Do you own the
rights to your DNA?
While varied, all the previous claim evidence reasoning assessments have been written. To provide an alternate modality, I planned a class debate on the topic:
Do you own the rights to your DNA? Preparation: Argumentation is similarly a core practice of scientists, and McNeill and Krajcik (2006) define it as “a verbal and social activity aimed at justifying or defending a standpoint for an audience” (p. 2). For the debate, I split the class into two debate groups. I gave both groups the following article about how DNA is used in research. For the first group I gave them an additional article about Henrietta Lacks, a women who’s cells were taken from her for research purposes. And the second group an additional article about the Supreme Court case on the breast cancer gene patent. I wanted to give students both a historical case and a more recent Supreme Court Case. I structured the debate by having group one go first, and each person in group two assess a partner in group one’s use of claim, evidence, and reasoning during the debate. To prepare, I had everyone identify evidence from both sides of the argument and then randomly assorted them on to their sides during class. Part of my purpose in assigning the sides was to challenge students to argue against a side they might believe in. As mentioned previously, Zimmerman (2007) found that separating beliefs from evidence to be a challenging skill. Debate Structure:
|
Zimmerman (2007) found that separating beliefs
from evidence to be a challenging skill. Artifact 10: Video of Students DNA Debate
I found that during the debate the students used evidence from the articles I provided them and from their background learned in class (such as exons and introns, DNA replication, and Transcription). While re-watching students’ rebuttal and closing remarks from one of the debates, I found that students closing statements were similar to their rebuttal, in that they were still mainly discussing the evidence from the article. This is where more reasoning could be used to tie the evidence presented during the debate back to their claim. In the future, I will be more explicit about how closing remarks should be structured in future debates.
From students’ peer assessments using the base explanation rubric, I found that the 40 students, ranked their ability to use claims at 2.9, evidence at 2.6, and reasoning at 2.6 out of 3. This claim and evidence scores were similar to my assessment of students during the zebrafish lab discussion. The average reasoning score is higher then I found over previous assignments. However, students have assessed themselves in a similar pattern that McNeill and Krajcik (2006) observed which is that students’ evidence and reasoning scores are lower compared to their claim scores (p. 14)
|
Artifact 12: Sample Peer Assessments from DNA Debate