Electronic Portfolio The University of Pennsylvania's Science Teacher Institute Master of Integrated Science Education Program

Application of Scientific Concepts – The participant has grown in the ability to apply concepts and scientific principles to practical problems and/or real-world situations.

Related Course: BIOL 501 - PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Being able to make sound decisions about real-world situations is a responsibility that we entrust to many of our politicians and local leaders. In both of our education courses we discussed the topic of being "scientifically literate", loosely meaning to be aware of, and to have the ability to read and understand science issues and concerns.  It would be beneficial for our decision-makers to be scientifically literate because sometimes it is necessary to understand and apply scientific principles to solve problems.  In this piece of evidence, I got to experience a small taste of what it is like to be a politician who had to use science to help make a decision. This assignment was given to us in our Biology course; we had to address a real-world problem, the Avian Flu,  and decide if the United States should stockpile vaccines against this flu strand. 

I chose to include this in my portfolio because it shows a real-world application of science. In order to make a decision about stockpiling it was necessary to understand viruses, vaccines, and this flu strand. These were things that we learned in our Biology course so it was a very relevant assignment. I had to be able to read and understand scientific literature on the topic. It was very interesting and challenging because it was a real-world problem that was current and genuine. I had not been faced with a situation like this before, where I had to rely on science to make a decision about a hot topic like the Avian Flu. This was especially difficult for me because I am not a great decision maker.

I was able to take away a few valuable lessons from this assignment that I can carry on to my classroom. First of all, this gave me an understanding of the difficulty involved in combining politics and science. I always knew that those two entities worked together, but this thought became a reality for me. I do not think this aspect of science would have been made more clear to me in another way. I know that this happened because this assignment was an excellent example of an authentic assessment. In our education course we studied and developed authentic assessments and learned how much more effective this is than paper and pencil tests. Having done this assignment, I got to appreciate the value of this form of assessment, and am much more anxious to implement real-world applications with my students.


Related Course: ENVS 685 - ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Another piece of evidence I wanted to include for this rubric category is the synthesis of a scientific article that my classmate and I did in our Environmental class. We read a scientific article about the effects of herbivorous mammals that were brought into Australia by humans. Our job was to read, understand, and synthesize the information that the author stated, and then report this out to our classmates. This was an extremely difficult task for us because there was so much vocabulary to weed through in order to make sense of the main points within the article. We worked together and presented the findings of this article in a PowerPoint. We gained an understanding of the difference between peer-reviewed scientific literature and articles written for the general public.

This was a task that was so much harder than I would have ever imagined. The jargon related to the subject matter posed so much of a challenge that it became frustrating. I feel that this was an important experience for me because I was able to able to feel what some of my students feel when they do assignments. It is often hard for me to relate to their struggles because most things came easy to me when I was young. Reading scientific literature is no easy task, but is something that must be done in order to produce scientifically literate citizens. Having experienced what I think was the worst, I think I am better prepared to help my students when it is time for them to have to read similarly difficult scientific literature.

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