ADI and Model Types

I think that the majority of these models would be useful in ADI activities.  We wouldn’t even need to utilize the full structure of an ADI activity that Sampson and Glein talk about for every single ADI; we could simply structure a normal class day around an ADI activity.  The epistemic games that I don’t think would work well in an ADI activity in biology are cost-benefit analyses (although I could see a derivation of this being useful for understanding fitness in evolution), cross product games, and axiom systems.  I can easily see a use for all the rest of the epistemic games covered in Collins & Ferguson.

An example of an ADI that could lead to students developing models using several different epistemic forms in Collins and Ferguson might look at evolution.  I think that the prompt I used last week to set up an ADI for evolution would work well again, so I’ll copy it in:

“Introduction: We have been learning about how evolution can lead to a wide diversity of organisms.  We have also discussed how scientists represent these evolutionary relationships through phylogenetic trees.  However, the ways in which species are related are not always easy to find.  Scientists must evaluate a number of traits when constructing a phylogenetic tree including, but not limited to, physical traits, sequenced genes and proteins (when available), behavior, and the ecological niche each species occupies.

Problem: In 2012, researchers in the Democratic Republic of Congo described a new species of monkey that they named Cercopithecus lomamiensis (described in DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044271).  Construct a model describing your group's hypothesis of the evolutionary relationships between this new species and the following 10 monkey species: XXX (here I would list 10 monkey species, at least 8 of which live in sub-Saharan Africa.  Each species ought to have a Wikipedia page, nothing too obscure.).

Student groups will be allowed (and expected) to use the Internet in class for this project.  They ought to construct phylogenetic trees based on the traits they select.”

In order to encourage students to think about other possible forms of showing evolutionary relationships among species, I would remove the explicit references to phylogenetic trees and simply ask them to describe the evolutionary relationships among these monkey species.  I might expect students to construct phylogenetic trees, a form of tree structure, or use a compare and contrast game, a form and function game, or possibly a multicausal analysis.