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Data Generation in the Discovery Sciences—Learning from the Practices in an Advanced Research Laboratory

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Abstract

General scientific literacy includes understanding the grounds on which scientific claims are based. The measurements scientists make and the data that they produce from them generally constitute these grounds. However, the nature of data generation has received relatively little attention from those interested in teaching science through inquiry. To inform curriculum designers about the process of data generation and its relation to the understanding of patterns as these may arise from graphs, this 5-year ethnographic study in one advanced research laboratory was designed to investigate how natural scientists make decisions about the inclusion/exclusion of certain measurements in/from their data sources. The study shows that scientists exclude measurements from their data sources even before attempting to mathematize and interpret the data. The excluded measurements therefore never even enter the ground from and against which the scientific phenomenon emerges and therefore remain invisible to it. I conclude by encouraging science educators to squarely address this aspect of the discovery sciences in their teaching, which has both methodological and ethical implications.

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Acknowledgments

A joint grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSHRC) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Councils of Canada (NSERC) funded both the natural science and social science parts on which this research is based. I am grateful to my team members Craig Hawryshyn, Theodore (von) Haimberger, Elmar Plate, and Shelby Temple for their contributions to our collaborative project.

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  1. Lansdowne Chair, Applied Cognitive Science, University of Victoria, MacLaurin Building, Victoria, BC V8W 3 N4, Canada

    Wolff-Michael Roth

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Correspondence to Wolff-Michael Roth.

Appendix

Appendix

For the transcriptions, I follow a commonly used system based on conversation analysis adapted for the inclusion of prosodic features (Selting et al., 1998). In the rules implemented here, everything is written in small letters and sound words that run into each other are transcribed that way unless the run-in sign “=” is used when it would be difficult to distinguish pronunciation (e.g., “a=one”). The transcription is phonetic such that if a participant pronounces the words “this” or “that” in the way a French or German speaker often does, that is, with a soft “d” or “s,” the transcription will read something like “ze other one is to read dis ze whole branch.”

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Roth, WM. Data Generation in the Discovery Sciences—Learning from the Practices in an Advanced Research Laboratory. Res Sci Educ 43, 1617–1644 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-012-9324-z

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