According to the lecturer interviewed in the pilot interview, it is very difficult to say who should actually take responsibility for teaching graphing skills at university level, as portrayed by the following quote,
“Eh if one is thinking about, eh, let’s say first-year science students, first-year science students would be, ehm, taking a number of different first year courses, maybe about five, so they could be taking biology, physics, chemistry, and, and they could be using graphing in all of those subjects, so ehm, thinking of first-year, with all of those students, it might almost be an idea for them to have a centrally organised course on graphing skills, so that, otherwise there’ll be a risk, there’s a risk that each of those departments teaches graphing skills. So they get duplication. ...Ehm, ehm, so it makes it a bit difficult to see exactly who should be teaching this, unless there’s some sort of overall coordination across the whole of first-year”. (Pilot interview)
But an interesting comment on this suggestion, which seems so sensible, is that research has shown that students struggle to transfer skills, and if taught in maths for example, many cannot then apply what they have learned in biology (Brasell, 1990; Millar et al., 1994) - (see Chapter 1, section 1.2.4).
Over and above teaching graphs at university, only one lecturer suggested that school teachers should also be responsible for teaching basic knowledge of graphs.
“I think that the students coming in essentially to do a science degree need to know about graphing because it’s an essential part of any, ... any aspect of the sciences, ehm, ... because graphs are such an important way of actually communicating information. And I think that it probably needs to be taught both in the school and, .... and here. I think what we do is we, ... it would be good if students came in with that knowledge and all we were doing was reinforcing it or putting it in a particular subject context. But I think that we can’t assume that, and we have a responsibility, if we want the students to know how to graph or to use graphs, we need to teach them that”. (Lecturer #5).
Table 29. Lecturers’ and teaching assistants’ opinions on who should teach the skills (n = 7)
Category Explanation Frequency
School. School teachers should teach basic knowledge of graphs. L5. 1
University. Tutors / Lab staff. L4, T1, T2, T3, T4. 5
Lecturers. T1, T2. 2
Students themselves. T1. 1
People from the education field should design special practicals or tutorials. L2. 1
Table 29 illustrates that all the teaching assistants agree that graphing skills should be taught at university by the tutors or the laboratory staff. It is interesting to note the apparent contradiction of opinions, in that earlier on all the teaching assistants agreed that they expect the students to be able to construct graphs when they enter first-year.
Not all of the staff members interviewed had an answer to the question of who should teach the skills. One lecturer blatantly admitted that “I have no idea” (Lecturer #1), and one Teaching Assistant confessed that “I don’t know I guess whoever is, eh, coordinating the first-year labs and then the demonstrators, obviously”. (Teaching Assistant #3).
3.3 CONCLUDING REMARKS
The results obtained from the interviews and the analysis of the question papers showed many of the difficulties in understanding and using graphs identified by Brasell (1990). Firstly students’ ability to work
Chapter 3: Results and discussion 69
with graphs seemed to be superficial. Brasell (1990) suggests this happens when students focus on the use of the rules of graphing rather than an understanding of the functions of graphs and what they show. A number of students in this study appeared not to know or were unable to apply, the graphical “grammar” for encoding and decoding information in a graph. Secondly, many students seemed not to understand how to link the graph with the variables being depicted and they may not have understood the substantive concepts being graphed, as shown in questions 5 and 8 of the College of Science examination (Tables 24 and 25), where for many of the concepts less than a quarter of the class answered correctly.
The results of the class which had received sustained and systematic training in graphing (the College of Science students) revealed that many students still had problems with graphing skills, in spite of all the teaching. Brasell (1990, 82) warns that
“Explicit instruction is often limited to routines for plotting and reading data points in simple graph formats. These algorithms work well for constructing graphs as part of laboratory reports as long as guidelines indicate which variables to plot on which axes. They are also sufficient for recognizing the appropriate graph in multiple-choice graphing test items. However, the algorithms are not adequate for interpreting graphs or designing graph formats from raw data.” Stories about teaching in the College, however, suggest that their teaching of skills goes beyond the simple provision of hints on how to do the skill.
In the web-based materials to be developed to teach graphing skills to first-year biology students, cognisance needs to be taken of these problems, and the instructional design will be based on a firm foundation of what learning theory and educational research has shown about effective teaching and learning.