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1. Writing for Identity? Exploring the Motivation of Pre-College Students to Participate in Science Publication

   Sarah C. Fankhauser (March 2024, National Association for Research in Science Teaching)

   In a typical science class, communication exercises may include a variety of outputs including lab reports, posters, reflective writing, or research proposals. However, a growing number of students are engaging in more complex and professional communication endeavors, including scientific publication. The chance to write a research paper and experience the peer-review and publication processes may provide students the opportunity to integrate several practices from the Next Generation Science Standards, as well as share their research in a more public setting. Although we have some limited understanding in terms of the outcomes that students experience when engaging in peer-review and publication of their science research papers, we have no information or data regarding why students want to participate in these processes. As such, the purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations of pre-college students to pursue peer-review and publication of their scientific research papers. Using the theory of science identity to analyze the data, I found that students view publication as a mechanism to grow their scientific skills and be recognized as a scientist. The findings suggest that providing students the opportunity to share their research in more public settings could be a factor in developing their science identity. 

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2. Reading, receiving, revising: A case study on the relationship between peer review and revision in writing-to-learn

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2024.100808  

   Finkenstaedt-Quinn, Solaire A; Watts, Field M; Shultz, Ginger V (January 2024, Assessing Writing)

   East, Martin; Slomp, David (Ed.)

   Studies examining peer review demonstrate that students can learn from giving feedback to and receiving feedback from their peers, especially when they utilize information gained from the review process to revise. However, much of the research on peer review is situated within the literature regarding how students learn to write. With an increasing use of writing-to-learn in STEM classrooms, it is important to study how students engage in peer review for these types of writing assignments. This study sought to better understand how peer review and revision can support student learning for writing-to-learn specifically, using the lenses of cognitive perspectives of writing and engagement with written corrective feedback. Using a case study approach, we provide a detailed analysis of six students’ written artifacts in response to a writing-to-learn assignment that incorporated peer review and revision implemented in an organic chemistry course. Students demonstrated a range in the types of revisions they made and the extent to which the peer review process informed their revisions. Additionally, students exhibited surface, midlevel, and active engagement with the peer review and revision process. Considering the different engagement levels can inform how we frame peer review to students when using it as an instructional practice. 

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3. “Adding Stuff From Other People”: How Peer Comparison Influences Conceptual Modeling in Precollege Engineering Contexts

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36529  

   Stenger, Katelyn; Chiu, Jennifer; Fick, Sarah (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   Conceptual models serve as both as a design artifact and an object that communicates understanding about underlying systems. As such, conceptual modeling is considered as a crucial component of engineering design. Peer comparison and critique can help students develop conceptual models, yet little research explores how peer comparison activities can support conceptual model development in engineering settings. Therefore, we investigate why and how fifth-grade students made changes to their conceptual models after a peer comparison during a 4-week engineering design curriculum unit focused on water runoff at their school. Data sources included students’ conceptual models before and after the peer comparison, field notes, and student interviews after the peer comparison. To understand how students described their conceptual models and why any changes may have occurred, we interviewed twelve students and coded these interview transcripts at the utterance level. Results show that peer comparison activities can increase conceptual model quality. Further, peer comparison contributes to a diverse set of additional representations in students’ conceptual models. The study suggests peer comparisons of conceptual modeling may support students in realizing their peers are a great source of information, a critical realization to support positive engineering design experiences in K-12 and higher education. 

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4. How Can Educators Exchange High-Quality Feedback with Various Forms of Evidence of Practice?: An Analysis of Afterschool Educator Professional Growth Through Noticing

   https://doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2025.2466289  

   Cian, Heidi; Kastelein, Kate (February 2025, Journal of Science Teacher Education)

   While youth derive much of their science learning and appreciation outside of the formal science classroom, educators in afterschool and other out-of-school time (OST) settings have received relatively little investment in their professional learning. One exception is ACRES, a program that provides professional learning modules for OST educators in STEM facilitation skills, including Asking Purposeful Questions. Educators who participate in these facilitation modules exchange feedback with one another in response to the evidence of practice they bring to the professional learning setting. Due to the diverse nature of OST settings and the unique demands OST educators experience in their work, the type of evidence of practice participants bring to these sessions varies. Using a framework of teacher noticing, we explore how peer feedback in Asking Purposeful Questions modules differentiates across these diverse forms of evidence, as well as how differential feedback aligns with outcomes the coaches of Asking Purposeful Questions modules hope to see realized. We explore common forms of evidence educators experience in these cohorts, including video of contrived practice; authentic video with youth; professionally produced videos the coaches provide; and lesson descriptions. We find that, while all forms of evidence elicit noticing and associated feedback exchange supporting the module’s desired outcomes, each may be expected to exhibit specific strengths and limitations. We suggest that coaches may build upon these features to direct educators’ noticing to aspects of the evidence that may be particularly fruitful for learning. 

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5. Limits of Private Learning with Access to Public Data

   Alon, N.; Bassily, R.; and Moran, S. (October 2019, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   We consider learning problems where the training set consists of two types of examples: private and public. The goal is to design a learning algorithm that satisfies differential privacy only with respect to the private examples. This setting interpolates between private learning (where private) and classical learning (where all examples are public). We study the limits of learning in this setting in terms of private and public sample complexities. We show that any hypothesis class of VC-dimension d can be agnostically learned up to an excess error of α using only (roughly) d/α public examples and d/α2 private labeled examples. This result holds even when the public examples are unlabeled. This gives a quadratic improvement over the standard d/α2 upper bound on the public sample complexity (where private examples can be ignored altogether if the public examples are labeled). Furthermore, we give a nearly matching lower bound, which we prove via a generic reduction from this setting to the one of private learning without public data. 

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