Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning: From Assays to Assessments—On Collecting Evidence in Science Teaching

As scientists, we are accustomed to operating in a professional culture of evidence. Evidence is employed in the public discourse of science to support new ideas within a field and refute old ones. We can refer to this form of evidencethorough, detailed, extensively reproduced and analyzed-as a summative form of scientific evidence. It is this summative form of evidence that is presented in conference proceedings, in journal publications, and, eventually, in the more static context of books. Yet evidence is also collected and used in more local and iterative ways in the daily life of the scientific laboratory. Results from preliminary investigations guide the design of larger-scale studies, and more often than not entire new lines of inquiry have their origins in unanticipated results that emerge from an experiment designed to address a wholly different question. Who among us has not performed the exploratory experiment to guide our ideas and explore areas of interest without the commitment of all the controls and multiple trials that we would require of a more mature experiment? We can refer to this form of evidence-exploratory, preliminary, informative, and instructive for future experimentsas a formative type of scientific evidence, one that is much less publicly acknowledged, although it may be shared and discussed.