William A. SandovalUniversity of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Education
William A. Sandoval
PhD, Learning Sciences, Northwestern University
About
79
Publications
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Introduction
My work mainly focuses on organizing science instruction in school so that the science children learn has value to them out of school, with my main focus on processes of scientific explanation and argumentation. I am also interested in how situated theories of cognition can describe and explain epistemic cognition (thinking about knowledge and knowing), and in the development of design research methods in education.
Additional affiliations
July 1998 - present
Education
September 1993 - December 1998
September 1981 - December 1986
Publications
Publications (79)
Introduction
A growing body of research has identified gender disparities in STEM education, but data are limited from studies directly comparing autonomy given to autonomy wanted by adolescents, as experienced in classrooms by gender and across course subjects.
Methods
With a sample of US adolescents (n = 540), aged 11–19 and 55% female, we asses...
This case study presents the efforts of three high school teachers to design and implement climate change lessons in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Using three conceptual frameworks that organize the assumptions of the environment in the NGSS we examine how those assumptions influence teacher practice when teachers str...
Autonomy is associated with a variety of cognitive, educational, and motivational benefits, but relations between autonomy and reasoning skills are less well understood. We posit individuals afforded greater autonomy are more often put into situations of having to consider multiple options, or causes, and hence will likely reason about cause and ef...
How can we encourage adolescents to ask the most effective questions? Several different lines of research design children’s and adolescents’ learning environments in ways that capitalize on self-
initiated, largely self-directed question-asking and answer-seeking. We describe a number of studies indicating that such contexts yield effective outcome...
We report on seven secondary science teachers’ initial efforts to understand and enact NGSS-aligned teaching. After interviewing and observing them over the course of the school year, we found that teachers revised their lessons to include instructional strategies that aimed to meet the demands of the NGSS. Yet at times, the purpose for which teach...
We report on one teachers' efforts to redesign an entire instructional unit as a coherent storyline about forces and motion as a part of a multiyear professional development (PD) project around the NGSS. Designing coherent storylines demands that teachers create opportunities for students to meaningfully engage in science practices in order to deve...
Most of the research on argumentation in science education has documented the myriad flaws in students’ argumentation, and the difficulties teachers have organising productive arguments in the classroom. We apply a sociocultural framework to argue that productive argumentation emerges from a classroom culture in which its practice meaningfully serv...
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) reforms in the United States present a number of serious learning challenges for in-service teachers. As states and school districts are assuming responsibility for the new standards, there are few professional development (PD) models for how to help working teachers meet these challenges. This study pre...
To appear in the International Handbook of the Learning Sciences
Science educators are typically dismayed by the failure of students to use relevant scientific knowledge when reasoning about socioscientific issues. Except for the well-documented association between having more knowledge about a topic and a tendency to use that knowledge, the influences on students’ evaluation of information in socioscientific is...
Epistemic cognition is the thinking that people do about what and how they know. Education has long been concerned with promoting reflection on knowledge and processes of knowing, but research into epistemic cognition began really in the past half century, with a tremendous expansion in the past 20 years. This review summarizes the broad range of p...
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are the latest reform of science education in the United States. The new standards are a radical departure from previous standards in their focus on science practices. Not only have general notions of inquiry been replaced by specific science practices students should learn, but the standards articulate...
This poster summarizes features of classroom environments that promote productive science argumentation in elementary grades, based on research conducted from 2007-2010.
Practicing scientists’ views of science recently have become a topic of interest to nature of science researchers. Using an interview protocol developed by Carey and Smith that assumes respondents’ views cohere into a single belief system, we asked 15 research chemists to discuss their views of theories and experimentation. Respondents expressed a...
Research has addressed what instructional conditions may inhibit or promote scientific argumentation. Little research, however, has paid attention to interpersonal factors that influence collaborative argumentation. The present study examines the ways interpersonal factors affected group dynamics, which influence the features of collaborative argum...
Situated theories of learning recognize the rules, tools, goals, and communities within which activities develop. Similarly, situated theories of epistemic cognition recognize that individuals’ ideas about knowledge are tentative and dependent on particular contexts. In this study, we bring these frameworks together and qualitatively examine how on...
Science educators have been interested in developing people's understanding of the epis-temology of science for a long time. Despite decades of research on students' ideas, and decades of instructional reforms, it remains very hard to change students' ideas about the nature of scientific knowledge and practice. There are essentially two specializat...
Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to
learners’ capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive
engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such
coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of evidenc...
Preconference Workshop: Epistemic cognition broadly refers to an array of understandings and practices related to knowledge claims and their justification, as well as the practices and processes for achieving knowledge. Epistemic cognition encompasses both explicit beliefs as well as involved reasoning practices. Recent work by learning scientists...
This symposium raises the issue of the role of domain-general factors in scientific reasoning and argumentation tasks. The contributions cover conceptual problems concerning the interplay of general and specific elements in scientific reasoning, methodological requirements and existing research paradigms for investigating the role of cross-domain f...
The conceptualization of students' personal epistemologies has been criticized for being inconsistently defined, overly simplistic, and inappropriately decontextualized. Broadly, epistemic cognition encompasses explicit thoughts about the nature of knowledge as well as reasoning processes related to knowledge claims and justifications. Learning sci...
Engaging with science in everyday life typically occurs in the context of socioscientific issues, situations where science can play some role in helping people come to some judgment or decision. Such issues often require the interpretation of inscriptions (graphic representations of information) to evaluate claims. Research on socioscientific reaso...
Design research is strongly associated with the learning sciences community, and in the 2 decades since its conception it has become broadly accepted. Yet within and without the learning sciences there remains confusion about how to do design research, with most scholarship on the approach describing what it is rather than how to do it. This articl...
Recently, situated theories of cognition and learning have attracted personal epistemology researchers, motivating efforts to revise traditional PE theories of developmental stages and independent beliefs. In the situated framework, researchers view knowledge practices as tentative and dependent on particular contexts. In the present study, we qual...
The aim of this study was to assess whether and how a sustained instructional focus on argumentation might improve children's understanding and application of key epistemic criteria for scientific arguments. These criteria include the articulation of clear, coherent causal claims, and the explicit justification of such claims with appropriate evide...
Personal epistemology as a field has been around for forty years and generated a wide assortment of models to explain epistemological development. Dominant frameworks are inspired either by Piagetian or information processing perspectives on cognition, and all have failed to explain a range of empirical results that question the stability and coher...
The objective of this study was to determine the efficacy of an optional 1-2 unit service learning (SL) course added onto two undergraduate engineering classes. The SL add-on aimed to increase participant understanding of, and interest in, local environmental science issues relevant to the course material and consisted of classroom visits to a part...
Previous research has shown that children tend to demonstrate lower
performance on analogical reasoning tasks at a causal relations level
compared to most adults (Gentner & Toupin, 1986). This tendency is
an obstacle that geoscience educators must overcome because of the high
frequency of analogies used in geoscience pedagogy. In particular,
analog...
This study investigated children's judgments of the epistemic status of justifications for causal claims. Twenty-six children (14 boys, 12 girls) between the ages of 8 and 10 were asked to help two story characters choose the “best reason” for believing a claim. The reasons included appeals to an authority, to a plausible causal mechanism, or to da...
Following their participation in a guided-inquiry unit, 129 seventh-graders from five diverse urban middle schools were asked
about their perceptions of specific inquiry tasks, from an expectancy-value framework. Students were asked to rate the interest
value, utility value, and task difficulty of (a) data collection design; (b) explanation; (c) da...
Drawing on sociological and philosophical studies of science, science educators have begun to view argumentation as a central scientific practice that students should learn. In this article, we extend recent work to understand the structure of students' arguments to include judgments about their quality through content analyses of high school stude...
Constructing a good scientific explanation would seem to require both a sound conceptual understanding of whatever is being explained and an understanding of the epistemic requirements of what makes an explanation good. The epistemic standards for a good scientific explanation have been refined historically in response to the issues that arise from...
The present study explores and documents the process of building social and argumentation norms in a combined third- and fourth-grade science classroom and examines how the processes regulate students' participation patterns, including the students' roles. This study also investigates the positive potential of negotiating norms and taking on intell...
Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should beware insistence on a narrow definition of epistemology to guide this work. His argument is a response to suggestions (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Sandoval, 2005) that the study of personal epistemology should focus on people's views about knowledge and knowi...
The primary objective of this session is to highlight ways in which identity can be construed and studied within science education, and to advance a discussion about how science education can embrace its civic responsibility toward students to help them appropriate science as a meaningful tool in their lives beyond school. The four papers reflect a...
What counts as inquiry in a science classroom? How can we best characterize children's abilities to engage in inquiry? These are the main questions considered by Hammer, Russ, Mikeska, and Scherr (2005) in their paper. The first question is a central issue to the theme of this conference: identifying areas of consensus in science education. Obvious...
Laboratories have been a fixture in science education for more than a century , yet their value has been debated almost that entire time. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) released America's Lab Report, synthesizing recent inquiry-oriented research efforts that use laboratory experiences more effectively than is typical. This chapter com...
The seemingly simple task of reusing data for science education relies on the presence of scientific data, scientists willing to share, infrastructure to provide access, and mechanisms to share between the two disparate communities of scientists and science students. What makes sharing between scientists and science students a special case of data...
Who, besides scientists, engages in what we would call scientific argumentation? When? for what purpose? As calls for argumentation
to take a central place in science instruction increase (Driver et al., 2000; Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Kuhn, 1993b), answers
to these questions become more important. There are two key claims for engaging students in sc...
It has long been a goal of science education in the United States that students leave school with a robust understanding of the nature of science. Decades of research show that this does not happen. Inquiry-based instruction is advocated as a means for developing such understanding, although there is scant direct evidence that it does. There is a g...
Designed learning environments embody conjectures about learning and instruction, and the empirical study of learning environments allows such conjectures to be refined over time. The construct of embodied conjecture is introduced as a way to demonstrate the theoretical nature of learning environment design and to frame methodological issues in stu...
This paper explores how two teachers concurrently enacting the same technology-based inquiry unit on evolution structured activity and discourse in their classrooms to connect students' computer-based investigations to formal domain theories. Our analyses show that the teachers' interactions with their students during inquiry were quite similar, an...
Science education reforms consistently maintain the goal that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, including both the nature of scientific knowledge and methods for making it. This paper articulates a framework for scaffolding epistemic aspects of inquiry that can help students understand inquiry processes in relation to the...
Students' epistemological beliefs about scientific knowledge and practice are one important influence on their approach to learning. This article explores the effects that students' inquiry during a 4-week technology-supported unit on evolution and natural selection had on their beliefs about the nature of science. Before and after the study, 8 stu...
This article explores how students' epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum about evolution. Analyses intended t...
A long standing goal of science education in the United States has been that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, of what scientific knowledge is like and how it is constructed. Despite this interest, students continue to leave secondary schools with naïve views of the nature of science. Current science education reforms advo...
This study examined the effects that different kinds of technology-based representational tools have on students' genetics learning. One form of tool represented phenomenological features of genetics - genes, pedigrees, and so on - and were embedded in a simulations-based software program. and another tool provided discursive representation to supp...
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...
This poster reports findings from a pilot study of a preliminary version of a CENS middle school inquiry module. The purpose of the pilot was to elicit students' conceptions of plant evolution, especially leaf structure-function relationships in different environments. Pre-tests of students' knowledge about plants and plant evolution confirmed our...
This paper explores the struggle of one teacher as she tries to learn and apply the discursive practices of inquiry in her urban high school science classroom. We specifically concentrate on her attempts to listen to student thinking and her emergent ability to incorporate this discourse into her teaching practice and how this might reflect a chang...
This paper describes an ongoing high school science teacher professional development project focused on developing teaches' ideas of scientific inquiry and inquiry pedagogy. We present preliminary analyses of the first several months of this project, focusing on analyses of teachers' interactions during our professional development workshops. These...
This study explores whether and how high school students in an introductory biology course changed their beliefs about the nature of science, and especially theory change, over the course of a four-week, technology-supported inquiry unit on evolution and natural selection. Curricular and technological scaffolds supported students' construction and...
This paper presents initial findings from our collaborative effort to understand the roles various kinds of scientific representations play in supporting students' epistemological learning in science, through their development of epistemic practices. We present concrete design principles for the development of representational tools that support st...
Inquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different from typical didactic science instruction. Two of the central challenges in teaching science through inquiry are that a) students' inquiry must productively engage them in exploration and reasoning about central issues in the domain; and b) students need to be able t...
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...
Recent standards for science education have called for students to
engage in inquiry, defined as a set of interrelated processes used to
ask questions about the natural world and investigate them. An important
issue for educators and researchers who would implement inquiry-based
instruction is to understand what the product of such inquiry processe...
Engaging students in conducting their own scientific inquiry means engaging them in the construction of explanations about their world, because building such explanations is fundamentally what science is about. Students require support both for constructing their own explanations and for reflecting upon those explanations in ways that will help the...
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...
Examples play a critical role in guiding the acquisition of cognitive skills. We have argued that students need to apply the knowledge gathered from studying examples to solve analogous problems for that knowledge to be effective. There is a tradeoff between the active nature of constructing solutions and the facilitating effect of guiding problem...
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...
Abstract This study examined,how urban high school students’ beliefs about the nature of professional science relate to their beliefs about school science. Two aspects of the nature of science were examined: the status of scientific knowledge,and the purpose of experimentation.An open-ended questionnaire, Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS), was...
This poster highlights the progress of The CENS Pre-College Education group as part of the CENS educational pipeline.
Projects
Projects (8)
Autonomy is associated with a variety of cognitive, educational, and motivational benefits, but relations between autonomy and reasoning skills are less well understood. In a multi-level study, we examine associations between younger (11-13 years) and older (14-19 years) adolescents’ autonomy and their performance on a multivariable causal reasoning and prediction task. We highlight sociocultural, individual, and developmental factors in their differing roles on autonomy and reasoning skill.
Do girls perceive autonomy differently in STEM subjects? How does this extend to autonomy being given, versus autonomy wanted? These questions may potentially address a long withstanding concern of why girls’ interest in science tends to decline (Osborne et al., 2003).