using various teaching methods to construct this intended view of scientific research for students. Participant J’s focus was to “teach about how you do problems” and to “give them the skills that they need to analyze data”. He used a flipped-classroom approach, which is an approach to teaching where students watch recorded lectures before attending class. During scheduled class time, instructors typically focus on answering student questions, and students work on activities or problems. With this problem-based approach, as described in the quote above, he aimed to change students’ understandings about the process of scientific research, with a focus on data analysis. In some cases, Participant J described using published research papers as a basis for this problem-based approach, which are very simple because the “studies were done in the mid 60s”, but “it’s giving them the research data, and helping them to walk through it”. In this process described by Participant J the process of research is explicit, but the complexity of scientific research is somewhat more implicit. In contrast to Participant J, Participant L described teaching methods which more explicitly address the nature of scientific research. For example, he described using scientific literature to show the discursive nature of research. He said that he shows the class parts of the literature that demonstrate a conflict and “I do show that with the citations of these journals that provides this back and forth over months and years where they’re you know calling each other’s results or 39 cursory or elusive and all these other things” in order to show that “this is also how we arrive at some sort of known conclusion as well, as it takes time, that happens in the literature and often times that can be a slow and evolving process”. He also described showing students “situations where a model gives us the wrong result”, either by showing data that doesn’t fit with the model or by asking students to make a prediction based on a model and then introducing a different, observed conclusion. Participant L’s goal with this method was to show that models have limitations, but also that “this is how science evolves”. Participant I and K similarly used techniques where student expectations or predictions were challenged. Participant I said that she has been “trying to add more and more is examples or little situations where students come in with a particular preconceived idea, and then it blows up in their face, and so they kind of almost discover or they're confronted with the complexity”. Participant K said that within the incorrect options for an in-class multiple-choice quiz he would “try to list maybe one other one that you think a lot of the students are gonna select if they've got this kind of common misconception with the material”. Confronting these situations where students see unexpected conclusions or identify their own misconceptions highlight the complexity the participants aim for students to identify in scientific research. The unique format of Case 1’s program makes interdisciplinarity a highlighted aspect of scientific research. Faculty members from different disciplinary areas sit in on one another’s classes, offering input when suitable and gaining an increased awareness of what students are learning in other courses. Speaking about these connections between courses, Participant J said that “the interdisciplinary stuff has really been extremely powerful, and it’s not that we’re teaching any different material”. For Participant J the interdisciplinary crossover was supportive 40 of his teaching practices and allowed students to complete more advanced data analysis, but he didn’t make as explicit a connection to teaching of research. In contrast, Participant L spoke about the interdisciplinary nature of the program when describing how faculty within the program view and teach scientific research. Participant L said that “what’s important is we all bring our own perspectives. We apply it within our disciplinary context, but then we also have those touchpoints where things overlap and so that’s where we kind of have the opportunity to have those conversations”. For Participant L, having other faculty in the classroom “to contribute as needed” was not simply an opportunity to build stronger knowledge of disciplinary content, but also an opportunity to convey different and overlapping interdisciplinary constructions of scientific research. This inherent interdisciplinary nature of Case 1 allows for more complex conversations about the nature of scientific knowledge and research. 3.1.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students 3.1.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching Participants in Case 1 all spoke about teaching in ways that align with Pratt’s (1998) description of a developmental perspective on teaching. Participant I mentioned that her goal for students is “for them to become independent learners, so that for them to kind of develop the skills or discover skills maybe they already have”, speaking to a key part of the developmental perspective, which is students’ prior knowledge. Participant K similarly mentioned encouraging students “to really engage with what I'm saying and bring in their insights and their input too”. The teacher’s role as a guide is a central aspect of the developmental perspective which arises 41 within Case 1. Participant I described her role as a teacher as “providing opportunities, and sometimes incentive”. Participant L used the words “facilitate”, “guide”, and “shepherd” when describing his teaching role. Participant J, speaking about his role as a teacher, said “it’s not direct, it’s not linear. It’s partly intuitive – I don’t know, I mean, it’s a human process of, how do you change the way people think, how do you midwife change of attitude in approach to how one approaches problems”. This speaks to the core of the developmental perspective, which involves a commitment to changing students’ ways of thinking and understanding. Participant K gives an example of a teaching practice that integrates prior knowledge and new ways of thinking: We might give them some facts, give them some information, but then try to introduce it in a new context, and, which is gonna push the student to use the knowledge that they have but really critically think about it, think about what it means, why it's useful, and how it can be applied to this new situation. When describing Case 1 Participant J said that “Our goal is to get them thinking like a scientist”, and this articulation – explicitly stated in the student handbook for the program – uses language about ways of thinking. In this context, where the program goal is aligned with the developmental perspective of teaching, it makes sense that within Case 1 participants describe their role as teachers as that of guides or facilitators, and the participants aim to build on students’ prior knowledge to develop new ways of thinking and understanding. Despite the commitment to a developmental perspective within Case 1, participants all made mention of the importance of “content” within their teaching. A focus on content is a key feature of Pratt’s (1998) transmission perspective of teaching. For Participant I content coverage was a 42 responsibility to the larger curriculum across students’ degrees: “in some ways, there are things that we need to cover because our students then go into the mainstream and they have to have covered it”. Participant L also spoke to this concern, saying that “I am responsible for preparing them with a certain body of knowledge and skills that they need to have to take second year [disciplinary] courses, like just form a pure curriculum perspective”. While a statement that content needs exist isn’t necessarily a sign of a deeply held belief in content transmission, when Participant L spoke about his role as a teacher he also said that “there’s obviously you know lots of transmission of information” before going on to describe his aim “to facilitate as much as possible”. Here Participant L addressed a tension between his beliefs about teaching and learning, which align with the developmental perspective, and the institutional responsibilities to a larger curriculum across students’ degrees. Participant K also spoke to this dual responsibility, as he said: I kinda see myself as trying to toe the line there, or through these two different things of trying to you know being the leader, being the instructor, the person with the knowledge, and giving that knowledge to the students, but then also encouraging the students to really, instead of just sitting there passively and listening to things, to really engage with what I'm saying and bring in their insights and their input too. Participant J similarly began his description of his own role as a teacher by discussing “transmission of key information”, which he viewed as “the easy part”. He moved from this description into a longer explanation of his role “to facilitate”. Within Case 1 these transmission and developmental perspectives exist in tension, but each participant spent more time detailing their beliefs and actions that align with the developmental view, suggesting that it holds a place of higher esteem or priority in their approach. 43 Participant J gave a more detailed explanation of his perspective on how content is integrated into the larger undergraduate science curriculum. He said that “year two is the big problem because you make a decision after year one what area you wanna go into, and then you have a problem of having to do the homework and getting all the basic stuff under your belt in the next year”. That is to say that in a students’ second year there is a strong emphasis on learning disciplinary content, while “the real depth of learning in the field, field specific learning takes place in year three, and year four is sort of a capstone”. In Participant J’s view “year one is foundational” but, within Case 1 “we try not to content load it”. He went on to say that “Even thought there is a lot of content, there’s no way around that. But what we’re trying to do is concept load it, and process load it”. Here Participant J encapsulated the overall Case 1 tension between content transmission and development of thinking, while highlighting the prioritization of a developmental perspective on teaching. One additional key aspect of the perspective of teaching within Case 1 is that several of the participants within this case are engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research practitioners. In the words of Participant K “there's also people in the program who are classified as teaching professors, and so they're really into, you know the scholarship of thinking and learning and how students learn and effective teaching methods”. Given the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of Case 1, established through a shared program curriculum and observing one another’s classes, the presence of faculty with high awareness of pedagogical research may have had an impact on faculty teaching perspectives and practices across the program. 44 3.1.2.2 Assumptions about Research Participants in Case 1 spoke about research in a variety of ways which aligned with different research conceptions described by Brew (2001). Participant I spoke about searching for clues, and research as a process of answering questions, which seems to be a good example of Brew’s domino conception of research. While all the participants gave some personal account of how they began a research career, due to the wording of the interview question, Participant J gave a very extensive and personal account of his research career that aligned with Brew’s description of the journey conception of research. Participant L spoke about answering questions, which could fall under the domino view, but also research as a way “to move from things that are known and established, relatively, and that have stood the test of time to instead be talking about the unknowns”. This description of research as moving beyond a threshold of knowledge fits well with Brew’s description of the layer view of research. Participant K’s description of his research aligned less specifically to Brew’s categories, but may fall under the journey or layer views. The variety of views of research stand in contrast to the alignment across participants in terms of teaching research. It seems that participants’ specific perspectives or ways of describing their own research, within this case, weren’t a major factor in how participants taught scientific research or wanted first-year students to understand scientific research. While Brew’s classification of research conceptions was not particularly helpful with understanding Case 1, some other statements made by the participants highlighted assumptions about research that may have influenced their teaching. Participant I gave an anecdote about different disciplinary assumptions about research impacting teaching practices. She noted that 45 herself and another colleague in the program had an argument about whether students should do group work in class, and they discovered that a faculty member from Math might consider group work inappropriate because collaborative research is rare in the discipline, while a higher degree of group work in a Biology class may stem from a larger amount of collaborative research within the discipline. Participant I stated that “we are just using kind of the norm of our discipline” and within the context of Case 1 “I have to keep in mind that the way you work is different”. She also mentioned that this understanding was born of the interdisciplinary nature of Case 1. She said, “I wouldn't have been able to articulate this way a few years ago because I hadn't had those conversations, but I try now to kind of share that with the students as well a bit”. There are implications here that faculty within Case 1 may be more aware of disciplinary differences and may highlight these differences for their students, but also that faculty in a more traditional teaching context may have teaching practices influenced by their disciplinary norms with less awareness of that influence. Similar to Participant I, Participant L noted the value of the interdisciplinary setting of Case 1. He, and other participants from Case 1, mentioned that having colleagues from different disciplines sitting in the classrooms leads to opportunities to step in and answer cross-disciplinary questions during class. Participant L saw this as an opportunity where “I can talk about, just that murkiness or muddiness of where my limits of knowledge become and then, having them recognize that I can bring in a colleague who has more expertise to really continue the conversation and, and I hope that that supports their idea of what science is like as well, is those people working together to try and solve problems and better understand the world, as well.” This quote highlights a key aspect of Participant L’s view of research, which is inherently 46 collaborative and interdisciplinary. Participant L’s research experience involved work in an interdisciplinary laboratory, where he “felt that there was that strong sense of community within that institute”. In this way Participant L stood out from other participants in Case 1, where their personal histories of beginning to participate in scientific research did not seem to align with or impact the way in which they taught students about scientific research. When describing their early experiences with scientific research, the participants from Case 1 did not describe any courses or programs similar to Case 1 in their educational background. Participant J spoke about experience with strong mentorship. Participants I and J both spoke about childhood experiences which inspired an interest in science and research. However, they did not highlight any experiences which aligned with the research-oriented nature of Case 1, where characteristics and processes of scientific nature are highlighted in courses where students don’t participate in original research. Participant I mentioned that learning about research was an implicit aspect of her education: “I don't think we were really explicitly taught about how you do science, it was more like through example and you do labs and... follow the process.” Participant K mentioned that: We learn theories and concepts in, as, you know in undergraduate and courses, but the more general topic of like what science is, and how science works, and that kind of stuff, I didn't really pick up until I actually started doing research myself. Here Participant K also made a connection with the culminating research project of Case 1, suggesting that students must participate in their own original research “to kind of get it”. But he also mentioned that “I never really had a class like the one that I'm involved in” about the nature of science”, and “what I'm trying to do there is use what I've kind of picked up through my own 47 research that informs you know my understanding of science”. Here Participant K described translating his own learning through an implicit, research-led curriculum into a more explicit research-oriented curriculum within Case 1. 3.1.2.3 Assumptions about Students When describing the students in Case 1, the most common description participants shared was that students in the program are highly engaged in their courses and learning. Participant I said students in Case 1 “are incredibly engaged”, Participant J said that, compared to mainstream science major students, “What does differentiate them is their level of engagement”, and Participant K said that “the students who enroll in [Case 1] are very engaged”. Participant L also spoke about student engagement, but described it as a desired outcome for the program, rather than as a characteristic of the students. He said that: We always try and remind them that the learning is not a spectator sport, you have to participate, you have to be engaged, you have to be involved, and that’s something that our students really do take to heart, and certainly do their best with that as well. He mentioned that colleagues teaching science courses in later years recognize students from Case 1 “because they’re the ones that are interested in participating in those classes, they’re the ones that will put their hand up to ask ‘well like why is this happening?’”. While participant L didn’t necessarily identify engagement as an inherent characteristic of students in Case 1, he did still view it as a quality that is emphasized within the program and which students carry beyond the courses in Case 1. Participant L also said that “some of our characteristics of our students we always talk to them about is that they, they tend to be inquisitive, so we’re not looking for people 48 that memorize”. While he didn’t use the exact “engaged” terminology seen from Participant I, J, and K, a connection can be seen between students within the program being inquisitive, the program of Case 1 encouraging engagement and involvement, and students asking questions in later classes after completing the Case 1 program. One factor which participants mentioned in their assumptions about students is that students must apply to Case 1 to enter the program. As Participant L said: They do make the decision to apply to [Case 1]. So, I think that they do have to write an entrance essay to get into [Case 1] and to us that’s important as well. And I think that does provide some sort of filtering or streaming effect, because they do have to take those extra steps to choose to apply to the program. Participant I said “they have to be admitted to the [mainstream science major at the institution], but they fill out also a separate application to be in [Case 1], […] and it involves an essay, you know”. The participants here noted that students must self-select to choose Case 1 as a program. This factor may have an influence on the participants’ assumption that students are highly engaged. Some other descriptions that participants gave for students in Case 1 could be seen as connected to the consensus assumption that the students are more engaged than those in mainstream science classes. For example, Participant J said that: We simply say, well I would like you to do- you know, it would be a good idea if you did this. Well, most of them will go out and do it. Whereas in the mainstream you might have 10% who did it. 49 Here Participant J identified the students’ higher willingness to complete work compared to mainstream students. Relatedly, Participant I noted that “most of them are overachievers, so I try not to, umm, kind of not to overload them with work”. While engagement may be seen as an active quality during class hours, a broader definition of engagement with course content could describe this willingness to pressure to complete homework. Participant L’s statement that “the students are fantastic, I mean, to me that’s the real delight of teaching within [Case 1]” was much more general, but may also align with high engagement. In terms of academic abilities, participants in Case 1 stated that there were no differences between students in the program and students in mainstream science programs. Participant J said that “What is differentiates them from the students in the mainstream is not their marks, at the point where they enter the program. The distribution of marks is not that much different”. Participant L mentioned that “there’s been different studies on this, the entering average for the [Case 1] students is really no different than the entering average for the [mainstream science major] students as a whole”. Participant I said “academically when they come in they're not any better than students who are in the [mainstream science major]”. In Participant K’s view “I don't know any of the numbers, and I'm not the one who'd be able to say this, but I'm guessing that there's probably not a huge difference in terms of their achievement academically”. This assumption or perception that students are no different academically from the larger mainstream science majors seemed to be a consensus across participants in Case 1. The contrast with faculty remarks about engagement highlights that this seems to be the single factor where participants consider Case 1 students to be unique, and otherwise they consider the students in Case 1 to be the same as students who do not apply and enter the program. 50 The participants also described the diversity of student academic background within the Case 1 program as similar to the mainstream science major students. Participant L mentioned that students in Case 1 have different academic backgrounds. He said, “we’ll have those students that did every [International Baccalaureate] class or [Advanced Placement] class possible, we’ll have others that just did their regular high school grade 12 classes and that’s it”. Participant L’s comments seemed to counter a possible assumption that students participating in Case 1, a specialized program within the institution, must have completed specialized programs or advanced curriculums prior to entering university. From his description, students enter the program from a variety of academic backgrounds. Participant K addressed a trend he noted where the students within Case 1 who didn’t complete Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes within high school “tend to feel that they're way less competent, and they're less familiar with the material”, but he countered this by noting that “there's definitely students who were not in these AP or IB courses who excel in [Case 1] and do really well”. Participant I noted a similar concern from students and also dismissed the concern, saying: Lots of them - who come from public schools probably, I don't know if the majority, but, lots of them come from regular public schools, but. They don't know that lots of them do, but they've talked to a few others who've come from private schools, so they're like "Oh, but I just, I just went to this high school am I going to be okay?" and you know "I didn't do any extracurricular". and you know, "it's fine" (laughs) "You're here, it means we looked at your application and thought that you'd be successful". 51 Similarly, Participant L said “the IB or AP students don’t automatically do better”. It seems that the participants don’t consider academic background to be a limiting factor for student success in Case 1, although Participant K and I’s comments suggest that students may perceive this issue differently. Beyond academic program or curriculum, Participant K spoke to students in Case 1 “coming from different types of schools and so it could be geographically”. He identified that Case 1 students come from diverse locations, saying: I think last year was about a third were coming, were international students. And when I say international it's not even, it's not just like from the US and China and that's it, it's like students from all over, from the Caribbean, from places, countries in the Middle East, from Southeast Asia, from India, from like all different countries. He went on to note that differences in education related to geography and culture prior to joining Case 1 could have an impact on the students. He said that: There's gonna be tons of differences there in terms of their experiences. Some students come from countries where there's, they don't feel as comfortable you know, voicing their own ideas to an instructor, they come from an educational system where it's a little bit more of a one way flow of information, from the teacher to the student, and so it takes some adapting for them to kind of adapt to this idea that there can be an interaction, a two way exchange between an instructor and student. He added that this diversity in education formats can be seen among in-province students as well. In Participant K’s experience, students from “remote small schools” and “smaller programs” could “find it most challenging coming to [the institution] to [Case 1]”. It is important to note 52 that all of Participant K’s comments about diversity of geographic origin followed a comment that “you'd probably find this just the same outside of [Case 1] as you would in [Case 1]”. He did not view the number of international students within Case 1 to be different from mainstream science courses. However, a specific implication can be seen here that not all students entering Case 1 are prepared for the teaching and learning styles the courses are developed for. The diversity and different educational experiences that Participant K described are not surprising for an institution of higher education, but it seems to offer some conflict to the assumption that students within Case 1 are uniformly highly engaged with the courses. This aspect of different educational backgrounds potentially impacting how students engage with instruction in Case 1 was not raised by other participants. In terms of student futures, participants from Case 1 seemed fairly certain that some of the students would be part of the scientific research community in the future. Participant I said that “lots of them are going to be in the research... but, I also think that, uh, lots of them are not gonna be in [Participant I’s discipline]”. Participant J said that “most of them are. Will be. Most of them will be”. Participant J’s statement implies that he may have some contact with or knowledge of students who have proceeded from Case 1 into the research community in the past. The nature of the Case 1 program, which requires a choice to apply and select a specialized program with an explicit focus on scientific research, may be a factor in the confidence the participants displayed around this point. Participants were aware that students in Case 1 have selected a program with an explicit curriculum of teaching academic research, and the participants held a goal of teaching students to think like a scientist. That said, Participant I mentioned that “if they're able to you know, make good use of science, the other sciences, that 53 should be the goal”. In her perspective, students could benefit from an understanding of scientific research in the future even if they aren’t active scientific researchers, either as a user of science “who uses scientific information maybe to make decisions” or as a consumer of science who will “read science maybe more for pleasure, or for [their] own learning”. With Participant I’s description of the students as non-members of the scientific research community she gestured towards the importance of increased understanding of scientific research for the general public, and a goal of science communication. 3.2 Case 2 3.2.1 Teaching Research Case 2 is a lecture-based physics course, aimed at students who are non-majors in the discipline. Developing students’ understanding of scientific research is not an explicit learning outcome of Case 2, based on the syllabi shared by Participants N and O. However, the participants described very different goals for students’ understanding of physics or scientific research after completing the course. One of Participant N’s key goals for students in Case 2 was “to leave not hating [physics] more than when they started”. She also said that “physics is really just mathematical description of nature, and I think if they walk away knowing that that’s what physics is, that’s probably my main goal”. While she wanted students to have “a general understanding that you can use mathematics to describe behaviours in the world”, she primarily articulated affective goals for 54 the students. She also mentioned a goal for students to feel “empowered to be able to solve problems, even if at first glance they think that they don’t know how to solve a problem like that”. Her stated goals for the course focus on decreasing fear and increasing confidence, as well as a general understanding of the function of the discipline. Participant N also described the importance of students understanding “that their professors are researchers, and that our level of understanding of various topics is influenced by the fact that we continue to study these things beyond, undergrad and grad school, like we’re continuing to work on that”. For Participant N this understanding that faculty conduct research or have conducted research was a benefit of studying at a large research university, as opposed to a small college. This was the key understanding of research that Participant N wanted students to have within Case 2. She contrasted this to Case 3, a course she has also taught, where “we focus […] extensively” on the reality and process of scientific research. For Participant N “it’s hard, you know, in a class like [Case 2] to tell them very much about what the actual day to day reality of doing research is, and how that actually works”. She described several obstacles or barriers with the structure of Case 2, outlined in more detail in the Assumptions about Teaching section below. Despite Participant N’s focus on affective outcomes around research and extensive barriers within Case 2 when it came to teaching about research, she did mention some ways that she addresses research within the course. For example, Participant N said that she aimed “to make connections with the material that I research when it’s appropriate in class”. She used some hedging language to soften this statement, claiming not to “go to extreme lengths” and to only make connections “when it’s natural, and it fits in”, but she also mentioned connecting class content with the academic work of a friend when appropriate. Participant N also said that the 55 problems and examples brought into the class were “showing that there is a connection to the research yes, but not necessarily like the process of research, more just like jumping to the end result, like, this connects to this”. Here she gave an example drawing a connection between class material bout harmonic motion to observations from her own research. Participant N described problem-solving as a key aspect of what is taught in the class, and said that “the problem-solving approach is, probably, like, uniformly applicable to all sort of science”. While the time scale is different, and with problems solved in class “you’re hoping to accomplish that in minutes, maybe at most hours”, she claimed that “the steps are kind of quite similar” when it comes to “designing an experiment and actually carrying it out”. Ultimately Participant N said that this method of problem-solving “is learning, what learning how to do science… is, basically”. The contrast between this statement about the larger applicability of the key skills taught in Case 2 and Participant N’s earlier statements about barriers and lack of time show that her definition of teaching research differs from what takes place in the course. From her perspective, the described activities did not meet the definition of teaching research. In contrast, Participant O spoke about a particular “perspective of that scientific research process” that he aimed to “emphasize in the most, introductory even courses in physics”. Within the context of Case 2 he said that: The goal has been to use this opportunity to provide not just the knowledge that they need for [Case 2] or for this physics course to do x y and z later on, but to have them use this kind of, methodology in any discipline that they plan to go in. Within the same course and facing the same barriers as Participant N, Participant O claimed a different intention and focus in his teaching. The perspective of the scientific process that he 56 aimed to emphasize is one which “requires more than anything a flexibility and an idea that you have to, you’re never really done it’s always an iterative process” and: There’s never really like a final solution really that you should just be satisfied with and move on, it is a work in progress and you can always improve the model, you can improve the results by improving the model, by improving the methods you use. Participant O’s description of scientific research here focused on iterative attempts to solve problems or improve models. In the context of Case 2 he specifically described “the methodology being this, uh, this modeling and iterative process”. Describing the iterative modeling methodology within the course, he said that “it’s in the assignments, it’s in what we do in class in terms of how we solve problems, it’s embedded in how homework assignments and reading assignments are designed”. For Participant O this message of how scientific research occurs underlies all aspects of the course. Participant O’s description of conveying a perspective on scientific research through “how we solve problems” within Case 2 echoes Participant N’s mention of teaching a problem-solving methodology that applies across scientific disciplines. When Participant N described teaching problem-solving in class she mentioned that “sometimes I show them first an approach that doesn’t work” and said that she would explain “why did I choose this, and then how did I know it wasn’t gonna work, how did I change approaches”. This demonstration of different and repeated approaches to the same problem resonates with Participant O’s description of an “iterative” approach. The key divergence here is with how the participants described their prioritization of this approach within their teaching. For Participant N the teaching of research is not a core aspect of Case 2, especially in contrast to her descriptions of Case 3 or a “fourth-year 57 honours class in my actual research sub-area”. Participant O’s descriptions of how an understanding of the scientific research process underlies all aspects of the course demonstrate a different understanding and prioritization of teaching research. While Participant O described all aspects of Case 2 as connected to the problem-solving methodology, he also highlighted a specific assignment added to the course, which connected more deeply to the process of scientific research. In this assignment students “decide on different topics of their interest” and create “a five-minute video presentation […] using as much of the course content as related to the topic as possible”. Students were required “to look up primary sources” and explain an application or phenomenon, including descriptions of history and improvements, “having to look at it sort of holistically”. For Participant O “all of those go back to having to understand that scientific process”, in order to give an explanation that could be understood by other students in the class. Participant O also spoke to using “multiple choice kinds of questions that don’t have a clear answer, that, you know, one answer might seem right, but, your intuition sort of tricks you” within the class as a way to address “the challenging concepts that we need to sort of understand and overcome before we can delve deeper into solving problems”. These types of questions may highlight the complexity of science or the need for an iterative process. Participant N also mentioned asking students “to answer questions intuitively before we’ve covered the topic at all”, but her use of this technique was to demonstrate to students that their prior knowledge and experience can help when “they think it’s more complicated than it actually is”. For Participant N intuition was useful for demonstrating to students that complex math could be made less intimidating when they already knew the final 58 answer, while for Participant O it was a demonstration that they should approach scientific questions with a well-practiced iterative problem-solving method. Neither participant noted significant changes in course content within Case 2 during the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to online learning. For Participant O “the content we delivered and what we were trying to achieve didn’t really change, but the additional tools that were available to students to access it increased and evidently included more students in a better way”. That is to say that the content was the same, but some of the adjustments to teaching methods increased accessibility for students. This suggests that teaching scientific research was neither increased nor decreased in prioritization despite the disruption. However, he also stated that “interaction in class in person, you know, it happens on Zoom in breakout rooms but it’s really not the same kind of interaction as I’ve observed, having done both”, suggesting a decreased amount of student interactivity during COVID-19 online teaching. This was significant for Participant O, as he went on to say “that social aspect of learning is really, really the fundamental piece, in achieving some of these goals that we’re trying to achieve in the course”. In his view, students require different perspectives from one another as part of the learning process. Without those different perspectives, he said “you’re just always going to kind of do it your own way and you’re gonna live in your own little bubble and universe and not really understand or consider any other methods and ways of thinking”. This perspective suggests that a key aspect of the course, or at least a key aspect of the intention to teach students a methodology of iterative problem-solving, was missing during COVID-19. It seems that the goals and instructional practices for Case 2 were not significantly impacted by the transition to online learning, but the outcomes for students may have been impacted by the difference in methods of interaction. 59 Additionally, Participant O mentioned that “going online, made me question a lot of the ways how we’re running courses”, mentioning concepts of “ungrading” (which Stommel [2021] describes as a systemic critique of assigning numeric grades for student performances) and science communication. Participant O addressed “the excellent example of the successes and failures of science communication and the reasons we need these kinds of methodologies to make sure we don’t end up where we ended up”. It may be that the world response to COVID-19 increased his motivation to teach students about scientific research and an iterative problem-solving methodology in Case 2. 3.2.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students 3.2.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching Participant N’s views and descriptions of teaching were highly dependant upon the context of the course and students being taught. When asked about her purpose as a teacher she said, “I think it really depends on the specific class that you’re teaching”. Many of Participant N’s statements that involved teaching research were outside the bounds of Case 2. These statements also often connected well with Pratt’s (1998) description of an apprenticeship perspective of teaching. When describing a fourth-year honours course she taught in addition to Cases 2, she said she “replaced the final exam with a final project where they’re gonna look at modern research and write a paper on what the open questions in the field are”, and described wanting to “inspire specific interest in a research area, and show them, not just what physics looked like 100 years ago but what it looks like in 2021”. In the context of teaching fourth-year honours students, 60 Participant N focused on “authentic tasks” (Pratt, 1998, p. 226) and integrating more engagement with research. When imagining teaching a hypothetical first-year course for physics majors Participant N said she “would probably spend a lot more time telling them about my research” in comparison to Case 2. When Participant N described scientific research communities she mentioned training and mentoring graduate students, ensuring they have opportunities, challenges, and tenable research problems. In these contexts that involved students more deeply engaged with Participant N’s discipline, especially in the honours and graduate context, her priorities and language aligned with the apprenticeship perspective of teaching described by Pratt. However, this apprenticeship perspective of teaching did not align with how Participant N described her teaching in the context of Case 2. Within Case 2, Participant N’s goal as a teacher was “just to empower the students and that they shouldn’t be afraid of physics and that they have the tools that they can do these things”. As mentioned earlier, her goal was for the course is to “make it a pleasant experience for” the students, and for them to leave the class not hating physics. While this description could be interpreted as an ideal that Participant N wants to convey to students, as described in Pratt’s social reform perspective of teaching, it would be reductive to ignore the teaching practices Participant N went on to describe She mentioned using “worked examples in class, where I explain my thought process and how I’m approaching a problem” with the aim “to give them strategies for problem-solving, more than anything”. Here Participant N described modeling or demonstrating a particular way of thinking when approaching problems. She also mentioned asking students “to answer questions intuitively before we’ve covered the topic at all” in order to demonstrate that “they know on intuitive grounds what the right answer should be”. Here 61 Participant N was highlighting the value of students’ prior knowledge, emphasizing that they “just need to reconcile the math with reality” when they approach solving a problem. These techniques align well with the developmental perspective of learning, which aims to move students from their existing knowledge and ways of thinking into more advanced or complex ways of thinking. Participant N’s perspective of teaching within the Case 2 context seems to be developmental, or perhaps a blend of developmental and social reform. Ultimately the difference between Participant N’s discussion of teaching within Case 2 and her description of teaching a fourth-year honours course or mentoring graduate students shows some underlying assumptions about what types of teaching are appropriate to different instructional contexts. In describing the instructional context of Case 2 Participant N described many different features of the course that she seemed to view as barriers to explicitly teaching students about scientific research within the course. One key issue was time pressure. Participant N said that “You usually can’t go into like, tremendous amounts of detail on things that deter from the main course objectives because, it’s just such a tight timeline to get everything finished”. When teaching Case 2 Participant N felt that “the material that we cover is the material that we cover, and, you know, because it’s a multi-section course at the end of the day, you’re obligated to, keep pace with your other instructors”. In her view there wasn’t flexibility to adjust the course outside of the discipline-based content. She also felt that Case 2 “doesn’t have a lab component”, and this was a barrier to addressing research in the course. For Participant N “a lab is maybe where you can give a little bit more, like, of a feeling for what real research looks like”, suggesting that she identified research-based instruction, defined by Jenkins and Healey (2009) as teaching where students are active participants in research processes, as necessary for students to learn about 62 research. Another barrier she identified was the fact that students in Case 2 are non-majors in physics. She said that Case 2 “is sort of broad but shallow, like we cover a lot of different topics but we do so at a rather surface level”, and that her approach to the course would be different if it were aimed at students who would later major in physics, including more intentional or explicit discussion of research. For Participant N the size of the class, which she described as 150 to 200 students, also impacted the instructional possibilities. She said: Because it is such a big class, you’re kind of teaching to the, to the median. Like you, you can’t go as fast as the strongest students and you can’t go as slow as the weakest students, you have to kind of set the bar somewhere. Participant N related this factor of class size to the instructional techniques she chose, including the decision to demonstrate her own struggles with iterative problem-solving as a method to make the material less intimidating for weaker students. However, this aspect class size impacting the pacing of content is certainly also a factor in her consideration of time limitations within the course. The combination of many contextual barriers that Participant N described within Case 2 may explain why her teaching perspective in Case 2 did not align with the perspective she gave for other contexts. When those barriers were lowered it seemed she considered it more relevant to teach students about scientific research. Participant O, like Participant N, seemed to describe teaching within Case 2 in ways that align with a developmental perspective of teaching and learning. When describing his goal as a teacher he mentioned “not necessarily trying to just teach you content a b c and d, we’re trying to teach you a method” and referred to that method as “a way of thinking about the world”. As mentioned above, the developmental perspective of teaching focuses on changing students’ ways of 63 thinking. He described introducing a methodology of “step-by-step problem-solving and procedures that we want them to practice as much as possible”, giving students a desired way of thinking or approaching problems “that you can apply to anything”. Participant O also said that “a lot of the class is multiple choice kinds of questions that don’t have a clear answer”, challenging students’ existing understandings and intuition in order to provoke different ways of thinking. He also mentioned evaluations that asked students to share limitations, assumptions, and reasoning – that is, evaluation that accounted for students’ thought processes. Participant O’s description of teaching within Case 2 consistently focused on encouraging a specific problem-solving methodology or way of thinking, demonstrating a highly consistent developmental view of teaching. Participant O also mentioned his involvement in scholarship of teaching and learning research. When describing his teaching practices, he mentioned choices “based on pedagogical research” and “really thinking about” useful teaching methods for the “limited time and resources” of the course. The consistency of perspective that Participant O demonstrated in comparison to Participant N may be related to more intentional and extended thought about teaching practices, arising from this background. Alternatively, his differing views on teaching research may arise from his position as a faculty member researching teaching practice, rather than actively pursuing research in the discipline of physics. 3.2.2.2 Assumptions about Research Within Case 2 the participants spoke about research in ways which often aligned with Brew’s (2001) journey perspective of research. In Brew’s description of a journey perspective, researchers focus primarily on their individual story and progress as a researcher and developing 64 insights they gain along this career journey. This alignment with the journey perspective may have arisen due to the design of the interview question which specifically asked for the researcher’s “story”, prompting a narrative response. Participants N and O both narrated their introduction to becoming a scientific researcher through a series of encounters with research and different positions within research teams. While Participant O’s description of his research experiences aligned with a journey perspective of research, it also connected with other models described by Brew (2001). Participant O’s description of his research story highlighted large research collaborations, including relationships within large networks, resources, and communication modes. These are key components of a trading view of research, in Brew’s description. However, in a trading view, publications and accolades are usually a key outcome of the research process. Participant O refers to publications largely in terms of “access to information” and “pre-research”, and also spoke to “the creation of the new data and knowledge that were coming out of our experiment”. This view of research as a collection of components and resultant items is identified by Brew with a domino perspective of research. In these ways Participant O’s description of his own experiences with research seemed to combine aspects of several of Brew’s different research views, without being particularly emblematic of any one in particular. In contrast to his descriptions of his own research experiences, when Participant O spoke about teaching research in Case 2 he described an iterative process where “you can get an answer, you can get a solution, but you should be able to, again with more time more resources, you should be able to refine the model, refine your approximations and assumptions, and do better”. This 65 description of an ongoing process, and of striving to move beyond the existing answer, aligns very well with Brew’s description of a layer perspective of research. Participant O’s description of his own research experiences didn’t appear to connect well with Brew’s models of faculty research perspectives, and more importantly, was highly differentiated from the research perspective he described as the goal for students in Case 2. As mentioned above, Participant N gave a narrative description of her experience with research aligned in some ways with Brew’s (2001) journey view of research. When describing her current research work, Participant N mentioned carrying out reactions, discovering materials, and characterization of those materials. These discrete items and answers, addressed as collected items, align very well with Brew’s domino view of research, where lists of research elements are lined up and questions are solved. While this description seems to fit well with how Participant N spoke about her ongoing research, her description of her own process of learning research was different. She spoke about relationships with mentors, and said “I had very positive mentors in grad school so, lots of opportunities to attend conferences, networking, being introduced to people in the field”. Participant N’s focus here on relationships could be seen as part of a trading view, but similar to Participant O, she didn’t focus on the recognition that arose from those relationships. The “trade” aspect of Brew’s description of the trading perspective seemed to be less of a focus for Participant N. For Participant N, the key result of her experience having mentors was a current focus on acting as a mentor for graduate students. Participant N’s perspective on teaching research and mentorship was that “because of how research is done in North America, to me it’s really about training students and, ah, what their experiences are”. Ultimately, she said that “I really see things through the lens of the grad students that are 66 working with me”. For Participant N, mentorship is not just how research should be taught, but is also an aspect of what research is – a component of her definition of research. The importance of mentorship for Participant N’s research journey and research view may be related to her background. She said she “learned about scientific research in a tangible sense really late”, around her final year of undergraduate study, and stated that “I don’t have a family history in academia”. When she began her honours project she said “at that point I had no conception – I didn’t really know about grad school at all, I hadn’t heard of academic research as a career path”. While she didn’t state it directly, it seems that Participant N may have been the first generation in her family to attend postsecondary education. For Participant N this knowledge gap around scientific research and academia played a role in the importance of mentorship for her development as a researcher, as she “sort of figured it out along the way”. The outcome of this experience is that her conception of the scientific research community was based on responsibility to act as a mentor and to guide graduate students. As she said, “they only have two or four years to make progress on a problem and it could kind of dictate their future so I see that as the main responsibility of doing research”. While Participant N’s focus in this description of research and mentorship involved teaching students about scientific research, a key point here is her focus on graduate students. The assumption revealed in her discussions of mentorship and, as described earlier, her inclusion of research in the curriculum of a fourth-year course, is that for Participant N the teaching of research is appropriate for graduate or fourth-year undergraduate students, but not for first-year students. 67 3.2.2.3 Assumptions about Students The descriptions and assumptions the participants shared about students in Case 2 mainly connected to their understanding that the students were not majoring in the discipline of the course, Physics. Participant N said that “these are students who definitely are not planning to major in Physics, or even a natural science usually, usually they’re majoring in either like a social science or more like a health science field”. Participant O’s perspective was that “for many students, these are the life science students, this is the only Physics course they take in university”. Both participants identified that students in Case 2 might be majoring in life or health sciences, while only Participant N mentioned that students may be studying social sciences. When describing whether students may be researchers in the future, Participant N said “I know a lot of the students I ask what they want to do after undergrad they mention things like, nursing or kinesiology, so there’s definitely research-based careers in those areas – forestry, same thing, there are research-based careers”. Her descriptions of possible futures for students gave some additional information about students’ areas of study, reinforcing an emphasis on life science. Similarly, Participant O described the students within Case 2 as “interested in health sciences or pursuing health science related degrees, so it could be pre-med to physiotherapy to kinesiology and all of kind of health adjacent sort of life science adjacent disciplines”. These statements give a strong sense that the participants in Case 2 clearly identify the students as not majoring in Physics or planning to pursue research within the Physics discipline, based on understanding of the course and interactions with students. 68 For Participant N, the understanding that students in Case 2 are non-majors in the discipline seemed to lead to several other assumptions about the students. She believed that “a lot of them are very anxious to be taking a physics class” and said that “lots of them will disclose that”. She claimed that students in Case 2 tend not to “fight over grades”, that is to say, unlike “engineering or pre-med students” they won’t argue that they deserve a higher grade than they have received on a test. Participant N’s perception was that students in Case 2 “just want to pass”. She said that they “do on average a lot better than just passing” and “tend to surprise themselves”. This idea that students are anxious about the course and expect to do badly connects with Participant N’s stated goal for students “to leave not hating [Physics] more than when they started”. Participant N also noted that it’s possible to “predict how well someone’s gonna do in our class by how well they did in their last math class” and said she explained every mathematical step carefully when conducting problem-solving within the course. She specifically contrasted this to hypothetical courses where the students are expected to be Physics majors, in which case she would “expect that they’re stronger mathematically”. Beyond this disciplinary difference in teaching technique, Participant N also identified the fact that the students are non-majors in Physics as a barrier to teaching more explicitly about research. She said that, while in a multi-section lecture course for physics majors “probably at the end of the day you’re dealing with a lot of the same time pressures to just get through the content as, as fast as possible”, “at a minimum I would probably spend a lot more time telling them about my research”. In these ways her statements revealed that she was adapting her teaching of the explicit disciplinary content of the course and the possible implicit information about scientific research based on her expectations of student background and interests. 69 Participant O also expressed concerns about students’ negative feelings toward the discipline and course. He said: If you mentioned Physics to the person who’s cutting your hair or the person who’s delivering your packages the perspective of the average person is, ‘I hate Physics,’ or ‘I hated Physics in high school,’ ‘It’s really hard, it doesn’t make any sense to me’ and so, all- our students are no different from those people. Participant O described the students in Case 2 as “the public”, coming into the course with negative bias towards Physics due to their status as non-majors in the discipline. Like Participant N, he said that one of his goals was “to kind of break that down”, considering it a success if students hated Physics less by the end of the course. While Participant O seemed to mirror Participant N’s concerns on this subject, he largely spoke about the students in Case 2 in terms of diversity of academic major and interests. He said that his “overarching philosophy is that every student is different” in terms of how they learn, but also mentioned “the diverse backgrounds and nature of the students and what they’re interested in and what they’re going to end up in”. His expectation was that students in Case 2 had varied academic backgrounds and majors. He even mentioned that “many students are not actually in their first year”, as they may have chosen to leave a required Physics credit to the second or third year of a degree. Participant O believed that this diverse group of students have “a wide range of interests”, and initiated the research project on an individually selected application of a course topic (as previously described) to allow students to connect course content with research in areas of personal interest. In this way, he is adjusting his teaching of the course and of scientific research to suit his views of the students as non-Physics majors, whose academic interests fall outside of the discipline. Additionally, he posts supplementary materials on the course website that he considered “mind blowing” in order 70 to “motivate the most lethargic student who’s just sort of trying to get this credit”. Participant O said that these supplementary materials and applications were “different based on the audience”, designed to appeal to the disciplines students in the course were majoring in. While Participant O’s adjustments to the course and his teaching differed from Participant N’s, both derived primarily from their understanding of the students in Case 2 as non-majors in the course discipline. 3.3 Case 3 3.3.1 Teaching Research Developing students’ understanding of scientific research is an explicit part of the curriculum within Case 3. Instructors teaching the Case 3 course use a shared, centrally developed course syllabus, which includes a core goal for students to “Articulate and discuss what science is and how it is done”. Given this centralized learning goal, the entirety of Case 3 could fall into Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) classification of research-oriented teaching, where students learn about the research process but are not participants. Beyond the shared syllabus, instructors also share a centralized lesson plan outline for the full course. Instructors can make modifications to the course, but this previously prepared syllabus offers some consistency in how the construction of scientific research takes place within the different sections of Case 3. However, the course is offered in two different contexts, which have some impact on instructor assumptions and adjustments. Case 3 is offered as an elective course for mainstream undergraduate students in a direct-entry science major to meet a requirement to complete a “communications” course. Other 71 communications or writing courses without a science focus are available which can meet the same requirement, suggesting an element of choice and self-selection of students within Case 3. Case 3 is also offered as one component of a specialized program aimed at students who intend to enter science or engineering majors but whose English language skills do not meet the requirements for the mainstream direct-entry programs at the institution. The participants interviewed as part of Case 3 varied in their experiences with delivering the course in these separate iterations as an elective or as part of the specialized program. When discussing their purpose or goals within the course, participants across Case 3 raised some consistent themes around student understandings of science or scientific research. One common concept among participants was for students to unlearn prior conceptions of scientific research. Participant X aimed for “students to stop thinking of science as something that is data only, facts only, and is right or wrong”. For Participant X the “goal is to have them thinking more like an expert at the end of the semester”. He said that the students “will try to take the theories as if they are the facts” and he aimed to show them differently. Similarly, Participant Y said that a main goal of the course is to redefine what science is. She believed that students “get told a lot about all of the scientific method” and her goal was students “unlearning some of the things that they’ve maybe thought about in a more elementary sense about what science is”. Participant Y wanted students to understand that “science intersects with other things in society and that it isn’t just this singular method that is often just in this linear fashion”. She also mentioned that “students come into the course, often talking about proving what’s true” and that she wants students to understand that “we don’t prove anything in science”. For Participants X and Y a key aspect of students in Case 3 understanding scientific research was for them to unlearn previously 72 learned definitions and conceptions of research. In contrast, Participant Z mentioned that a goal is to “give a realistic idea of how science is done”, which has an implied suggestion that an unrealistic idea of how science is done may exist. However, Participant Z did not explicitly refer to conceptions of science that may need to be replaced or improved. Participants from Case 3 frequently described wanting students to understand science research as uncertain or ambiguous. Some of this uncertainty is seen in how Participants X and Y described the concepts they want students to unlearn, above, where prior understandings of science related to concepts such as truth or a linear scientific process. Participant X also directly said that he aims to “highlight the uncertainty” of science. He said that students “give lip service to the idea that the results of science are tentative but then they come out talking about truth” and described confusion an aspect of both learning and science. Participant Y aimed to emphasize that “science is a real human endeavor”. She said she wants students to understand that science is “driven by human passions and that it isn’t this very cold, calculated, ‘yes/no’ kind of outcomes, there is a lot of grey areas”. Participant Y also mentioned the importance of bias in science, which “strives to be objective but is not always objective”. For Participant Z, an important concept was “scientific research as being constantly refined”, where experimental results point toward conclusions and “you need to keep testing your conclusions and you need to keep investigating further”. She said she wanted to “emphasize the tentative nature of science” and described telling students that “even if there’s a lot of evidence in favour of some conclusion I don’t know that this is every really going to be final”. The goal for participants in Case 3 was to construct an understanding of scientific research as uncertain, biased, or tentative, highlighting complexity. 73 Participants described using various methods to achieve their goal in constructing scientific research. One common theme within Case 3 was instructors speaking about their own experiences with research, in the context of teaching about science communication and the research process. Participant Z said that because Case 2 is not aligned with a particular scientific discipline “I don’t bring anything usually that’s very-very specific from my research background”, but more generally when it comes to the scientific research process “sometimes I and other instructors would bring in examples from our own experience”. Participant Z said that her teaching in the course includes “talking about things like publication, talking about collaboration, and to some extent, reading scientific publications and interpreting data from them” and said that she will “bring in my experiences with applying for funding” when the course addresses how scientific research is funded. Participant Y said “I usually bring in the personal”. For example, Participant Y said that, in the context of a class lesson about peer review, she thinks: It’s useful for students to hear about a personal experience of what peer review is like and what my experiences were with what it’s like or what the process is to write a paper, submit a paper, do the whole thing. Participant X similarly said “I will talk about when I was doing this, when I was out doing this research, when I was out doing this research. I will bring up those examples”. Participant X’s research includes disciplinary research in a scientific subject area along with research around the scholarship of teaching and learning, and he described sharing examples from both areas with his students. 74 For Participant Y, bringing personal examples into the classroom was key to further the goal of humanizing science and helping students to understand that science “is a human endeavor, that there are humans behind all the discoveries”. Participant X also highlighted an assignment where students interview a scientist as “one of the best things that they encounter in the whole year”. He explained that the interview “highlights the publishing process and the process of doing research” through interactions which humanize scientists, furthering the same goal Participant Y addressed. Participant X identifying this assignment as one which particularly helps students understand scientific research shows that he placed high value on storytelling or anecdotes from scientific researchers in the process of constructing scientific research. Participant Y also mentioned that her experience with the peer review process sometimes arises during the interview a scientist assignment. Between the instructors in Case 3 bringing personal examples into the classroom and the assignment which requires students to directly interview a scientist, experiencing a narrative of scientific research appears to be a key aspect of the course. Another classroom teaching technique that the participants referenced as focused on teaching research was an activity connected to statements about the nature of science, which students must agree or disagree with. For Participant Z this activity forced the students “to examine different attitudes toward science, but also different aspects of the process of science which they might not have thought about”. Ultimately, she said that “it gets at ideas about a lot of different parts of the process of research” including observation, funding, and practical implications. Participant Z described a second stage of the activity where “students read these case studies of historical scientific discoveries with these card games claims in mind” to help the students understand how the concepts and themes may be applied in practice. Participant X said that “it’s 75 an interesting activity because they often end up taking these things that they think are the right answer and they think that you want you to hear”. He found it to be a helpful activity for highlighting “science in confusion”, as mentioned above. For both Participants Z and X having students confront statements was a useful tool for leadings students to think about the nature of science and scientific research, either in practice or within a context of uncertainty. 3.3.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students 3.3.2.1 Assumptions about Teaching In their descriptions of their teaching within Case 3, Participants X and Y made statements which aligned with Pratt’s (2005) description of the developmental perspective of teaching. The language Participants X and Y used resonated with the developmental view of a teacher as a guide in students’ learning process. Participant Y referred to herself as a “guide on the side”, with a role that is “not to transmit information” but to “provide expert feedback”. She said that she “a more skills-based approach” and that she is “less concerned about content knowledge”. Participant X said his role is “like a facilitator, where you’re setting up activities, and it’s not showing them how I think, it’s having them practice thinking in new ways”. His aim as a teacher was “to get them thinking at a higher level in as many things as we can”, with a belief that “the habits of mind are what we wanna keep them with later, longer”. He further stated that teaching is “convincing other humans to think about stuff, and build structures in their brain”. From this description it appears clear that Participant X’s view of teaching was as a way of changing 76 students’ patterns of thought. Participants X and Y identified themselves not with expertise, but with facilitation, and aim to lead students to new ways of thinking in their instruction. Participant Z’s description of her teaching process was more ambiguous in terms of Pratt’s model. Participant Z described herself as “as somebody who the students can come to with questions”, offering one-on-one contact with a mentor for students who may otherwise be enrolled in large classes. For Participant Z her aim as an instructor was “being a place where students can bounce ideas off, or ask questions, and not necessarily that I’m just telling them how to do these particular skills”. There are aspects of this description that align with Pratt’s (2005) description of a nurturing perspective of teaching, where the focus is on students’ self-concept as key to their learning. Participant Z implied that her goal of mentorship is connected to the goal of students better understanding scientific research, when she said “I’d like to give them sort of a realistic idea of what it’s like to be a scientist but then, also, you know, they end up coming to me with questions about how they should get to that point”. Participant Y mentioned that empowering students is a key goal for her in the course, and that she wants students to “gain an identity as a scientist”, but went on to add goals for students to “think critically, and not just about science”. While Participants X and Y also addressed the importance of students viewing researchers as humans and forming connections with scientists, they didn’t connect this goal as firmly to their role within the classroom, and they gave other more detailed descriptions of their views on teaching. For Participant Z, mentorship and nurturing a relationship with students as individuals was more important than for others in Case 3, and she made fewer statements related to how she conceptualizes her teaching practices. 77 Participant Z did offer some reflections on how science research is incorporated into courses outside of Case 3. She described teaching first-year students in a discipline-specific course, stating that “we do teach some of the same skills, like for example, interpreting data from a scientific research paper, but then we don’t really teach about the process of science at all”. She viewed this as “kind of problematic, because then when I get the second-year students I also don’t teach them about the process of science, but I sort of assume they know it”. Participant Z’s hope was that scientific research is taught elsewhere in the “range of courses” that students complete, possibly in lab courses. She said that, despite a shift in science education away from lecture and towards “more realistic problems” and “more realistic assessments”, “it’s more just that we don’t necessarily have time to build this in, explicitly, to some courses”. In Participant Z’s view “labs are really better for learning about the process of science because you have to design an experiment and complete an experiment yourself, usually. Um, although sometimes you’re just given instructions for an experiment and you just follow them”. She also mentioned that labs were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these final contradictions went unaddressed, Participant Z clearly identified laboratory experiments as a key component of learning about scientific research within the standard disciplinary curriculum, despite teaching within Case 3. 3.3.2.2 Assumptions about Research Case 3 participants described their own research in various ways which seemed to align with different definitions from Brew’s (2001) model of faculty views on research. Participant X’s descriptions of research were delivered through a personal narrative, which aligns well with 78 Brew’s description of a journey perspective of research. For example, when asked to describe his story of becoming a researcher, Participant X described his undergraduate educational experiences which gave him “a real perspective on the importance of failure”. His description of learning about scientific research began from failed courses, before he discovered a discipline he was interested in pursuing. Participant X’s inclusion of life experiences that may not seem directly relevant to his research, but which inform his personal character and identity, as part of his description of becoming a researcher, align with Brew’s connections between the journey view of research and personal growth (2001, p. 279). Participant X also frequently focused on his participation in grants and research projects, publications, and dissemination of research in patterns which connected to Brew’s trading model. In some ways this seemed to be reflected in his discussion of the course and teaching research. For example, while describing the misconceptions students may hold when entering the course, he said: The idea of the hierarchy of different disciplines, and whether arts or sciences is better or harder or whatever, I find that very frustrating. You know, because, in the end, we’re all publishing, that’s the highest level. It looks the same. In this example Participant X viewed publication as the normative manifestation of research activity, across disciplines, and brought that standard of determining what activities make one a researcher or what makes a discipline valid into his description of a more developed or accurate view of research he hopes students will attain. He also said that “dissemination of the stuff you do is important” although “dissemination can be a small group of people”. While Participant X spoke about publishing elsewhere, and raised publication and peer review processes as important components of the Case 3 curriculum where students learn about research, his statement that discussions “sharing even with some faculty or mentees or whatever” is sufficient suggests that 79 the act of sharing research discoveries to any audience and forming connections is his priority. This view of research as social is well aligned with Brew’s (2001) trading perspective of research. Participant Y, similarly, described relationships to others as a key aspect of her experience as a researcher. While describing her background she mentioned labs where she was trained, and research groups she consults with. This progression was delivered as a personal narrative, but unlike Participant X, Participant Y didn’t focus on her personal growth within that story. When describing the scientific research community Participant Y focused on all of the individuals within a research group or lab, including undergraduate research assistants and volunteers. This contrasts with other participants, who focused mainly on researchers interacting with one another through shared results or publications. For Participant Y “everyone kind of matters within that realm or within that how that work gets done” in a research community. Participant Y also spoke about her preference for the scholarship of teaching and learning research community over her prior experiences with disciplinary science research, because “you can definitely feel supported”. In her view “all of us are there to apply certain practices in our teaching, not just about publishing the next big paper or getting the next big grant, or whatever, so, the kind of goals are slightly different”. Participant Y’s focus in her description of research and justification for her preferred community align with Brew’s (2001) trading view of research. This also seems to resonate well with her goal within Case 3 for students to understand that “science is a real human endeavor”. Participant Y’s view of the research community seemed to impact the description of how she wished for students to view research. 80 Participant Z said her “thoughts on research are more retrospective” because she was “in a teaching stream position”. Unlike some other participants in a teaching-focused faculty role, Participant Z’s position prioritized administrative and leadership responsibilities, and she was not actively involved in research around teaching. In her view, as someone whose existing role didn’t include research, she did not necessarily identify as a researcher. This differed from other participants, who actively pursued research either in the natural sciences or the scholarship of teaching and learning. Reflecting on her past experiences with science research, Participant Z said that her “motivations were more sort of exploring knowledge about biology and I guess trying to generate new knowledge rather than trying to develop some product or some sort of medical treatment or anything like that”. This brief statement could be associated with Brew’s (2001) layer view of research. Like Participant Y, Participant Z identified a scientific research community as “the lab that I was working with or in labs with the institution that we were collaborating with”. However, Participant Z specifically said that she was aware “people sort of also talk about the broader research community, you know people who they meet at conferences and so on, but for me I guess it was more about collaborations in research, people who I actually physically worked with”. Unlike Participant Y, Participant Z did not describe a broader research community where she found connection or felt supported. Participant Z’s description of her research collaborators as a community seemed to have a connection with her teaching of Case 3. She said that “we’re really trying to stress teamwork and collaboration in this course”, emphasizing to students that collaboration is “something that you have to do to be a scientist”. Participant Z said that “the expectation of participation and of group work” was the main aspect of the course that “reflects my experience of research”. Participant Z’s focus on local collaboration and disregard of a broader scientific community may not align precisely with 81 Brew’s (2001) description of a trading view of research, but it seemed to be important for her teaching in Case 3. 3.3.2.3 Assumptions about Students Two different groups of students enroll in Case 3, as the course is offered in two different contexts. Students enrolled in mainstream undergraduate programs majoring in science may select Case 3 as an elective course, possibly serving as an alternative to a required communications or writing course that is not focused on science. Participants mentioned that the role of Case 3 as meeting program requirements has varied over time. These elective sections of the course are separate from an iteration of Case 3 that is offered as a required component of a specialized program for first-year international students majoring in a science discipline, with insufficient English-language scores to enter their program of study directly. Participant X, who taught Case 3 within the specialized program, said of the students, “they’re not really that different”. In his perspective, while the program was exclusively composed of international students, “the amount of international students in regular [institution] classes, it’s really not that different […] there are a lot more students from China in the classes, but that, honestly, it’s like that everywhere”. Here Participant X seemed to consider the number of international students, or even specifically Chinese students, in mainstream courses within the institution so high that he did not consider the specialized program of exclusively international students to be significantly different. Despite his insistence that the students are similar to those in mainstream courses, Participant X did identify some unique features of working in the specialized program. He noted that “it is very challenging for science students who are ESL to be in a language-heavy class”, 82 making it difficult to convince students to talk within the classroom. He also identified that “their attendance is almost impeccable”, “they are really overworked”, and “there’s a little bit of higher incidence of cheating”. The later point, Participant X attributed to two factors, which included the mentioned aspect of overwork and to difficulty hiding cheating because of language skills. Participant X believed that “international students get caught cheating”, which is different from international students cheating more frequently than other students. The contrast between Participant X’s insistence that students in the specialized program were no different than other students and the differences that he identified suggests a defensiveness on behalf of the students, especially in consideration of his statement that the “arts faculty had this huge trauma that ‘Ohhh, international students cheat’”. Participant X constructed a view of his students in opposition to what he perceived as an existing negative view of international students within the institution or within higher education faculty. However, in his references to techniques he used in the classroom to encourage students to participate and speak, or his descriptions of confrontations with students caught cheating, it seems clear that he took the observed differences between students into account in his teaching practice in Case 3. Participant Z, who has taught both cohorts of students in Case 3, identified the different groups of students as having different motivations for enrolling in the course. Describing the mainstream students who select Case 3 as an elective course, she said “by and large they’re quite motivated” and they select the course because, as a science-focused communications course, it “could enhance their degree program” in comparison to other communications courses. In comparison when she described the students in the specialized program she said “they’re not necessarily motivated to take the course, they’re just motivated to study computer science or something like 83 that, and then they have to do this”. The lack of choice is a difference she noted as significant when comparing the students, although she did refer to both groups as “motivated” in certain ways. Participant Z also noted that certain conversations may proceed differently depending on the group of students in the course. For example, when discussing how research is funded, she said that students from China may have an expectation that the government would “decide what research gets funded”. She said that “there’s these cultural differences, with, attitudes towards the purpose of science” and the role of the government, but “in terms of explaining how science is done to them, not much difference”. Much like Participant X, Participant Z described some differences between the groups of students but described the differences as not significant or not changing the messaging of the class, in terms of teaching scientific research. In contrast to Participants X and Z, Participant Y had only taught Case 3 in its iteration as an elective course for mainstream students. While she said that the students are “always a very, kind of diverse group, but engaged group”, she also said that “it’s hard to sort of categorize them and describe them in one swoop”. Compared to students in other first-year courses, Participant Y mentioned a “difference in scale”, where her other experience was with class sizes of 280 to 310 students, while Case 3 classes are capped at 25 students. Other than this difference in class size, Participant Y said the students were “I don’t know, similar, I would say”. While she observed that “they all tend to be really focused on getting high grades”, she viewed this as a factor for students across the institution, who were a “product of probably what high school experiences have cultivated for them”. While Participant Y had some assumptions and concerns about how students focus on numerical grades and achievements, she didn’t characterize students in Case 3 as unique in this aspect. 84 In terms of students achieving future connections to the scientific research community, participants in Case 3 varied in how they described their expectations. When asked if students from Case 3 will go on to be part of the scientific research community, Participant X responded, “Yes, in fact in many cases know that they are already”. He mentioned a former student “producing research right now”, doing an honours thesis with one of his colleagues. Participant Y was less confident in the outcomes for students in Case 3, and said that “it’d be interesting to know whether a higher percentage of students that take [Case 3] end up doing directed studies in their fourth years or go on to master’s program or whatever”. However, she also said: I do think that it does spark an interest, and in fact, I’ve had several [Case 3] students get interested in volunteering in a lab and I’ve actually helped them get positions with folks that I know, and I do know several of my students from previous [Case 3] classes that I’ve taught are now in grad school. Despite slightly more hesitant language about students’ futures, Participant Y was also able to identify examples of students progressing towards joining the scientific research community. Her phrasing that Case 3 “sparks an interest” suggests that she believes completing the course may be causal factor in students pursuing scientific research, which extends beyond Participant X’s experience-based answer. In contrast, Participant Z was more hesitant than Participant Y. She said: I’ve never actually studied the degree outcomes for these students but I would say, I would guess that more of them might be interested in a research career compared to people who opt for an English course, but that’s just my impression. 85 While Participant Z only offered an impression, and did not identify any examples of students pursuing research, she also said: “I expect them to sort of use scientific research in whatever it is they end up doing”. As an example, she said that students may become physicians who would take research into account when prescribing medications. While Participant Z was uncertain about students becoming scientific researchers, for her “as long as they end up in a career that’s tangential to science” the understanding of scientific research gained in Case 3 will be useful. Collectively, the participants in Case 3 view the students as likely to have some connection to scientific research in their future, although their conceptions of what that may look like and what the cause may be seem to vary. 3.4 Cross-Case Analysis 3.4.1 Teaching Research The contexts of the three cases studied are highly varied. Case 1 and Case 3 both represent courses where teaching students about scientific research is an explicit component of the curriculum. Within Case 2, research is not explicitly a component of the course, but participants described implicitly teaching students an approach to problem-solving which could apply across different disciplinary and research contexts. While participants in Case 2 differed in their perceptions of whether teaching this problem-solving approach was in fact a practice of teaching students about scientific research, participants in Case 1 and Case 3 used very different language from those Case 2 instructors to describe the conception of scientific research they aimed for students to understand. Across Case 1 and Case 3 the instructors referred to ambiguity, 86 uncertainty, a lack of “truth”, and research as a human endeavor impacted by bias. This contrast suggests that research is constructed differently by instructors depending on whether that construction or the teaching of research is explicit or implicit in the course curriculum. While Case 1 and Case 3 both include scientific research in their explicit curriculum, they are highly programmatically different. Case 1 is a specialized program consisting of multiple courses across different scientific disciplines. Case 3 is a single multi-section scientific communications course, offered as an elective and as a component within a specialized program for international students entering the institution as science majors. Despite these differences, the understanding of scientific research that the instructors aimed for students to hold was highly similar. This suggests that, when faculty explicitly teach first year science students about scientific research, they intend to convey a singular or at least similar construction of scientific research in this broad context. The variations in the forms of Case 1 and Case 3 suggest that this construction of research may be embedded into and adapted to many different institutional instructional contexts, given that those contexts include teaching scientific research is an explicit aspect of the curriculum. Across Cases 1, 2, and 3, instructors referred to several different teaching techniques that they identified as impacting students’ understandings of scientific research. Participants in all three cases described challenging students’ prior understandings of concepts or of research through in-class questions or activities where misconceptions or instincts may lead them to choose incorrect answers. Participants in Case 1 and Case 3 mentioned using specific cases from scientific literature in their teaching. Participants O in Case 2 described a video project that he described as 87 connected to students learning about scientific research. While participants in other cases did not describe similar projects, the project may have touched on similar connections to specific cases or publications from the scientific literature. Participants in all three cases also mentioned referring to their own research in their teaching. Across the cases and different contexts, including both those where research was explicitly part of the curriculum and when it was not, the participants associated similar teaching techniques with teaching scientific research. The cause of this common association of certain teaching techniques with teaching research is not clear within the findings of this study. The association may originate from similar training, from a shared instructional culture at an institutional level, or even a shared culture of instruction within science teaching in higher education. Participants from all three of the cases in this study described the adjustment to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic as not impacting the ways in which research was addressed within the courses. Participants spoke about changes to methods of student participation in class or necessary logistical adjustments to materials and activities. However, they did not consider the pandemic as impacting teaching of research, outside of possible COVID-19 examples included in their class materials. Across the three cases, none of the participants spoke about the topics of Indigenization of teaching or of research, or of colonial histories of education or of research. The institution where this study was conducted has several publicly available documents, plans, and resources related to Indigenization of the institution and of teaching, and the participants’ silence on this issue was surprising in contrast. While some participants addressed students’ nations of origin and cultural 88 backgrounds, there were no mentions of Indigenous students, or of how participants from different geographical origins may grapple with local or contextualized understandings of scientific research. 3.4.2 Assumptions about Teaching, Research, and Students Participants across the three cases described teaching and their roles as teachers with language that could align with several of the teaching perspectives described by Pratt (2005). However, across all three cases instructors most frequently aligned with the developmental perspective of teaching. This aligns with Pratt’s statement that “within North America this perspective is the most prevalent view of teaching and learning in any curriculum or program concerned with critical thinking and problem-based learning” (p. 235). Under this perspective, teachers account for students’ past knowledge in a subject and lead them to develop more complex ways of thinking. Collected findings from the case suggest that this is the dominant view of teaching and learning across all three cases. Case 1 and Case 2 both involve disciplinary content outcomes as an explicit component of the course, while Case 3 is a communications course. In this context it is not surprising that participants from Cases 1 and 2 described time pressures, transmission of content, and teaching students specific problem-solving methods. Participants from Case 3 did not address these components, which could be expected given the differing context and designated outcomes of the course. The emphasis placed on these aspects by participants from Case 2 was more notable than those in Case 1. Based on statements from the participants these differences could be attributed 89 to Case 2’s context as a multi-section course with a large number of students enrolled. Participants from Case 2 saw these factors as contributing to time pressures. Taken together, these statements suggest that participants with disciplinary content-based outcomes for their courses find that these outcomes make it more difficult to allocate time or priority within the course for explicitly teaching about scientific research. It is interesting to note that instructors mentioned these factors within Case 1, where scientific research is an explicit outcome of the course. This may suggest that outcomes around disciplinary content are assumed to have more weight or priority by instructors, even within the context of a specialized research-focused program. Participant N in Case 2 and Participant Z in Case 3 both spoke about labs as the most suitable place for students to learn about research. It is not clear what similarities these participants might have which would bring them into alignment with this concept. It is possible this is simply a view unrelated to the context of their cases which they agree upon. However, it does show an alignment between at least two participants in holding an assumption about how research should be taught to undergraduate students, which corresponds to Healey’s (2005a) endorsement of research-based teaching. Participants across the three cases described their own research in varied ways that aligned with different perspectives from Brew’s (2001) model of faculty conceptions of research. For most participants, their perspective of their own research did not seem to impact the way they described teaching research to students, or the way in which they hoped first-year students would understand research. Participants descriptions of teaching techniques which highlight scientific 90 research were common across participants and cases. Participant descriptions of how students should understand scientific research within each case aligned more closely with whether research was an explicit learning outcome in the course than with any participant’s description of their own research processes or experiences. Unlike the participants’ research views, the participants’ perspectives on the scientific research community had some interaction with their teaching. For example, some participants who conduct research in the area of scholarship of teaching and learning, and who also spoke about including examples from their experiences with research in their teaching, mentioned addressing either interdisciplinary research or disciplinary differences in research using these examples within their classes. Additionally, Participant I in Case 1 and Participant Z in Case 3 both mentioned utilizing group work in their teaching as a practice arising from highly collaborative experiences of research within their disciplines. Participants expressing these views, mainly within Case 1 and 3, drew on their experiences interacting with other researchers as inspiration in their teaching practices, which suggests a goal of preparing students to enter the research community. Participants in each case expressed some hesitancy to predict student futures, but also within each case they mentioned that at least some students are likely to participate in the scientific research community in the future. The confidence of participants in Case 1 and Case 3 was stronger, and they provided some reasoning behind these statements. In contradistinction, participants in Case 2 seemed more inclined to consider it an inevitable aspect of teaching many students. Participants in Case 1 and Case 2, teaching within a disciplinary context, sometimes 91 made statements that students may end up as researchers in a different discipline from the participant. For Participant N this decreased the importance of explicitly teaching research within Case 2, and it’s possible this was an implied or unexpressed concern for other participants in a similar situation. Within Case 1 and Case 3, students voluntarily selecting a program or course where scientific research was an explicit part of the curriculum seemed to play into participants’ evaluations of whether students were likely to become part of the scientific research community, while the context of Case 2 meant that the participants did not consider this a factor in their evaluation of student futures. Participants in both Case 1 and those who taught Case 3 in its iteration as an elective course addressed an awareness that students chose to enroll in their class in their descriptions of students. They described students as engaged or enthusiastic, and otherwise largely described the students as diverse in ways equal or comparable to students in mainstream science courses. These participants did not describe, or had not considered, a source for the students’ motivation to take the course or their high levels of engagement. That is to say that the participants did not describe any factors which might make a student more likely to enroll in Case 1 or the elective version of Case 3 beyond some inherent level of engagement and enthusiasm. However, they did sometimes describe the ways in which this engagement impacted their teaching, mainly in positive ways. Participants from Case 2 also repeatedly spoke to their awareness that students enrolled in the course as a program requirement, and addressed concerns that students hated or feared the discipline they taught. This awareness impacted how the instructors taught the course, and their goals for students within the course. Participant N spoke to differences in how she might teach the course if students were majoring in Physics, while Participant O likened the 92 students in Case 2 to members of the public, at least in terms of their interest in and feelings toward the discipline. Considering the contrast between Case 2 and Cases 1 and 3, it seems that instructors’ awareness of why students enrolled in a course can have a large impact on their perception of those students, and the ways in which they design and teach the course. Participants in Case 1 and Case 3 specifically address the concepts of scientific research that students carry forward from high school as a concern and consideration in their teaching. Participants in these cases aim to correct misconceptions or address simplified and linear views which originate in students’ prior education. The perception that students are entering higher education with incorrect views and misunderstandings of the nature of scientific research was common to participants in both of these cases. This issue was not addressed by participants from Case 2. It’s not entirely clear if participants from Case 2 do not hold this assumption, or simply did not express it. Within the results of this study, it seems that this assumption is correlated with explicit teaching of research. 93 Chapter 4: Discussion and Conclusions This study examined the construction of research within three different cases of first-year university natural science courses. The findings suggest that faculty take differentiated approaches to constructing research depending on whether that construction or teaching of research is an explicit goal of the course. Within the cases where students’ understanding of scientific research was an explicit outcome of the course or program, participants described a common intended depiction of scientific research. They described teaching research in ways that included research as a human endeavor, as uncertain or ambiguous, and as susceptible to bias. They positioned this view of research in opposition to a view of science as a rigid process, or as truth or facts. In contrast, participants with no explicit goal of teaching about scientific research in Case 2 described teaching an iterative problem-solving or modeling process which was implicitly connected to the process of scientific research. The descriptions of how research is constructed in Case 2 echo some aspects of the construction of research in the other cases – namely a sense of researcher uncertainty and iterative process – but are not as rich or comprehensive. For the participants in Case 2, aspects of scientific research which are at the forefront for participants in Case 1 and Case 3 become part of the implicit or null curriculum. Based on these findings, it seems that the most significant factor impacting how faculty construct research within first-year science courses is the context of the course itself, as either emphasizing or not prioritizing research. Participants across all three cases in the study described using similar teaching methods to construct research within their courses, regardless of whether research was an explicit or implicit 94 outcome for their teaching. These similar methods included questions designed to highlight misconceptions or incorrect instinctive answers, use of the scientific literature in teaching, and inclusion of instructor research in teaching. Participant descriptions of teaching and learning across all three cases also largely aligned with Pratt’s (1998) developmental perspective of teaching. This alignment across different case contexts suggests that common perspectives on teaching lead to common teaching methods or practices, and specifically to similar perceptions of what types of activities most effectively teach students about scientific research. As previously suggested, the similar perspectives on teaching across participants could be attributed to similar training, institutional instructional culture, or a factor as broad as instructional culture within science teaching in higher education. This study intentionally centred what Jenkins and Healey (2009) term research-oriented teaching, where the research process is the subject of teaching and students are members of an audience, rather than active participants in research. The common approaches highlighted as specific to teaching research by multiple participants suggest that a set of specific teaching practices may be commonly considered suitable for research-oriented by teaching faculty in natural science. This finding could have implications for design of future studies which aim to directly study research-oriented teaching practices. Participants in the study holding a common developmental teaching perspective also gestures towards a possible gap that could be explored in future research. Namely, what teaching practices are used by faculty who hold differing teaching perspectives, including an apprenticeship teaching perspective? Brew (2003) presented a model of the scientific community where students were inducted into research communities of practice, and where “what researchers understand research and scholarship to be are key influences in how we conceptualise the nature of student learning” (p. 95 12). In contrast, within this study the ways in which participants described their own research and induction into the scientific research community, which sometimes aligned with Brew's (2001) models of research views held by faculty, largely did not converge with participants descriptions of how they aimed for students to understand scientific research. Despite many study participants readily describing students as future participants in the scientific community, there was a disconnect between their description of their individual understandings of research and their intended teaching of research. That said, participant descriptions specifically of the scientific community did seem to impact their teaching or construction of research. For example, participants with interdisciplinary research experience valued interdisciplinarity in teaching, and participants who viewed the research community as highly collaborative valued or prioritized group work within their teaching. This suggests that, in some ways, participants may be bringing students into a community of practice (Brew, 2003) and enculturating students (Langemeyer, 2019) into research norms (Brady, 2017), as described in the reviewed literature. However, prior to beginning this study I anticipated that participants who were practicing enculturation would hold an apprenticeship view of teaching, as described in Pratt's (1998) framework. In contrast, most participants described views and practices of teaching that fit with a developmental view – that is, participant statements aligned with a perspective of teaching as developing new ways of thinking, with a focus on students’ prior knowledge. While some participants described adjusting their teaching practices due to their perception of norms within the scientific research community, for most participants the methods of teaching students about research involved building on prior knowledge and developing new or more complex ways of thinking. In this area the teaching practices and assumptions about teaching described by the 96 study participants did not align well with the expectations set by the literature. The study findings may suggest that enculturation and induction into a community of practice is not a good model for the construction of research for undergraduate science students. That said, Participant N in Case 2 gave contrasting descriptions of teaching research which may offer insights on this issue. When describing her teaching in an upper-year undergraduate honours course, Participant N’s statements were well-aligned with the expected apprenticeship perspective of teaching. In contrast, her described teaching in Case 2 fit more closely with the developmental perspective of teaching. Participant N’s descriptions of her teaching goals and teaching perspective in terms of teaching scientific research adjusted for students in different years of study. This study specifically focuses on first-year undergraduate teaching, while much of the reviewed literature around the teaching-research nexus is not limited specifically to first-year students. Participant N differentiating between how she taught research to undergraduate students in different years of study suggests that the view of research that participants aim for students to hold within the cases in this study is potentially unique to first-year undergraduate science courses. This may also explain or align with the similar descriptions from participants in Case 1 and Case 3 of how they aimed for students to understand research, despite teaching in highly varied instructional contexts within the institution, and despite describing their own research practices in highly varied ways. The construction of research described by participants may be an early step in a larger process of enculturation to the research community, and to an eventual view of research more similar to the ones held by participants themselves. 97 Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) model of the research-teaching nexus locates the teaching of research along two axes: students’ roles within the teaching environment, either as audience or as participants, and the focus of teaching, either upon content or research processes. The findings of this study suggest that another important axis to consider in the model may be a variable of time along students’ educational journey. This study’s findings have focused on first-year teaching, limiting the findings to a small amount of time within the period of undergraduate study. One area for further research on the research-teaching nexus, especially that arising from Jenkins and Healey’s model, may be to elucidate stages of developing conceptions of research as constructed by faculty across different years or stages in undergraduate curriculums. Further nuance may also be uncovered by examining different instructional contexts which constitute first-year science courses, to determine whether intended constructions of research are described by faculty in ways which resonate with those seen in this study. As previously mentioned, the context of the cases studied had an important impact on how research was constructed. This was seen in participant descriptions of time pressure related to course disciplinary content outcomes, class sizes, multi-section courses, and students’ status as non-majors for the course discipline. Participants identified these factors as barriers to explicitly or more extensively including scientific research in their teaching. Several of these identified barriers suggests an assumption by participants that teaching first-year undergraduate students about scientific research is not a high priority within the undergraduate science curriculum. Specifically, the identification of disciplinary content as a barrier to teaching research brings this issue to the forefront. While this assumption seemed to be most impactful in Case 2, which was a course within the “mainstream” program with no explicit course outcome around research, 98 statements from participants in Case 1 about the importance of teaching disciplinary content and accountability to sequenced disciplinary courses demonstrate that this assumption can also hold weight within specialized, research-focused programs. Despite the explicit prioritization of teaching research within Case 1, the impetus to cover disciplinary content was an important consideration and a tension for the participants. The pressure to deprioritize teaching research when faced with disciplinary content outcomes and administrative factors stands in contrast to an assumption shared by participants in Case 1 and Case 3. Participants in these cases, where teaching research is an explicit component of the curriculum, described first-year science students as entering higher education institutions holding misconceptions or misunderstandings about the nature of scientific research. They assumed that students learned about scientific research in high school in a way that they viewed as inaccurate and simple, conceptualized through a rigid scientific process which resulted in truths or facts. This assumption echoes Huet's (2018) finding that faculty don't believe students understand research, as well as Murdoch-Eaton et al.'s (2010) description of students as not having a clear understanding of scientific research. The participants who spoke about these student misconceptions were instructors in cases where they explicitly teach students about science research, and they were able to counter these misconceptions in their teaching. However, even for participants in Case 1 the pressure to cover disciplinary content was notable enough for several participants to mention it in the study. This suggests that in courses where teaching research is less emphasized or not an explicit outcome, the assumption that students enter higher education with misconceptions about scientific research is neglected or disregarded due to the assumption that disciplinary content knowledge takes priority over teaching scientific research. 99 Some participants within this study expressed assumptions about how research can be taught most effectively which aligned with Healey’s (2005a) assertion that students "gain most benefit from research when they are actively involved" (p. 187), or when they are participants in a teaching situation where the research process is emphasized. This is termed research-based learning by Jenkins & Healey (2009). For example, Participants N and Z described lab courses or assignments as the most suitable place for students to learn about research, as they would be participating in the research process directly. Participant K also spoke about the research-based component of Case 1, where students conduct an original research project, as a key point where students learn about scientific research within the program “through kind of applying themselves, with the scientific methods themselves”. He described statements in student reflections where they shared thoughts about the nature of science throughout the assignment and said that “these projects that they do really seem to have a really strong influence on how they view science”. However, Participant K’s statements about the value of the research project came in the context of the full Case 1 program, where: The whole first term they've been learning a lot about scientific research of course through their various classes, they've been learning about the scientific process, they've been learning about you know what it means to be a scientist, how does scientific research work, they've got some little bit of experience by this point kind of looking at some scientific research articles, so they know the general process that scientists go through when they're conducting a research project. While Participant K’s perspective that students benefit from undergraduate research experiences echoes findings from research described in the literature review (e.g. Seymore et al., 2004; 100 Lopatto 2004; Lopatto 2007), in the specific context of Case 1 the students have been primed to understand research through research-oriented teaching, where the students serve as audience while research processes are the focus of teaching. Within the context of this study it is not possible to know exactly how that research-oriented teaching prior to participating in a research impacted the effectiveness of the research-based experience. However, given the above-mentioned statements from study participants about students entering the institution with misconceptions about research, and Linn et al.’s (2015) observation that undergraduate research experiences can reinforce misconceptions, it is possible that the research-oriented teaching in Case 1 prevents those misconceptions from being reinforced. That is to say, explicit teaching about the nature and processes of research prior to students actively participating in research may make that participation more effective as a learning activity. Future research with a more direct comparative design could serve to identify any specific impacts of research-oriented teaching prior to research-based teaching. The need for future research into any interactions between research-oriented and research-based teaching could have important implications for undergraduate science curriculum and program design. The study findings suggest that students may not encounter explicit research-oriented learning in mainstream undergraduate science programs. Most significantly, Case 1 and Case 3 where teaching research is an explicit component of the courses are available to students only through specialized programs or as elective courses which students must intentionally self-select to attend. In contrast Case 2, which is a required course for some programs, includes teaching of research only implicitly. Further, Participant Z from Case 3 directly described her assumption that between first and second year, students in mainstream science programs would have 101 explicitly learned about scientific research processes through a lab course. However, she also held the expectation that they would only learn about scientific research effectively in labs where students developed the experiments themselves, which may not account for all undergraduate lab courses or activities. Participant Z also mentioned that lab courses were disrupted by COVID-19, suggesting that similar disruptions or alterations to a typical course sequence may deprive students of research-oriented learning, or of any direct instruction around science research. The implication of this statement, along with the findings uncovered within this study, is that the misconceptions around scientific research which students hold upon entering higher education may not consistently be addressed within mainstream science programs. Participants did not identify specific factors which led to students participating in Case 1 or the elective format of Case 3, beyond high levels of engagement or motivation. The participants described students in these cases as being diverse in academic background, academic achievement, and geographic origin. Within the institution’s Faculty of Science, students may self-select into courses which explicitly teach research, such as Case 1 or Case 3, or they may implicitly learn problem-solving methods which are adjacent to the scientific research process in courses like Case 2. This study did not directly investigate students enrolled in the cases, and thus it is not clear which factors may lead students to choose between these different paths, encountering explicit or implicit constructions of scientific research. However, Participant N’s description of herself as not having “a family history in academia”, and specifically her positioning this as an explanation for why she learned about research “really late”, offers one possible explanation. Students who are the first generation in their family to attend postsecondary education may not be aware enough of scientific research to self-select into the 102 programs or courses where it would be explicitly taught. While it is beyond the scope of this study to speculate further about factors leading to student enrollment choices, this could be examined further in a future study. The differentiation between explicit and implicit teaching of research potentially creates inequalities in students’ access to understanding scientific research across the variety of programs and curricular pathways within the institution. If it is true that students who do not receive research-oriented teaching are more likely to have misconceptions about research reinforced through research-based teaching in undergraduate research experiences, as theorized above, then the differences in research construction across courses observed in this study could impact students’ long-term understandings of scientific research. It is important that further research examine the extent to which research-oriented teaching impacts student outcomes from undergraduate research experiences, and future engagement with scientific research more broadly. Beyond the areas for further study discussed above, many important aspects of constructing or teaching scientific research were not examined in this study due to its limited scope. For example, this study did not directly discuss the impact of the geographic location of the institution studied, the diverse community connections which may exist therein, or the impact of the colonial history of either the location or of educational institutions more broadly. This study and the participants within did not address the ways in which scientific research or the teaching of scientific research could be decolonized or Indigenized, or how faculty involved in these projects might “do more listening to Indigenous voices” (Marker & Hardman, 2020, p. 295). 103 While this study examined the construction of scientific research as presently described by faculty, the faculty were silent on this important topic. This demonstrates the importance of making Indigenization an explicit theme within research in higher education. Researchers must make this a priority, especially in studies where this may indicate whether instructional faculty are making Indigenization a priority within their teaching and research. Conclusions cannot be drawn about the cases in this study, as the topic was not directly addressed within the research. Further studies should consider this limitation carefully. Several years have passed since I began this study, and my own position relative to the research-teaching nexus has changed since I conceived of my research questions. Prior to beginning this study, I worked as an academic science librarian, but my current job title is “Instructional Services Librarian”. In my work on a Chinese campus of an American liberal arts college I spend much of my time constructing “academic research” for first-year students who have not yet declared their discipline of study. In this particular curricular and programmatic situation, all students encounter a construction of research through common “core” courses, although the emphasis and construction may vary depending on differing instructors. However, unlike the cases examined in this study, the students’ introduction to academic research at my current institution are not necessarily grounded in a particular discipline or field of study, or if they are, the discipline may be misaligned with students’ future areas of study. This raises further questions for me, about the value of grounding early exposure or construction of research in disciplinary perspectives, and which curricular situation may be most fruitful for supporting students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Jenkins and Healey’s (2009) model of the research-teaching nexus was developed to apply across disciplines, but research processes and practices 104 are not discipline neutral. I wonder, if an additional axis around time or educational progression is added to the model, is there a point when constructions of “research” may be discipline-neutral, and a point when they must be grounded in a certain field of study? 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Case study research and applications: Design and methods. (6th ed.). Sage. 109 Appendices Appendix A Semi-Structured Interview Guide About the Semi-Structured Interview All interviews will be conducted in a semi-structured and informal conversational style. In this guide, a list of topics to be covered in the interview is given. This list is derived from the conceptual framework and research questions of the study. These topics will not be stated directly to the interviewee; the interviewer will guide the conversation toward these topics using or adapting suggested questions. The interviewer will follow up on interviewee responses to the introductory questions to encourage elaboration, using prompts such as: • Could you say something more about that? • Could you please clarify that? • Can you think of an example? • What do you mean by (key term)? • Is there an experience that helped you see things this way? • Has there been a time when that didn’t work as you expected? • What does that look like in your (work/teaching/classroom)? Additional topics or questions specific to the case (course or program) will be added to the interview questions for individual participants based on initial examination of course-related documents submitted prior to the interview. 110 Interviewer Opening: As you know, I’m studying how faculty describe and represent the idea of scientific research to students who are new to academia. In this study I’m talking to faculty involved in a multi-section lecture course and a specialized program for first-year science students. In this interview I’ll be asking about your perspectives on research and teaching, and your work on [course or program title]. Do you have any questions about the research topic before we begin? Topics to Cover Suggested Questions Participant’s conception of scientific research • Can you tell me a bit about your own research? • In your perspective, what does it mean to be part of the scientific research community? • Can you tell me your story of learning about scientific research and becoming a researcher? Participant’s perspectives of teaching • What do you see as your goal or purpose in teaching? • How would you describe the learning process? • How would you describe your role as a teacher, in the process of students learning about scientific research? • How have your experiences with scientific research informed your teaching? 111 Inclusion of research in teaching the course/program • What do you see as the main learning outcomes for [course or program title]? • What would be the ideal way for students in this (course/program) to think about scientific research? • How have your experiences with scientific research influenced the design of the syllabus? • What are some of the teaching techniques you use to include scientific research in the (course/program)? • Are there assignments or activities that you include in the (course/program) to help students understand scientific research? Assumptions about students in course/program • Can you tell me about the students who enroll in [course or program title]? • What considerations regarding students have you taken into account when deciding how to include scientific research in the (course/program) design? • Do you expect that the students enrolled in [course or program title] will be part of the scientific research community in the future? • Has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted how you include scientific research in the (course/program)?
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Educational Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Graduate
Mazawi, André Elias
An exploration of how science faculty construct “scientific research” in first year undergraduate teaching
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