Iris Tabak

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Education

How do people reason with data to make sense of the world? What implications might everyday practices hold for data literacy education? We leverage the unique context of the COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on these questions. COVID-19 has engendered a complex, multimodal ecology of information resources, with which people engage in high-stakes sens...

The substantive and the political are part of most educational endeavors. Researchers tend to be cast as more powerful in interactions between research and practice. This structural historical hierarchy is at the backdrop of research-practice partnerships (RPP) and threatens to marginalize practitioners’ perspectives. Drawing on Bakhtin and Goffman...

This paper examines whether model annotations can foster disciplinary literacy in higher education. Using history as a test case, 102 education undergraduates participated in a training and transfer task in which they read two-period documents, and responded to recall and comprehension questions, and to a short essay question requiring historical r...

This study aimed to map and characterize public engagement with science on YouTube. A two-part study was conducted. First, we collected and quantitatively analyzed trending videos on YouTube to evaluate the magnitude of public interaction with science content. Then, we assessed actual, rather than self-reports of, media interactions with science-re...

It would be easier to navigate our information world if we had a navigational system to guide us. Absent such a system, the authors of the five articles in this special issue propose different ways to help learners engage with scientific information, in light of the post-truth condition. I suggest that the contribution of these articles lies in the...

How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality co...

Internet and social media platforms such as YouTube are an emblem of information on demand, but, their educative value, especially for conceptually rich domains, such as science, remains unclear. Many people perceive YouTube as a good resource for learning about science, yet viewing many of the available videos can be akin to learning through trans...

Learning in a networked society is presented in this symposium with the basic assumption that “schooling” and “society” cannot be considered as separate entities and should bring together the theoretical and practical tools of scientists in both the social and educational sciences. Despite the powerful potential for cross-fostering of ideas between...

Our approach to learning in a networked society is grounded in the assumption that “schooling” and “society” cannot be considered separate entities. Consequently, research in this area should draw on both educational and social sciences. Bringing together the theoretical and practical tools of both domains allows us to examine the types of interact...

Background: Effective human-robot interactions in rehabilitation necessitates an understanding of how these should be tailored to the needs of the human. We report on a robotic system developed as a partner on a 3-D everyday task, using a gamified approach. Objectives: To: (1) design and test a prototype system, to be ultimately used for upper-l...

Fig. S1: Image detection flow chart. Left – Offline flow chart. Right – Online flow chart. Fig. S2: User interface for offline selection of thresholds.

This case study investigates the agency exercised by a teacher team coordinator in shaping the scaffolding she received from her coach while jointly leading teacher team meetings. We used linguistic ethnographic methods to examine 14 teacher meetings. Detailed analysis of four episodes is used to probe the ways in which the coordinator requested, r...

Scaffolding is often strongly associated with the structure of classroom educational software (Quintana et al., 2004), despite originally not involving classrooms or technology (Wood et al., 2007). Tabak argued that scaffolding can be productively distributed across a learning environment's varied educational resources, proposing a "synergistic sca...

This chapter describes the development of the web-based inquiry learning environments as part of CoReflect, a finalized 3-year EC project involving seven countries. In CoReflect, interactive web-based materials for data-driven inquiry using the web-based platform STOCHASMOS were developed. The learning environments (LEs) embrace the guided construc...

A classroom of 7th grade students is developing a scientific model of the factors influencing water quality in their local stream. They run a dynamic simulation of the model to test it, yet they are able to do so without having to produce sophisticated mathematical representations for these relationships. In another classroom, 11th graders are read...

A comparative synthesis of multiple graphs is a common practice in scientists' work as well as in everyday contexts. We refer to this process as graph meta-analysis. We present findings from a classroom enactment in which cultivating students' graph metaanalysis skills was one aspect of fostering scientific literacy through an inquiry-based unit on...

Specialized authoring tools enable non-programmers to develop computer-based learning environments that reflect a particular task model. Largescale implementation of novel but pedagogically sound environments is made possible if the resulting environments reflect the intended essential pedagogical features. We explore the balance between constraint...

Do different disciplines cultivate different epistemologies? We draw on the epistemological framework of D. Kuhn et al. that delineates three perspectives absolutist, maintaining that knowledge is objective and immutable; multiplist, maintaining a radical relativism; and evaluativist, maintaining a qualified relativism. We conjectured that typical...

What role can technology play in cultivating a disciplinary stance — raising questions, planning investigations, interpreting data and constructing explanations in a way that reflects disciplinary values and principles? How can overt and tacit expert scientific knowledge be captured, represented and used to design software that enables novices to a...

Recent research points to the centrality of epistemological knowledge in subject-matter learning and reasoning. However, our understanding of factors that might influence epistemological development is still fairly limited. In this chapter, we synthesize results from a series of cross-sectional studies in order to consider sociocultural perspective...

Recent analyses point to the importance of communication and policy representation in understanding and fostering reform success. I propose adopting the idea of a pattern language(Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, Jacobson, Fiksdahl-King, & Angel, 1977) as a profitable direction for policy research on the design of policy documents. A pattern langu...

In this article I ask whether disciplinary distinctions are pertinent to multicultural education. Are pedagogical prescriptions aimed at providing access and success to students of diverse backgrounds equally applicable across domains? I review cross-cultural cognitive research to depict defunct deficit and extant pluralistic approaches to diversit...

In this paper, we explore cross‐domain versus domain‐specific scientific epistemological understanding. Research about relationships between such understandings shows mixed results. The ambiguities may result from the instruments used. Unlike most studies, we combined instruments from the personal‐ and science‐epistemology research traditions. Stud...

In this article, I argue that when design and intervention are central to the research process, context as a construct is problematized. How we define context can facilitate or impede our ability to construct rich and veridical accounts of learning. A design stance may predispose us to less profitable notions of context. I present the advantages of...

In this article, we examine the role that different participant structures can play in supporting inquiry-based science learning. We frame mastering scientific inquiry as mastering the "what," "why," and "how" of the cultural tools that scientists employ. We present a participant structure we call the teacher as partner and show how it renders the...

In this article, I examine distributed scaffolding, an emerging approach in the design of supports for rich learning environments intended to help students develop disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and communicating. Distributed scaffolding incorporates multiple forms of support that are provided through different means to address the complex an...

The research described in this paper investigates one possible explanation for students’ ability or inability to identify fallacious arguments. As students’ ability to identify informal reasoning fallacies has been the subject of scant empirical investigation, the current study may broaden our knowledge concerning this phenomenon and locate it in a...

The classical theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when two related cognitions are mutually inconsistent, one of them will change to restore consistency. However, Billig suggests that inconsistency is primarily an interactional problem between subjects and not a cognitive problem within a subject. In the current paper, we adopt Billig's rhe...

The authors argue that design-based research, which blends empirical educational research with the theory-driven design of learning environments, is an important methodology for understanding how, when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Designbased researchers’ innovations embody specific theoretical claims about teaching and learni...

Mastering science involves not only developing the skills of doing science, but also developing the skill of taking science. This paper describes how a teacher tried to help her students develop appropriate scientific ways of presenting explanations. The teacher employed a number of strategies as she and her students jointly constructed progressive...

Thesis (Ph. D., Education and Social Policy-Learning Sciences)--Northwestern University, 1999.

This paper presents a set of reflective strategies for inquiry to help students in the process of learning science by conducting their own investigations. Reflective strategies are actions students can take to evaluate their progress and understanding as they conduct their investigations in order to be more systematic and effective. We also present...

Working in small groups with computer-based learning environments provides an opportunity for students to investigate and discuss their own explanations of natural phenomena. Incorporating domain-specific strategic support in the design of these environments can make student investigations and discussions more productive by focusing them on key var...

This paper presents research that is part of a broader project called BGuILE (Biology Guided Inquiry Learning Environments) on supporting learning through student-directed inquiry in high school biology classes. In this paper we describe how student-directed inquiry in an environment designed to focus students on key principles of evolution can pro...

BGuILE is a learning environment in which students explore rich problem contexts in evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology. BGuILE uses domain-specific investigation models to scaffold students for the particular strategies experts use in these domains. These investigation models focus students on the relevant aspects of each domain, and suppo...

We describe a learning environment for high school biology called BGuILE that engages students in scien - tific investigations in which they can explore interest - ing problems in evolution and ecology. The environ - ment supports productive inquiry by two interrelated means. First, the system structures students' investiga- tions, encouraging them...

In this chapter, we explore the move from didactic instruction to a more constructivist, project-oriented learning model. At the heart of project-oriented learning is the notion that one learns through the process of constructing some type of artifact. The Highly-Interactive Computing Environments Group has been exploring technology that can suppor...

In recent years, the rapid progress in science and technology tends to bring about dilemmas on a range of socio-scientific issues. Thus, science education needs to prepare students to deal with such issues in an informed manner. In this paper, four learning environments (LEs) addressing topical socio-scientific issues (i.e. biotechnology, climate c...