Variable Responses to Uncertainty in an Undergraduate Biology Lab: A Case Study

• In Event: 69.019 - Examining Uncertainty as a Construct for Promoting Meaningful Scientific Engagement

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore whether and how students choose to engage with uncertainty in science. We present a case study of an undergraduate student, Alice, exploring the factors that explain her variable responses to uncertainty—engagement or dismissal—in an introductory biology course.

We conducted three interviews with Alice ranging from twenty minutes to an hour at the start, middle, and end of the semester. The interview protocol was designed to elicit students’ reflections on the purpose of the labs as well as their level of interest and engagement. In our analysis, we searched for where Alice located uncertainty in the course and the ways in which she chose to respond to it. For each instance, we identified factors that appeared relevant to her negotiation of uncertainty, and found commonalities and differences across them. We then chose two episodes for comparison: one in which Alice productively engaged with uncertainty, and one in which she chose to avoid it.

In the first episode, Alice encountered data that conflicted with itself and with her expectations of the phenomenon under consideration—the relative fitness of C3 and C4 plants in a high CO2, drought environment. Alice chose to take up this uncertainty. She conducted independent research and identified mechanisms that might explain the data. Ultimately she proposed her own theory. We attribute this engagement to Alice’s 1) sense of agency in framing the investigation as pursuing whichever comparison made the most sense to her, 2) interest in the subject matter as related to the real world consequences of climate change, and 3) confidence in her understanding of relevant mechanisms that she learned in lecture.

In the second episode, Alice again encountered uncertainty in how to interpret the results from her experiment regarding the oviposition strategies of female bean beetles. This time Alice chose not to engage with the uncertainty. Instead, she “just put something together and handed it in,” using what she considered to be a flawed experimental design to dismiss any uncertainty. We attribute this disengagement to Alice’s 1) weaker sense of agency—students had proposed and voted on possible experimental designs, and hers was not chosen, 2) lack of interest—Alice didn’t see the lab as posing an interesting question, and 3) lack of intellectual resources due to a divergence between the lab and lecture.

This case helps support research that suggests that students do not have a singular response to uncertainty (Jordan, 2015). Rather, whether and how they engage with surprising, anomalous or confusing events will depend on interactions between student agency (including space for novel ideas), relevant intellectual resources, and motivation and interest. Instructors will need to attend and respond to these factors when introducing uncertainty, to ensure that students feel confident in their ability to approach an uncertain problem and feel like they have permission to do so on their own.

Authors

• Robert Hayes, Tufts University

• Julia Svoboda Gouvea, Tufts University

• Aditi Wagh, Tufts University

• Matthew Simon, Tufts University