Quantification of Qualitative Data

Reading: Libarkin, Kurdziel, & Anderson 2007 College Student Conceptions of Geological Time and the Disconnect Between Ordering and Scale. J. Geoscience Ed 55(5) November

In this study Libarkin and co. continue their work on learning about how students learn. And importantly, learning what the students don't learn. They use questions from the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) to evaluate a range of students from a range of colleges. One pretty neat thing they did was to give the students complete a timeline. The timeline had Earth Forms at the bottom and today at the top. They were asked to put in the following events in order and record the time that those events occurred:

1. First Life on Earth
2. Appearance of the Dinosaurs
3. Disappearance of the Dinosaurs
4. Appearance of Man

Most students did pretty good on the sequence of events, only a few did crazy things like have dinosaurs appear, then Man, then dinosaurs disappear. They did OK on getting the dates in. Nearly all students failed to get the scale correct, even when given the timeline on graph paper. They'd do things like have dinosaurs appear and die out in the middle of the time line, have humans appear way too far down the time line, etc. Interesting enough of a result on its own.

But then Libarkin et al went a step further and mapped the timeline results to a Ternary diagram.

A Ternary Diagram is basically a chart, like any data you can chart you find out the x-axis value, the y-axis value and plot a point where they intersect. Here, instead of two axes, there are three and they cross each other. The diagram itself looks like a triangle, the axes run through the corners of the triangle. The other neat thing about a Ternary diagram is that the three axes need to all sum together to make a whole, so a Timeline naturally lends itself to this sort of analysis.

The authors set out to plot each student's timeline on the Ternary Diagram. They determined the percentage of the total timeline for three intervals:

1. Earth Forms - First Life
2. First Life - Man
3. Man - Today

Each of these intervals make up an axis in the diagram (well, technically the percentage of the whole that each interval is makes up an axis). So now every student timeline has a value for each axis and can be plotted on the diagram. This allows the student timelines to be compared and analysed further. Typically, in geology, Ternary Diagrams are used to represent phases: phases of minerals, types of sediment, etc. A geological Ternary diagram will usually have several areas mapped out on it that correspond to, say, K-feldspar, or biogenic ooze, depending on the diagram. Here the authors feel that they've discerned a few 'phases' of student concepts. The creationist students tend to plot together, the students in an "Honors Natural History Field Course" mark out a phase, and between lies a wide space where other students fall into.

Fortunately, the point that represents reality, the scientific concensus on the issue, falls within the same 'phase' as the Honors Students. BUT, the Honors students phase is really large. Their answers aren't ALL over the place, they don't cross into Young Earth Creationist (YEC) territory, but a helluva lot of them are just completely wrong.

It might be better to think of the diagram as having three phases, a small circular phase around the correct answer, meaning that there is an agreed upon answer, and some error is allowed for amoung students. A second YEC phase, just like in the paper, and a third phase, everything else. Viewed that way, you can see that the Honors students DO NOT cluster in the "Correct" phase. The smallest spread (but also a very small sample size) is from "Students in a small elite private University in the Northeast (and they were enrolled in a gen ed bio coure)", and following that, to me it looks like a "Large State University in the SouthWest". So you might think that small elite Universities are faring better in their geoscience education, except that he "Honors College, Natural Science Field Course" students were from a "Large State University in the East".

As far as demographics go, they were typical of what I've seen in geoscience courses (keeping in mind that these weren't all students from geoscience courses in the first place), that is to say, a buncha white kids. Couple of other ethnicities represented, but no black students. Thats probably another issue best examined at another time.

I don't know if this is standard practice in the social sciences either but in the demographic section, one student abstained from reporting their ethnicity, and was counted as a Caucasian. For some reason I find that humorous; is it expected that non-whites will always fillout demographic information, or is it expected that only white people wouldn't bother to do it (or is that the same thing)?

By the way, most of the above blather about the procedure and results is distilled into its essence in the paper as:

"The timeline distance between three pairs of events, normalized to the sum of these distances, generates a ternary diagram from which conceptual zoning can be identified."

I think that the Lacodaemeons would've loved scientific writing.

Library Shitstorm

Apparently there is much internet-drama in the world of Libraries and Librarians. Many of the librarians actually have a name for their world of Library-related blogs, the biblioblogosphere, that's cute. The problem seems to have started more or less when a 'big shot' librarian at a Canadian University said that, 'rather than hire new Librarians to replace those retiring and others that will be forced out, we're going to replace them with PhDs and the like. No more librarians at the library'. This drove the biblioblogosphere berserk.

On the one hand, this sounds fine, replace people that specialize in whatever librarians do with subject matter experts. But there's such an uproar amoung the 'glasses on a chain' crowd, that I have to wonder, have I not been making use of my librarians? The librarians I've had contact with are great people, they are helpful. At Adelphi, one of the librarians actually met with our class, all pro-active like, and distributed a book-let she had written on using the library for science research, and also included proper citation methods. I still have it, it's useful. The librarians at Kingsborough are also really good, I usually have my students do a research project, and I insist that they learn to use the library databases, rather than google, for their research. One of the librarians there meets with my class, usually for two sessions, showing them how to use the database, how to come up with a research project, rather than just making up some idea and 'googling' it.

But clearly that sort of thing doesn't require a Master's in Library Science, so why insist on Librarians?

I don't know why, so I think I need to find out what else the librarians can be doing for me.

Pre-Grad School

I'll be starting in the CUNY Grad Center's PhD Program in Earth & Environmental Sciences this fall. I need to sort some things out before that. I've already been through a Master's degree program before, at Adelphi University; the MS was through their Biology Department where I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Beth Christensen on paleoclimate-paleoceanography. So on the one hand I have some idea of what Graduate School is like, keeping in mind that a PhD program is going to be different. I know I do good work in a lab and do good research and that I have some trouble writing up that research; I never published my Masters as a separate article in a journal, but I have done poster presentations on my subject matter, and I've done an oral presentation at an AGU conference. Clearly the big hurdle I need to make it over here is actually submitting and publishing in a journal.

I've done research, and I've applied for and obtain small grants, and I was also lucky enough to be responsible for equipment purchasing on a big grant where I work. But I haven't obtained and administered a big grant on my own. That involves a lot of paperwork and management, its not the sort of thing that you normally think about as being associated with doing science. Business, sure, that can be expected, but you tend to think of the work of science being spent either looking down a microscope or pouring over research papers; if a spreadsheet's involved its for tabulating data, not doing accounting. I'm expecting to see lots more of that as grad school progresses; I'll need to obtain funding just for taking credits/tuition, if that's doable, or maybe I can get a fellowship or some sort of grant for doing research while at school. I don't actually expect much 'support' in that sense from the program. In some ways, they shouldn't be providing that sort of support, students need to develop those skills, and sink or swim is a way to do that.

So I understand that scientists spend a lot of time doing things other than science. How much, I can't really say. I'd hope that the program can help make that clearer, but its not what we usually think of the doctorate curricula are.

Just finished reading Klein and Edgar's "The Dawn of Human Culture" (2002). The crux of the book is that there is a gap between the appearance of anatomically modern humans and the appearance of fully human behavior. The authors suggest that anatomy, at least the type of anatomy detectable in the fossil record, does not account for human behavior but rather language does; it was the acquisition of language after anatomy that allowed humans to create new behaviors and build up human culture. Prior to that, human culture, whether among Neanderthals, erectus, or even Homo sapiens, was very limited, extremely un-inventive, and almost exclusively utilitarian; no art, decorations, etc.

The book is short, and the actual presentation of the core argument is very short. Most of the book reads like a review of the human-like fossils that are out there and the earliest 'stone industries'. The focus is sometimes on Africa, sometimes on Europe, rarely on the rest of the world. And then mostly on Indonesia. The authors excuse this focus on the grounds that there aren't many remains from elsewhere to work with, noting that this is laregley because the focus has been on Europe (by Europeans) and Africa (by Europeans, as part of the African Origins idea). The review seems excellent to me, but they really don't spend much time on their own ideas vis-a-vis language and their putative "dawn of human culture".

The authors also don't care much for a lot of things in paleontology. Relationships between hominid fossils aren't important, behavior is what they care about. Dating-techniques would be more important, if only they weren't so prone to hard-to-correct-for-error. Relationships and time are usually the foundations of a paleontological study, so I was surprised to see this. Its not that the authors reject dating-technology, its not that they don't discuss relationships, its just that they don't really figure into their interpretation of the history all that much.

The authors also don't discuss human genetics very much. To be clear, they do discuss it, but its only import for them is that it supports the out of Africa hypothesis. It doesn't add anything to the timing of human migrations out of Africa, it doesn't help in looking at the spread of humans once out of Africa, it uninformative on the behavior of Neanderthals and erectus, and it doesn't help us to look at the spread of culture once it develops. Human 'paleo-genetics' certainly can inform of about all these things, but the authors don't seem concerned with any of it. True enough, the book was written in 2002, but thats hardly the Dark Ages.

As far as their hypothesis, it ends up falling rather flat. On the one hand, they make a very good case that there is a gap between anatomy and behavior, and it requires a special explanation. But their explanation is simply that fully developed language would appear quickly, undetectably, and that it would necessarily result in the development of culture, art, drawing, complex society, etc.

They don't offer anything in the way of how language developed. They mention that some people have a 'defective' gene, and because of this they have trouble processing language, but are otherwise intelligent. So we're left to conclude that they believe human culture is the result of one or two, maybe a few, new genes 'for language'. They require us to assume that culture comes after language, and that language is the necessary and sufficient ingredient for culture.

For those reasons, this book was disappointing, that is to say it disappointed me on those topics. On others, it was quite satisfying. The review of the actual fossils that have been collected was great, and the review of the earliest stone cultures/industries was also great, they make the book well worth the read.