The educational video game Mission Biotech provides a virtual experience for students in learning biotechnology materials and tools. This study explores the use of Mission Biotech and the associated curriculum by three high school teachers and their students. All three classes demonstrated gains on a curriculum-aligned test of science content. Students from two of the classes showed gains on a standards-aligned test of content; students from the third class did not demonstrate statistically significant gains. This result is attributable to a ceiling effect.The results support the idea that video games can be useful in classroom contexts. No statistically significant changes were found when looking at how the game affected student attitudes toward science and science careers.
Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some historical developments of dialogue and how answers have been conceptualized within these historical discourses. The authors propose that answers be seen not as a final step in the research process but rather as an opening, an assemblage, a jar, or a call to transition into new forms of questions, new outlooks on methods, and new processes of thought. Finally, the renegotiation of the philosophical notion of answers that the authors will discuss in this article exemplifies potential for a renewed commitment to meaningful educational research.
How can (post-)qualitative inquiry do justice in uncertain times? Post-qualitative inquiry, in its embrace of radical uncertainty, held promise for ethical and political responsibility in an entangled, hardly knowable world. Lately, we (authors) are doubtful of that promise. For over a year, through in-person and Zoom conversations, before and during the global pandemic, punctuated by weekly protests of a resurging Black Lives Matter movement, we reckoned with our hopes, doubts, dreams, and disappointments of justice in qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry. We reconstituted our dialogue in this paper around the topics most pressing to us: coming to justice, being wary of idols and ideology, and deciding what matters in post-qualitative inquiry. We came to the uneasy conclusion that, with no one to blame yet everyone responsible, the veneer of justice is peeling away from post-qualitative inquiry; that post-qualitative inquiry has, largely against its will, become a stable, divisive, and totalizing methodology; and that post-qualitative inquiry’s radical uncertainty has created the enabling conditions of indifference, apathy, and triviality. We urge (post-)qualitative inquirers to keep talking about justice and to balance a desire for post-theory with the responsibility for praxis, action, and decision-making.
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