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Record W4221136380 · doi:10.5430/ijhe.v11n5p39

To Tidy or not When Teaching R Skills in Biology Classes

2022· article· en· W4221136380 on OpenAlex
Andrew J. Martin

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Higher Education · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicGenetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSyntaxCurriculumMathematics educationCoding (social sciences)Computer sciencePsychologyPedagogyArtificial intelligenceMathematicsStatistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

An essential skill for STEM undergraduates is the ability to understand the world by manipulating, visualizing, and analyzing data to make or evaluate claims. Current online debate, without peer-reviewed literature, explores which of two common R syntax environments (base R or tidyverse) is best for teaching novice R users. In an in-person undergraduate course on evolutionary biology, we implemented two coding curricula: one using base R (n = 49 students) and the other using tidyverse (n = 58 students). We compared these two curricula using several dimensions of student success: interpretation of syntax, creation of appropriate data visualizations and analyses, and an absence of sex bias in performance. A linear model revealed prior experience had the largest estimated effect, followed by syntax environment; sex had the smallest effect. Pedagogical approaches that ensure students have repeated opportunities for practice and that implement techniques to overcome student frustration and anxiety are likely more important than syntax environment when learning coding in biology classes. Furthermore, the small effect of sex combined with the high proportion of females in the biological sciences suggests introducing computer programming in biology may allow females to discover interest and ability that they may not have had if computer programming was the sole propriety of computer science departments.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.667
Threshold uncertainty score0.510

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.379
Teacher spread0.362 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it