Feeling stuck creating your Data Nugget? Here are some of our favorite resources to help you get started.

• Powerpoint Slides from our Data Nugget Workshops: Making your own Data Nugget

• Adapting Your Research into Inquiry-Based Lessons for Public Outreach in High School Classrooms: an Answer to the Calls to Action 

• E.O. Wilson (2002) The Power of Story. The American Educator

• D.T. Willingham The Privileged Status of Narrative

• The Essence of Storytelling – The Green Ninja (video and lesson)

• Randy Olson TED Talk – The And, But, Therefore of Storytelling

• Berger and Milkman (2012) What Makes Online Content Viral?  Journal of Marketing Research. Vol XLIX:192-205

• Strode (2015) Hypothesis Generation in Biology: A Science Teaching Challenge & Potential Solution. The American Biology Teacher, 77(7): 500-506.

• Berger and Milkman (2012) What Makes Online Content Viral?  Journal of Marketing Research. Vol XLIX:192-205

Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? this article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. the results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. these results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured). experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation induced. taken together, these findings shed light on why people share content and how to design more effective viral marketing campaigns. 

• Randy Olson TED Talk – The And, But, Therefore of Storytelling

In order to help students better tell their stories, we invited Dreamworks Story artist Jeff Biancalana to come give a talk about story structure. Jeff’s talk was part of a Green Ninja/BAESI workshop titled Climate Change, Scientific Storytelling, and the Green Ninja. 

• D.T. Willingham The Privileged Status of Story, from "Ask the Cognitive Scientist"

• E.O. Wilson (2002) The Power of Story. The American Educator

• To make a Data Nugget based on your own data, download the experimental data Template and look over the items necessary to create one. Text in red must be provided by the researcher, along with images of the research being conducted, a table of data, and graphs or figures of the data.

• To submit your Data Nugget for review, fill out our Google spreadsheet or email the completed Microsoft Word template to eschultheis@gmail.com. You will hear back from us shortly with comments and edits if necessary.

• We have developed a new template, specifically for observational data, that can be downloaded here. This template provides students with background information and an observational dataset, and then challenges them to develop their own questions, hypotheses, and experimental design. This template is a perfect fit for citizen science and long-term datasets!

Adapting Your Research into Inquiry-Based Lessons for Public Outreach in High School Classrooms: an Answer to the Calls to Action

Powerpoint slides from our recent workshops detailing how to make your own Data Nugget.

BioQUEST’s 30th celebration tonight has me thinking of you all.  I would so love to be there tonight —I frequently think of you, Ethel.  I am also thinking of our dear friend Patti Soderbergh and wish she was around to be part of the celebrations.

At any rate, I hope you have a good celebration tonight—you have a lot to be proud of in that consortium.

I went to my first BioQUEST workshop in 1991.  As for many people, it was a transforming experience.  The three p's became, and remain, important elements in my teaching.  I also made a number of very good friends that year, Ethel Stanley among them.  I wish I could be there to celebrate this anniversary.  It is a wonderful tribute to its nurturers that it is still such a vibrant organization. 

Back in the early days, in 1989-1991, I had the pleasure of working in BioQUEST with the brilliant, wonderful and irrepressible Patti Soderberg.  BioQUEST was a small operation, Patti and I wore more hats than I can count, from coffee maker to workshop facilitator.  On the fateful day that we needed to come up with an official titles to satisfy some long forgotten piece of official business, we decided that we each wanted our title to be BioQUEST Co-Empress.  And so we decreed. 

Those were exciting days, BioQUEST was small, computers were huge, and simulations were rudimentary.  Nils Pearson developed a hypercard stack—a series of digital pages (black and white, of course) that would link from one to another in the order that the user desired!  So rather than in a linear fashion, the user could explore according to their own interests!  The content was actually pretty sophisticated conceptually, but, well, let’s say the hypercard stack has been surpassed technologically!

But central for me was the incredible mentorship provided me by John Jungck in those years.  When I first came to Beloit in 1989 I was barely older than the Beloit College students I was teaching.  And John Jungck was an incredible mentor as I sorted out my career paths, professional passions, gifts, talents, and growing edges.  I have no question that the following 25 years that I have spent in science education reform pushing for engaged, active, user-directed, constructivist, discovery-oriented science education, (and feel free to add any more adjectives form the last decades of science education reform), I have no doubt that my efforts were fundamentally molded by BioQUEST broadly and John specifically.  To John, my deep gratitude.

I came back and rejoined the fold in 2000-2005 and then I was greeted by another great mind and force of spirit in Ethel Stanley.  Wow, Ethel taught me a lot about ways to think, move through and be in the world.  Another formative relationship. Ethel, you never cease to amaze!

There were many more wonderful and inspiring people who have made up BioQUEST, too many to name.  It was always a challenge to describe to people what BioQUEST was, but really it is not complicated.  BioQUEST has always been, first and foremost, a community of inspired, passionate, bright people, with creative visions, who are committed to making a difference in science and education.  And while substantial “products” have certainly been developed, always the people are where it has started.  So, to all the BioQUEST people, long-timers and new, thank-you for carrying on the vision.

A blog about teaching introductory statistics with simulation-based inference

A national organization whose mission is to support the advancement of undergraduate statistics education.

The xkcd package provides a set of functions for plotting data in a XKCD style using ggplot2.

The original scientific paper annotated with additional resources for students

Report Title: Rapid evolution of a native species following invasion by a congener

Authors: Y. E. Stuart, T. S. Campbell, P. A. Hohenlohe, R. G. Reynolds, L. J. Revell, J. B. Losos.

Publication Date: 24 October 2014

Reference: Vol 346, Issue 6208, pp. 463-466

DOI: 10.1126/science.125700

Here is the Khan Academy 3rd derivative video:

The goal of the final project is for each student to have the time and space to investigate a topic of interest to them, and to apply mathematical thinking and tools germane to the course to that topic.

You may work in a group or share a project topic with another course.  This will allow your investigation to be more thorough.   You must use the tools of the course to address the topic at hand.  This may be through a novel idea or data set that you would like to model or you may take an established and published project and reproduce a portion of the results.

1. Please communicate with me regularly about your project idea.  

2. Once you have informal approval, then begin searching for literature that will serve to provide context for both the research question and the mathematical tools.

3. Form a research question and write a proposal.  

• This proposal will be due Wednesday, April 16th along with a short presentation to the class..  

• Provide a working title, abstract, and the names of any partners or any other class with which you are doing the research.  

• Cite at least 5 peer-reviewed resources (books and journal articles) both in a references section as well as incorporated into an introduction.  It may help you to organize your thoughts to add a summary of some important quotes from each article after each reference in the literature cited section.  The introduction must provide context and motivation for your research question.  

• The research question must be very clear, with one or two sentences of how you intend to address it.  The scope of your project should reflect whether you are investigating individually or with others, whether you are using as a joint projected with other courses, etc. and will be scaled in expectations accordingly.  

• Declare by what method you will formally present your results (poster or oral/ppt).

• NOTE: If you are either a math minor or an honors student, I expect that you will use Matlab as a tool investigating your research question.

4. Once the proposal is approved, work on the final project.  You are expected to have both formal oral and written presentation of results.  We will reserve class time for practicing the oral presentation, but you should submit your abstract as soon as it is approved to student conference (write it at the level of Calc I students).  The formal research paper will be in lab report style like the other reports in class.  This is an opportunity to present (to me) in-depth evidence of your work, your methods, and the context in which it is interpreted.

5. The exposition of the work must encompass:

• title (a rephrasing of the research question)

• introduction (contextual motivation for the research question)

• methods (a description about the mathematical tools used)

• results (the results derived from the use of the mathematical tools)

• discussion (an interpretation of the results and their significance)

• literature cited

6. All components of the final project will be due by the final exam period.

Here is a video on ODE's:

This project applies a lot of integration techniques:

Using the mathematics discussed in class: finding average value of a function with probabilistic inputs.  You are to come up with an extension to the wind the wind turbine problem done in class.  You may either find wind data for a new site or find a new power curve .  Or you might look for data for other kinds of energy production.  Weighted functions are not unique to power generation though.  The average of any function, f, with probabilistic input , pdf p, is

A=-f(x)(x)dx.

http://t.co/MCz9LEKf has a quick summary of weighted functions in computing energy as a result of wind power generation.  Here is our data from the activity from class. More info

If input cannot be found as a probability, (if the area under the input curve is not 1), then w(t) is a weight, and we calculate the average as

A=abf(x)w(x)dxabw(x)dx.

MIT Open Course has a tutorial on general weighted functions with a “non-power” related application.  Other applications can be found in center of mass and mean phenotype as a result of artificial selection.

You may work in groups to research your idea if you have a partner with similar interests, but each person must write their own report with their own scientific questions.  Your idea with some preliminary background research is due as a ppt next class.  If you are working in a group, each member’s subproject should be clear.  The class will discuss and critique and the each member will write his/her scope of work as a lab report due the Wednesday after break.  

Category                                                   Points  

HW Part & Action plan                                 13% (10 points)

(Present in ppt form to class Wed before break, needs references, detailed data)    

Lab report draft due Sunday (to peer) Wednesday after break            20% (12 points)

    Peer review feedback due Friday, Plan for revision due Sunday        17% (8 points)

Lab report, due following Friday                         50% (30 points)

Background Research                      

Distribution Curve                  To fit a distribution curve, you may need this JMP tutorial        

Power Curve                            For these curves, you may need this JMP tutorial                 

Calculation                                              

    Meaning and significance   

The lab research report will be graded using the Center for Biodiversity Research report rubric.

Lab Report Format   Lab Report Rubric   Lab Report Common Mistakes