Responsive and Responsible Use of Digital Resources for Research
Green shapleyfinal11
1.
2.
3. Teaching with a Visual Tree of
Life
• Goals and Context
• Methods
• Findings and Recommendations
4. Teaching with a Visual Tree of
Life
• Goals and Context
• Methods
• Findings and Recommendations
5.
6. Goals
• Understand how teachers currently teach
about the evolutionary relationships between
organisms
• Identify common teaching tasks
• Determine how future software might facilitate
those tasks
20. “This is scientific information
by scientists for scientists.”
–High school teacher
21. Valuable Educational Messages
• The Nature of Science: Alternatives and Evidence
• Misconceptions Abound: Tree-thinking takes training
• An appreciation for Biodiversity: The Wow! Button
• A Biological Index to Information
22. Valuable Educational Messages
• The Nature of Science: Alternatives and Evidence
• Misconceptions Abound: Tree-thinking takes training
• An appreciation for Biodiversity: The Wow! Button
• A Biological Index to Information
23. Valuable Educational Messages
• The Nature of Science: Alternatives and Evidence
• Misconceptions Abound: Tree-thinking takes training
• An appreciation for Biodiversity: The Wow! Button
• A Biological Index to Information
28. Valuable Educational Messages
• The Nature of Science: Alternatives and Evidence
• Misconceptions Abound: Tree-thinking takes training
• An appreciation for Biodiversity: The Wow! Button
• A Biological Index to Information
31. “I’d like them to have an underlying feeling of
the unity of life with this marvelous diversity…
to internalize that the carrots and we are
cousins!”
–Director of zoo education program
33. Valuable Educational Messages
• The Nature of Science: Alternatives and Evidence
• Misconceptions Abound: Tree-thinking takes training
• An appreciation for Biodiversity: The Wow! Button
• A Biological Index to Information
34. What Makes a Visualization Usable?
• Solve the Overwhelm Factor
• Simple, Teachable Tree Views
• Connect with the Familiar: History,
Common Names and Pictures
35. What Makes a Visualization Usable?
• Solve the Overwhelm Factor
• Simple, Teachable Tree Views
• Connect with the Familiar: History,
Common Names and Pictures
36.
37.
38.
39. What Makes a Visualization Usable?
• Solve the Overwhelm Factor
• Simple, Teachable Tree Views
• Connect with the Familiar: History,
Common Names and Pictures
40.
41. Conclusion and Future Work
Involve Teachers!
• Test recommended features for learning
outcomes
• Continue user-centered design and
development
42. Our Clients
• CIPRES outreach
• Tree of Life web project
• HCIL biodiversity information visualization
• Ed experts at UCMP and University of Pittsburgh
43. A big THANK YOU!!
The CIPRES Project www.phylo.org
Advisors Nancy Van House and Brent Mishler
Our participants Cynthia Parr at HCIL Kim Rathbun
Zachary’s Pizza on Solano UCMP
This work is funded by the CIPRES project
BUILDING THE TREE OF LIFE: A National Resource for Phyloinformatics and Computational Phylogenetics
Part of the NSF Information Technology Research program
44.
45. Alternative Trees
Q: Where does Diplura go?
conservative
Shares filiform cerci and
extra sperm tubules with Insects
Shares reduced Malphigian tubules,
and compound eyes with Entognatha
46.
47.
48.
49. “This is scientific information by
scientists for scientists.”
–High school teacher
50. “I’d like them to have an underlying
feeling of the unity of life with this
marvelous diversity…to internalize that
the carrots and we are cousins!”
–Director of zoo education program
Editor's Notes
Breathe!
Intro
Thanks
For those of you whose last biology class was many years ago, the Tree of Life, as we are using the term in our presentation, refers to the evolutionary relationships between organisms, and is often represented as a branching tree.
I’d like to start out with a Brief overview of presentation
I’m going to talk about goals of our project, and the context in which it fits, and then I’ll discuss the methods
Then, Rebecca will talk about our findings and recommendations
Purpose—conduct needs assessment for the NSF CIPRES project
We were trying understand what teachers will need from an eventual web-based application
That provides access to information about the Tree of Life
CIPRES is a collaboration between computer scientists and biologists
They are creating algorithms and software to help biologists compile the incredible amount of info they’re learning about the TOL into one database
An eventual goal of CIPRES is to create a web-based application that will provide access to this information about the Tree of Life
Like many NSF-funded projects, CIPRES has an outreach effort that’s working to make sure that this info is useful and useable, not just to scientists, but also to teachers and the public
CIPRES outreach asked us to find out what teachers will need from this future web application.
Our goal then, was to understand what teachers need and make recommendations to the CIPRES project about the future web application.
To accomplish this we tried to
Understand how teachers currently teach about the evolutionary relationships between organisms
Identify common teaching tasks
Determine how future software might facilitate those tasks
Our project fits within a much larger context of work
People have been creating visual representations of the TOL for over a century—it’s a very challenging problem
Ernst Haeckel is thought to be the first person to make the analogy between the evolutionary relationships between organisms and an actual tree.
This diagram shows a common bias in these types of diagrams, placing humans prominently at the top of the tree.
This is a more contemporary diagram of the TOL recently published in Science magazine
It starts to give you a sense of the increasing complexity of the information that needs to be represented.
It suffers from a different set of problems, one of which is information overload—it’s a challenge to convey this much information in one diagram.
In addition to these types of static diagrams, much work is being done to create software that provides more interactive
Ways to view tree structured data—the future CIPRES web application falls within this realm
Next some of the methods we used to find out what teachers need
Challenges
web app doesn’t exist
Gap between what scientists know and what some teachers are able to teach
We’ll say more later
Interviews with education experts, biologists, and middle school teachers, high school, college professors of both grad and undergrad
Exploratory-comparative usability eval
Survey
These were most informative
PAUSE!
Dabbled in other methods
Focus group
Teaching observation of two TOL workshops at Jepson Herbarium
HE of existing Tree-Browsing software
The nature of our project poses a dilemma
On one hand trying to make recommendations for an app that doesn’t exist yet
On other hand, it’s much easier to evaluate something that concrete
We couldn’t really find a methodology that seemed exactly right
So we did what all good researchers do and created our own methodology
P E E C U E
That’s a blend of other methodologies.
Met with one or two teachers at a time
START! with pizza and conversation
NEXT! Formal interviews, 2 questions: How do they teach now, what is a typical task
THEN! Usability evaluation—showed teachers three existing tree-browsing applications Populated with the Tree of life data
Together we explored software and Tried to accomplish the task identified in the interview
We’re calling these E-C U E because they weren’t comparative evaluations of the traditional sort.
We weren’t trying to make detailed comparisons between the features of the applications—
We were using them instead to spark conversation of a more exploratory nature, and to see if we could identify trends and themes
FINALLY! we asked the teachers to fill out a questionnaire identical to our survey
These are screenshots from existing tree browsers we looked at with teachers.
TaxonTree from U of M
Hyperbolic tree from Green Tree of Life website
Treemap from U of M
Complex context where
Complex context with no time for new topics.
As biology changes rapidly, it is harder to cross the gap between what scientists know, and what is taught in the classroom. At the graduate level, it is often the biologists themselves doing the teaching, so the gap is the smallest. At the middle and high school level, the gap is very real. To help new biology ideas cross this gap requires three things: reform of state education standards, curriculum materials developed around examples selected from the new science information, and teacher training, … this is the context within which the future tree of life visualization application is operating, and understanding this will be critical to whether it gets used or not.
Teachers don’t teach data, students don’t learn data -
a database may be an exciting research tool for scientists and a non-starter as an educational resource.
To have an impact on biology education nationwide, the challenge for this future web application will be not just to offer itself to teachers, but to SERVE the educational context.
Serve the context by helping teachers teach what they need to teach: nature of science, biodiversity, tree-thinking.
Contrary to our expectations, teachers at all levels want to see alternative trees. Want students to know that trees are hypotheses, and learn about how scientists collect evidence to decide among them. Important theme in the science education standards.
Scientists represent evolutionary relationships with these branching diagrams…
But our work suggests students probably see the diagram more like…
Probably don’t notice all that branching stuff.
Read a series in the organisms across the top
Read time in the bottom to top axis,
And come to the wrong conclusion.
Leverage interactivity
Shake up the order organisms displayed, get rid of that arrow across the top.
Demonstrate tree-thinking, where the relationships that count. Make students look at those branches.
Leverage interactivity to help students see the top to bottom axis like biologists do.
Complexify students’ view of biodiversity by throwing in a few other groups…
As one of our interviewees put it..
Apologies that this is blurry, but we wanted to try to give you a flavor of what a Wow! Feature might help accomplish. This is the whole tree, three domains, branch lengths = genetic change. Take a look at this circle…
We sensed a significant appetite for organizing information about organisms, ecology, literature, images, all sorts of things by a biologically meaningful index, rather than the default library indexes.
But with all that info in once place, it’s overwhelming… even for experienced bio enthusiasts
Lots of ground to cover to make an application usable not just by biologists but teachers and students.
To solve the overwhelm factor…
Very important to connect with the familiar…translate earlier experiences with the tree, use & recognize common names, and pictures of organisms. Key pedagogy at Middle School, but a good practice at all levels.
In this example, people often interpret the order of organisms across the top of the tree diagrams to be important. You will notice that the order in which organisms are displayed is different in these two trees. However, these two trees show the same evolutionary relationships. But in the one on the right, two sub-trees have been rotated around internal nodes, changing the order of the organisms across the top.
We believe that being able to show this interactively would help teachers to demonstrate that the order across the top isn’t important.
We’ll share more ideas like these for using an interactive, visual tool to help teachers dismantling misconceptions during our talk tomorrow.
Teachers teach with a part of the tree…
Different views…
Need to be able to start with, focus on, come back to, these locations, not always start at the root. Simplified, to show only what they want to show.
Fit within the curriculum? Connect from static curriculum diagrams to online interactive version, begins as identical, but allows access to more info.
Clearly labeled, presents one idea clearly. These are some examples from exisitng educational materials…
We’ve mocked up this proposal to start with the pictures of organisms, and represent the branching structure of the tree with nesting sets, like in TreeMap.
R: These recommendations will be used by the CIPRES project outreach, and the Tree of Life Web Project.
Find out more....at our demo station tonight , at our talk at 11:30 AM tomorrow, or at our website,
Support for Entognatha: Internalized mouthparts, reduced Malphigian tubules and compound eyes.
Support for grouping with insects: presence of filiform cerci, and an extra set of nine single tubules in the axoneme of the sperm.
This example is from an insect diversity course at the graduate level. The question is, where does Diplura group? The bottom two trees show two different possible hypotheses, while the top tree conservatively shows both possibilities. Evidence for the different groupings involves things like Malphigian tubules and filiform cerci. By providing visualizations of these alternatives and the evidence that supports it, the tree of life visualization application helps teachers teach about the nature of science
Once biologists decide where Diplura groups, students have access to a piece of the history of scientists’ efforts to build the tree of life, and how the tree changes, another important experience about the nature of science.
And they are publishing diagrams like this ….
…which you DON’T use to teach. When you teach, you are using diagrams like these…
All of these are static diagrams, but scientists' knowledge about the tree is changing at an amazing rate.
Our project also fits within the context of some great efforts in this area, and we hope that our work will contribute to these efforts, as well as to the CIPRES project
The Tree of Life web project
Many projects at the UCMP
Efforts in tree visualization software at the University of Maryland
