Overcome inertia and publish your science education scholarship

For those of us who have been publishing research manuscripts for decades, it is relatively easy to make the transition to publishing a study or innovation in a science education journal. However, for junior science faculty, a foray into science education can be intimidating. There are few resources available to help junior faculty with the preparation of manuscripts [1, 2], and some are specific to other disciplines [3, 4]. Traditionally, the art of writing a manuscript for publication has been learned through an apprenticeship in research, but junior faculty may lack the confidence to initiate scholarship and submit a manuscript in the area of science education. The following is a dialog developed by a junior and senior instructor to explore the causes for inertia in developing and publishing science education scholarship. The intent is to stimulate more instructors to share the results of their innovations in journals such as BAMBED. How do I write a single author publication as a newcomer in the field? My past experience has been with multiple authors that contribute different expertise to the paper and who also participate in the many rounds of editing the paper. Usually only well established investigators write single author publications. For many junior faculty, this is a valid cause of inertia. They have worked as a graduate student or post doc with a senior professor who did not let them go very far in the wrong direction. You may have had writing a good manuscript and a submission letter modeled for you, but you did not have a chance to do it wrong and learn from the experience. This would be like learning to ride a bicycle and never suffering a fall. The key to overcoming a fear of doing it alone is to find a mentor, which every junior faculty member should have anyway. Find someone who knows the culture of your institution, with whom you feel comfortable, and who is willing to invest their time in you. When you have an idea for a project that could lead to a publication, share an outline with your mentor and talk over the project. Let them know what has already been published in this area and what journal you are thinking might be appropriate. Get their advice at the outset and communicate with them regularly. An additional tactic might be to find someone at your institution already active in science education scholarship and start to work with them. If you are at a small institution, you might look for someone at a neighboring university, or start attending the annual ASBMB meeting and networking with other faculty attending the education sessions. How much time should I anticipate for writing a single author paper? As for research, the writing time is very small relative to planning and conducting the study. Because most education is on an annual cycle, it is a bit like agricultural research. Agronomists plan for the next season, plant, cultivate, maintain proper fertilizer and water, harvest, determine yield, and analyze the data. If you intend research on student learning in classes, this will follow a similar cycle. Are education papers segmented into the usual introduction, material and methods, results and conclusion sections? What types of data are included in the material and methods sections? Are education papers usually similar in length to research publications? In some ways, there is no difference. Manuscripts in both arenas need to be original and significant. Without these two requisites, there is no justification for an editor to agree to publish your manuscript. Both types of manuscripts include a literature review to place the work in context and make it clear that the work is original and cites previous work upon which it builds. However, with a scientific research publication, there is as much emphasis on the details of your methods and their citation as on the results of the work. Also, many biochemists and molecular biologists are accustomed to quantitative data, whereas data used to document educational improvement is often affective data (measurement of feelings and emotions) on student response to the change in what was done. Positive increases in student affective response can be directly linked to increased student motivation and learning, but it is a type of data most of us have not previously used. A second difference from research publications, which focus on new understanding, is that education publications focus on learning. Do not confuse learning with teaching; our efforts should be focused on facilitating learning and not facilitating teaching. Also be aware that some learning situations promote “cognitive bulimia” [5] in which students study for an examination and then forget the material; think about long-term learning. Length is an important consideration. The paper should be long enough to provide an adequate description of the pertinent literature and how the study was conducted. Some authors like to combine what constitute the results and discussion of a research manuscript, whereas some like to keep them separate. The important thing is to provide an adequate description of your contribution, but also keep it interesting. In addition, most journals have only a limited number of pages that they can publish per year, so you may be asked to condense a manuscript that is not sufficiently concise. I recommend that you examine four or five science education journals and note what sort of articles they publish, the amount of assessment expected for studies, and the style format. Suggestions in addition to BAMBED would be American Biology Teacher, Journal of Chemical Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Natural Resource and Life Science Education, or International Journal of Science Education. I teach particular courses once a year or every other year. How can I obtain repeats of introducing a new learning experience if that class meets only once a year? Can one semester provide enough data to show that a significant new learning experience occurred? Since I have only one section of some of the courses I teach, how can I have the appropriate controls for testing teaching or learning effectiveness? In addition, some of my classes are small, but lend themselves to innovating teaching. How many students constitute a valid group for showing effective changes in teaching and learning? Your questions indicate that you have a narrow sense of what sort of education project or scholarship can result in a publication. Start by reading the Instructions to Authors (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jabout/112782101/ForAuthors.html) to see what sorts of publications are being solicited for BAMBED. Some manuscripts are not about classroom pedagogy that transforms learning but can be an improved laboratory exercise, and the instructions for publishing laboratory exercises are detailed at the above-mentioned web site. Then, take a look at the last several issues of BAMBED (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jtoc/112782101/) to get a sense for the diversity of the scholarship that is reported. Think about your specific situation in terms of courses and students. Is there something that is not working well that could be improved? Can you think of a way to do that in a scholarly manner? Can you look backwards and find a group for comparison? For example, suppose that you ask the school Records office to provide an anonymous comparison for student grades in organic chemistry and general biochemistry for the past 3 years. Is there a correlation? One hypothesis would be that students having a poor knowledge of organic chemistry are ill-prepared for biochemistry. You could work with a faculty member in the Chemistry Department to develop an on-line module of the important concepts in organic chemistry that relate to learning biochemistry. Then, after offering the module to students for two semesters, ask the Records office to supply the equivalent data for those two classes. These data may show if the module is impacting performance in the biochemistry class. This could work equally well for a class of 20 or 200 students. Another option, if you teach/are involved in teaching multiple sections of a course, would be to try implementing changes in some sections and use the other sections as a “control.” The potential problem with this is that it would be difficult to carry this out as a true double blind study in which the instructors do not know about the treatment and do not have a stake in the outcome. It is well known in social science research that treatments can result in “Hawthorne effects” because of the attention the instructor or observer pays to the study subjects [6]. Another complication is using different instructional personnel. I have observed sections of the same laboratory class with different teaching assistants resulting in very different average grades on laboratory reports and laboratory practical exams. These differences usually correlate with end-of-term student evaluations of the teaching assistants. I teach both service courses and courses specific for our majors. Are there limitations in the interest of the journal to one type of course? Except for professional schools, most biochemistry classes contain students with a variety of majors. The profession is interested and is providing good training in biochemistry for all students. How can I report on a new learning experience in a course that is team taught and has very different styles of teaching involved? Team teaching can be a problem if it is really “turn teaching.” If you are really functioning as a team, my suggestion would be to try to get the other instructor intellectually engaged in the proposed scholarship. If the other instructor is not interested in educational scholarship and is a senior faculty member, it might be better to look for an opportunity in another class in which you have more control. This is my first time introducing new teaching methods and reporting on those in the literature. Although I have seen a few papers on changes in the classroom and laboratory, how do I access the larger pool of education literature? The simple answer is that you need to learn to use different mechanisms to search the literature. Most of us have become used to looking for relevant manuscripts and reviews in scientific search engines such as PubMed. Some of us have tried search engines such as Google Scholar. However, in looking for germane literature for this paper, we searched “science education publishing” and found no results on PubMed and 1.5 million results on Google Scholar (Table I). Similar to how your institutional library houses the science journals in a different section from the journals on science education, you will need to turn to a different search engine. The major search engine for educational resources is the Education Resources Information Center <http://www.eric.ed.gov/>. Searching the above string on ERIC produced 1,529 results. It quickly became apparent that we were identifying many references to publishing companies, so we further refined the search to “science education publish” and narrowed the field to a manageable number of results. In searching through these engines, we found at least six that were relevant and were able to obtain copies from the library or interlibrary loan. I am finding it difficult to design an appropriate evaluation, or assessment, of the effectiveness of student learning. Are student questionnaires and self evaluation an appropriate evaluation of the effectiveness of the teaching innovation? Do I need student questionnaires and self-evaluation from a similar course that was taught in the traditional way? Is evaluation of the knowledge students are able to demonstrate an effective assessment of learning and teaching, and does this have to be compared to a variety of teaching methods? To greatly simplify, let us assume that there are two types of assessments. One samples student response to the modification or change. This is measuring an affective response—how the students responded to the change. These are often done in a Likert scale in which students can choose responses to statements on a scale that ranges from strongly disagree to strongly agree. If you want to use this method, it is suggested that you consult with someone in an Education program to help develop the statements so that they are linked to dynamics that impact learning. For example, “I liked the organic chemistry module that was available for this course” does not really relate to learning, whereas “the organic chemistry module helped me to understand electron movement in enzyme reaction mechanisms” does relate to the student's perception of their learning. Another type of assessment measures student performance. For example, you may want to track progress in students' ability to answer essay questions about enzyme reaction mechanisms. A starting point is to have an understanding of the different cognitive levels of student understanding that would be the basis for the differences you expect to measure. The most commonly used framework is Bloom's Taxonomy [7]. Many web sites have a listing of words used in questions that indicate the level in Bloom's Taxonomy for a particular question. The next component is to develop a grading rubric [8]. A rubric is a matrix using definition of criteria used in assessment and definition of different levels of accomplishment within each criterion. Development of a good rubric is neither trivial nor intuitive, but worth the effort. This underused, but very helpful tool will form the basis for your assessment of the student's ability to answer the question and the level of understanding that they have of the subject. With a rubric in place, you have a standard that permits peer reviewers to understand how you measured learning and would permit other instructors to replicate you methods. As a new, pretenure faculty member, I feel that attention to teaching could reflect negatively on my tenure decision. How can I obtain the authority to include improving my teaching and reporting on those advances in my position? This is a good question, but difficult to answer. The pressure to produce research grants and publications has been perceived to have a negative impact on the instructional improvement [9, 10]. The acceptance of educational research as authentic scholarship varies from department to department and from institution to institution. Again, a good solution is to find a senior faculty member who understands the culture as a mentor. Also, this is a topic that you should explicitly address during your annual interview with your Department Chair. If you really want to do educational research as a significant component of your scholarship, you should try applying for funding. When a grant proposal is signed by your Department Chair and Dean, it provides a justification for spending a portion of your time on educational activities. My previous experience in publishing papers has included laboratory colleagues that provide internal review and editing of the manuscript. How do I find an appropriate person to help edit and review my education manuscript? Even if my fellow faculty members are willing to read my paper, do they have the broader knowledge to effectively comment on the significance and assessment of learning that I describe? Again, this will greatly depend on the size of your institution. In a small college setting, you may have no colleague interested in science education scholarship. If this is the case, you will have to spend some energy networking at other institutions or at scientific meetings. At a larger university, you may have several appropriate mentors who can provide assistance, but you may still want to network with colleagues at other institutions, including local colleges. Colleagues without specific expertise are still useful in that they read the manuscript with fresh eyes and have a generalized expectation for the form and content of a scientific manuscript. Is Institutional Review Board approval necessary? You will need to ask your institution's IRB (also called an Ethics Review Board or Ethical Research Committee). At our institution, any data collected from students, even if anonymous, that is maintained or published must have IRB approval. How much time do you have? The demands for securing research funding and producing research results are variable. Make sure you understand the research expectations before you engage in significant science education scholarship. How much can you do without funding? Funding can provide some degree of teaching release or student helpers for the research. Also, funding for educational scholarship provides authority to spend that time. However, implementing changes not based on technology and implementing assessment by surveys can be a low cost approach to educational scholarship. What is the most common mistake in preparing a manuscript? Not following the journal style. Look at the Instructions to Authors and follow the directions, especially the format for the References. Failure to follow the journal style creates a bad impression during the review process. What happens after I submit the manuscript? Reviewers will provide feedback, usually within a month. Editors make a decision based on reviewers comments but may send the manuscript to additional reviewers for additional opinions. Some degree of advocacy may be appropriate. For example, if reviewers are divided, editors often reject the manuscript, anticipating that an author of a solid study will resubmit with a manuscript that addresses the reviewers' comments and concerns.

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