# Feedback on Engin's dissertation chapt

Feedback on Engin’s dissertation chapter

Requests

1. does the story line work, does the argument drawn from design principles all the way to the technology hold? 
2. What can I cut, specifically? I think I have too much detail, but don’t see clearly yet what parts to cut. 
3. What else would you like to see in this chapter that I haven’t included yet?

One approach might be:  a. what venue do you think would be interested in publishing such a paper? CHI? Other?  b. how could we change the chapter to make it fit that venue, what to cut, what to add?

Response

Hi Engin,

Sorry it’s taken me a while to get this feedback to you. I hope it’s still relevant. I organized feedback according to conceptual stuff, and then smaller things–typos and such. I know you’re probably planning another pass for all that anyway, but I thought they might be helpful.

I don’t know CHI well as a venue–and am always so overwhelmed at the end of the summer that I’ve never managed to make a submission. I do think CHI would be interested in this theory-building, but only if it’s accompanied by user testing and empirical results. That seems like it might not be the best fit, because it would require you to combine multiple chapters. It seems like the main comtribution of this chapter is theory-building in the space of technology design for science pedagogy. What about one of the technology in education journals (or science specifically?) If you went this direction, I think you might need to add some more material on pedagogy (which answers my frequent questioning below about how LitC might support evidentiary reasoning within the larger activity system.

Conceptual questions

p15: Given the previous discussion of real and simulated data, it would be nice to know why you’ve gone to the trouble to have real euglena instead of simulations. 

p17: You describe affordances making it easier to do evidentiary reasoning by comparing model and data. But going back to your earlier discussion, I don’t yet see how these affordances get students “to perceive engagement in these effortful processes as sufficiently necessary and meaningful to want to take up this opportunity.” I suspect this comes from other parts of the activity system (eg the pedagogy). 

p18: re: Black box scaffolding. This seems to strengthen the counter-argument I brought up on p15. If the goal here is to make the messiness of the actual experiment disappear, why not just simulate it?

p22: This is the first time I’m hearing about mechanistic reasoning in this 

p23: The tone and level of detail changes here quite a bit. I suddenly felt out of my depth. 

p31: “These heuristics speak only partially to my evidentiary reasoning framework, lacking affordances and supports for reasoning with models about data and vice versa.” This, plus the last paragraph

Quibbles

p2: “Technologies - when well-designed - enable students” sounds a bit preachy. Maybe just say technologies potentially enable students to… Then you can go on to say they’re in use, they’re poorly designed, and they’re ineffective.

p2: Second- and third-to last sentences start with “Finally”

p2: In last sentence, a stronger transition would be clearer. Something like “This design work is the groundwork for the following chapter, where I…”

p4: The footnote cites Hmelo & Guzdial, 1996. If you don’t have room to explain why this reference, maybe a nod toward the long tradition of scaffolding research. 

p4: “about explaining real phenomena - as captured by the data patterns -, and the idea” Funny grammar. 

p4: ““use representations that learners an inspect in” Typo. 

p4: procedural, epistemic complexity. Your terms?

p5: " (p.366, (Quintana et al., 2004)).” Syntax.

p6: The purpose of the paragraph starting with “The studies presented” is ambiguous. It starts off suggesting (visual contrast -> precision). But then it turns into a more general list of how visual contrast could support evidentiary reasoning. 

p6: “provide well-designed contrasts between alternative explanations in addition to the visual contrasts.” The word ‘contrast’ is used confusingly here, referring to two different dimensions. The second usage (“the visual contrasts”) asks the reader to recall the antecedent. 

p7: Reiser reference. Syntax.

p7: “is that teacher have to play a key role” awk. 

p8: “Latter approach” Syntax

p11: “Computational tools that give students access to empirical data of real phenomena are support the identification” Syntax

p12: Hardly—wrong word here. 

p19: Overvies. wrong word. 

p20: It would be helpful to refer to this technique as ‘caching’

p20: “The downside of the database is that users cannot compare” It would be straightforward to cache N runs of an experiment.