“Because That’s What Scientists Do…. They Like to Make Their Own Stuff”: Exploring Perceptions of Self as Science-Doers Using the Black Love Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you to the authors for this piece. I was excited to review this paper because of the topic. More work that details alternative curricula designs for STEM fields that honor Black students’ experiences is surely needed. While the contribution of this work is important, at present I think there are some organizational and theoretical issues that would limit its impact. I provide feedback by section below, with some notes about wording and phrasing at the end. 

 

Introduction - 

In the introduction you use strong critical language and include limited concrete examples to support your statements. I think this may make you vulnerable to having your work dismissed by readers who do not enter your paper with a pre-existing understanding of whiteness and oppression in science education. I would recommend you revise this section to be more explicit about the ways race has historically operated in science education. For example, in the first paragraph you write: “Traditional K-12 STEM curriculum and assessment have privileged less than effective learning techniques, such as memorization [6-7], and penalizes students who do not adhere to normalized majority culture norms for the expression of content understanding such as exams.” It’s unclear from this sentence how exams are related to whiteness or how they embody cultural norms. One could easily argue that because traditional timed assessments have been shown to be problematic for white students as well that this is not a racial issue. I think it would be helpful to spell these things out.

 

Consider resequencing some of the ideas in the introduction. For example, you discuss whiteness throughout the introduction but it is only defined in the last sentence. Having this come earlier may help your readers.

 

It may be helpful to include a sentence or two with an overview of the study and your research questions in the intro.

 

Methods

 

I’m not 100% confident that I understand what you mean by “expanding” in your first RQ. I think you mean how they are disrupting white norms in assessment, but it may help to be more explicit. This could be accomplished by changing the wording of your RQ or defining what you mean in the earlier text.

 

The 2nd RQ is the first time the reader sees the term “Black Love” outside of the title. It may help to discuss the Black Love framework earlier so that the reader is able to find meaning in your research question.

 

I didn’t gain an understanding of your analytic process through reading the data analysis section. Instead, details about your analysis are included in the subsequent sections. I would, again, recommend moving discussion of Black Love earlier so that you can focus on your coding in your data analysis section. Would it be possible to make the following sections (e.g., semi-structured interviews) subsections of the data analysis section? I think this might reduce confusion for the reader. It would also be helpful to articulate how your data analysis process was tied to your research questions and your conceptual framework. I understand that claim, evidence, and reason are related to onto-epistemologies but I think it would be helpful to make this connection more explicit. I couldn’t find justification for why your data analysis methods were appropriate for your research questions.

 

Your positionality statement uses both “we” and “my” making authorship a little unclear.

 

Results

 

Your findings validate participants’ scientific argumentation by demonstrating that it includes claim, evidence, and reason. I’m not familiar with the works you cited when defining scientific argumentation in your lit review, but they do not appear to be critical in nature from the titles. For this reason I question whether this definition of scientific argumentation is also historically shaped by white epistemologies. I wonder whether applying this structure to make sense of Black girls’ scientific thinking still frames whiteness as the norm or ideal, or the reference to which Black girls should be compared. I’m sure you have already considered this. It might be helpful to articulate your rationale for these choices somewhere.

 

Relatedly, if “claim, evidence, reason” is structuring your coding and prominent in the exposition of your findings, is it acting as the conceptual framework for your study? In contrast, I don’t see culturally sustaining pedagogies engaged as much in your analysis or results.

 

I was surprised to see a paragraph about coding in the results section (p. 16). These details may be better suited for the data analysis section. 

 

I know you intend for the results to shed light on assessment practices. I think the connection to assessment need to be strengthened. The after school program context makes it a little difficult to see why there is a need to asses students’ learning at all and it isn’t clear how teachers might apply insights from this work in the classroom. Making the role of assessment more prominent in your results section may help. For example, you write the following:

we did not evaluate the correctness of the argument, but the presence of the CER. Summarily, three out of the five groups verbally expressed a verbal scientific argument in a DIY video (see Table 3). The two groups, Letrice/Princess and Karesha/Shauna, did not provide the importance of their products and actually presented their process as a recipe for their designed product rather than expanding on the use of each material, ingredient, or the product as a whole.

In this discussion of their work, are you commenting on the quality of their work as researchers or as teachers? Is this commentary an “assessment”? Would you recommend that teachers similarly assess by looking for evidence of CER and ignoring correctness? 

 

References

 

Several references were incomplete or needed formatting revisions: 

38 Wallon, et. al, 2018

54 (Banks, 1993,

55 Dixon-Román, E. (2020). A haunting logic of psychometrics: Toward the speculative and indeterminacy of blackness in measure- 1016 ment. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39(3), 94-96.

 

There were a number of sentences where I simply struggled to understand the meaning. I’m including some of them below in case it’s helpful.

• Reform focused on antiracist agendas remain focused on a generalized experience with centrality and equality of men as mentioned before regarding diversity initiatives in STEM [57]. 

• Also, gender politics are associated with White women having the central narrative of feminism. [Do you mean racial politics?]

• It is inadequate for students who are required to and promoted for assimilating to the norms of a science classroom [8].

• Three dimensions to provide solutions to these questions were named: self-determination, self-actualization, and self-efficacy.   [what questions?] 

• We evaluated how students learned about Black hair care but understand how Black middle school girls are participating in SEPs.

• Categories consisted of broad labels that encompassed a variety of related patterns and throughs I labeled as codes. [what are throughs? Or is this a typo?]

 

There were also a number of sentences that were stumbling blocks for me due to the way they were worded. I’m including some of them below.

 

• A goal of culturally inclusive curriculum and assessment is to integrating students’ knowledge and culture in the classroom [64], racial identity development, and a place in the curriculum for students to find commonness

• There is space in the literature for curriculum, instruction, and assessment that explores, honors, and extends students’ various cultural expressions and ways of knowing [70] as an asset as part of larger decolonization works specifically engineering education. [Do you mean studies of curriculum…] 

• We seek to identify understandings for engaging in STEM learning when the environment is undergirded in the principles of Black Love

• Specifically, “Black girls—and the researchers who work with them—are attentive to the ways race, class, gender, and additional interlocking identities tied to place funnel into urban classrooms”

• Coupled with our identities and following, Butler we understand this research as part of a larger movement to be inclusive of experiences and societal issues of Black girls within STEM spaces

• From the exchange in Excerpt 1, we active noticing and JiT teaching to outline several claims that were presented. [I think there is a missing word here]

Author Response

See attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study is well organized and interesting to read. There are minor issues for consideration

1.       it is described in the body as a dissertation. That is, at lines 269 and 271, the authors stated that “this dissertation”, “this dissertation research.” It is better to just describe it as this study.

 

2.       Some typo issues e.g., at line 102 he is written. I assume that it is to write the. At line 104, change an scientific to a scientific. 

Author Response

See attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I really like the organizational changes you have made. I also appreciate your clarifications around why you are using dominant understandings of scientific reasoning (CER) to unpack students' thinking. There are a few issues that remain for me, which I'll detail below.

 

Theory

I think I better understand how the Black Love framework shaped the work, as well as its connection to assessment. However, I'm still finding it a little unclear how your various frameworks come together. I'm presenting some questions that remain for me in hopes that it will be a helpful diagnostic tool for you, knowing that many readers will read less carefully and holds less background knowledge that aids their understanding.

- Which is acting as the conceptual framework for your study, Black Love or culturally sustaining pedagogies? Does one frame the development of the curriculum and the other frame your analysis? Are you synthesizing them, and if so, how? I see that there are themes of collaboration and verbal exchange across the two theories that seem to come into play with how you are conceptualizing expanding assessment practices but it's a little muddy for me.

- How did your conceptual framework(s) shape your data analysis? I see a description of the inductive/deductive coding process but it is unclear to me how your conceptual framework assisted you in making sense of your data during coding.

- How are your findings related to your conceptual framework(s)? Culturally sustaining pedagogies is not mentioned in the results section (aside from repeating the research question). Black Love is mentioned only twice. If one or both of these frameworks is shaping your interpretation of the results it would be helpful to spell this out for the reader.

- As a very small point, you mention that the focus on CER is guided by the academic success tenet. I'm not as familiar with culturally sustaining pedagogy as I am with culturally responsive pedagogy so I did a search for where you discuss this in the paper. I was surprised to see that this tenet is described as part of culturally relevant pedagogy, not culturally sustaining pedagogy. Looking for how you describe differences between culturally sustaining and culturally responsive pedagogies I found: "Paris and Alim employ culturally sustaining pedagogy in an effort to combat the superficial use of culturally relevant pedagogy that students express knowledge and participate in SEPs." This statement didn't help me to understand the similarities and differences between culturally sustaining pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy. Wouldn't CRP's tenet of critical consciousness prevent superficial application, if it is authentically implemented? I know this is a subtle distinction but I think it is important to be clear if you are engaging culturally sustaining pedagogies as your framework but then using CRP to justify methodological decisions. 

 

Assessment/Implications for practice

It seems I didn't effectively communicate my point in comment 11. So sorry for the misunderstanding. I intended to focus on the connection between the findings and assessment (not correctness). Let me try to rephrase without anchoring to that specific example. You introduce the study as bearing on historically white assessment practices. How do your findings reveal opportunities for more equitable assessment practices? What could a teacher learn from your study that they could implement in the classroom? It is unclear to me how your results talk back to the issues around assessment you introduced at the beginning of the paper. I think these strengthening connections to assessment and classroom practice throughout the findings and discussion would be helpful.

 

Lastly, I appreciate that you revised the introduction to provide a gentler introduction to readers about some of the underlying ideas (e.g., whiteness in assessment). However I think these could be strengthened further by offering examples that are more concrete. You write: "For instance, various approaches to science education reform utilize a science-for-all perspective that inadequately attends to the gendered and racialized experiences of marginalized students. Examples from Tzou, and and Bricker [6] support approaches to transformation within curriculum and assessment is systemic and linked to institutional forms of oppression. Middle-of-the-road approaches to expanding science education learning experiences through curriculum, instruction, and assessment are “dehistoricized and depoliticized” [7](p. 526)." I think a reader unfamiliar with these ideas may still have many questions. For example, how are the science learning experiences of marginalized students racialized and gendered? What does institutional oppression look like in the classroom? How are science curricula political?

I appreciate all of the work you have put into this revision and I hope this feedback will support further strengthening the manuscript.

Author Response

See attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for this thoughtful revision! It is much clearer to me how your theory supports your analysis and I appreciate the more explicit discussion of how your findings inform practice.