Week 2, Chapter 1 -- Starting Assumptions Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | MasteringBiology® | Honor Code | FAQs | HELP!

Instructions:

Part 1:

Read through the questions below. Write a paragraph, 150 words minimum, in response to one or more of the questions below that interest you. Use D2L's spell checker or your word processor software to spell check your paragraph. (The latter will give you a word count as well.) Proofread it yourself too, because spell checkers don't catch everything. When you are satisfied, post your completed paragraph in the Starting Assumptions forum for this week at the D2L discussion board.

Part 2:

Respond to the Starting Assumptions posts of at least two other students. (If you are the first or second person to post, you will have to check back later to complete this part of the assignment).

• Just as you spell checked and proofread your original post, you should do the same for your responses.
• Please respond to posts with 0 responses first; once every post has at least one response, you are free to choose any post to respond to.
• When you respond, please use the name of the student you are responding to. That is, say "Hi Jessica" or "Hi Paul" so that you can get used to the names of the people in class. (You can find a list of "real" names and preferred names posted on D2L).
• What constitutes a substantive response? This means that you have read and thought about the original post, and that after some reflection, you are extending one or more of the thoughts in the original post or offering an additional perspective as you might in a good conversation. It is not enough to say simply "nice job," "I liked that," "I think you're right about XXXX," "I disagree," etc. It is OK to disagree or agree, but the goal is to thoughtfully add something else interesting and new related to the content of the original post. At a minimum this should be at least 50 words, and 50-100 is preferable. Check out this page for more on the topic of good and bad responses.

After you have posted your paragraph and responded to two other students, go to Desire2Learn and complete the Gradebook Declaration for this week's Starting Assumptions assignment. (Do not declare that you have completed these assignments until AFTER you have made your posts. Your Gradebook Declaration is subject to the Honor Code.)

Here are the questions to get you started:

• Do you know any scientists, and what do scientists do?
• How has science directly affected your life?
• If you have had previous university-level science classes, what did you like and dislike about them?
• In what ways is science different from religion?
• Which types of advertisements influence your behavior most?
• What are some ways that advertisers try to influence your decisions?
• Do you ever experiment to determine whether a new product does what it says? If so, how much confidence do you have in your results?
• Do you think animal experimentation is a legitimate way to get answers to questions about humans?
• Did you know that pesticide companies pay volunteers up to $200 a day to test chemicals that they know to be neurotoxins? Do you think that testing harmful chemicals on humans should be legal? Why or why not? (If you are interested in this, check out this article from the December 2003 issue of Discover magazine and the 2013 EPA rules).
• Do you pay attention to news stories about new health-related findings (e.g., articles with titles like "coffee prevents colon cancer" or "coffee causes brain cancer")? Why or why not?
• Look at Table 1.1 in your chapter; it is a very nice guide for evaluating science in the news. How many of the "red flags" from the table can you find in a typical news story about science?
• What causes the common cold?
• Where do you most often get your information about colds?
• Have you heard anything about a link between vaccines and autism? Do you think it’s a credible fear?

View sample starting assumptions.

Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM