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The Knowledge Integration Perspective on Learning and Instruction
... Students not only should acquire basic scientific knowledge, but also apply them to solve real problems. Proposed by Linn and her colleagues, Knowledge Integration is known as the process of integrating complex ideas to explain scientific phenomena [6]. Songer and Linn explored the relationship between students' beliefs and their performance of knowledge integration in the domain of thermodynamics and argued that students having more sophisticated beliefs about science engage more actively in science classrooms for knowledge integration [7]. ...
... Some studies have indicated that Knowledge Telling is unsatisfactory, in which students passively acquire a set of isolated, discrete information from textbooks or teachers, but most of the knowledge would be forgotten in the end [15]. To improve the effectiveness of science learning and instruction, Linn et al. developed the Knowledge Integration(KI) approach, the core idea of which is to help learners form a coherent scientific understanding [6]. The KI approach claims that, instead of adding more new ideas, eliciting students' existing ideas, distinguishing between conflicting ideas and making connections between them can help students form coherent scientific understanding [6]. ...
... To improve the effectiveness of science learning and instruction, Linn et al. developed the Knowledge Integration(KI) approach, the core idea of which is to help learners form a coherent scientific understanding [6]. The KI approach claims that, instead of adding more new ideas, eliciting students' existing ideas, distinguishing between conflicting ideas and making connections between them can help students form coherent scientific understanding [6]. Making science accessible, making thinking visible, helping students learn from others and promoting autonomy are four core principles for KI instruction, and eliciting ideas, adding ideas, distinguishing ideas, reflecting and sorting out ideas are four general processes of KI [16]. ...
... The term conceptual restructuring relates most directly to knowledgeas-elements perspectives. Knowledge-as-elements perspectives characterize students' understanding in terms of collections of multiple quasi-independent elements (diSessa, 1993(diSessa, , 2006Linn et al., 2004;Clark, 2006). However, more distantly, conceptual restructuring has roots in early work about conceptual ecologies (Posner et al., 1982;Strike and Posner, 1992). ...
... Strike and Posner (1992) suggested that students maintain conceptual ecologies, including ''anomalies, analogies, metaphors, epistemological beliefs, metaphysical beliefs, knowledge from other areas of inquiry, and knowledge of competing conceptions''. This conceptual perspective is especially relevant to the perspectives that view a student's knowledge structures as a collection of independent elements (diSessa, 1993(diSessa, , 2006Hunt and Minstrell, 1994;Linn et al., 2004). diSessa's (1993) perspective is the most renowned of knowledge-as-elements perspectives. ...
... He suggests that the knowledge structures of novices consist primarily of unstructured collections of many simple elements that he calls p-prims (phenomenological primitives). Linn et al. (2004) focus on the process through which students reorganize, revise, and connect these elements. ...
This longitudinal study aims to provide greater insight into how students' understanding of matter and chemical reactions develops over time and how their knowledge structures are restructured. Four case-study students in a Norwegian primary school were followed for two years from age 10–11 to age 12–13. Researchers were responsible for implementation of science teaching promoting systematic development of students' understanding of the nature of matter and chemical reactions in many contexts across science disciplines. The four case-study students' expressed understanding was recorded and analyzed throughout the period. Results indicate that students develop fragmented and incomplete understanding, and drawing wrong conclusions may be necessary steps in the learning process. Moreover, students seem to develop a somewhat more integrated and cohesive understanding of the nature of matter and chemical reactions, indicating that the students restructure and reorganize their knowledge structures (i.e. differentiation, coalescence and promoting).
... Knowledge integration frameworks (discussed in detail later) are poised on the idea that students build on their prior knowledge as they form scientific knowledge webs (Linn, 1995;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Williams et al., 2010). Hence the need for curriculum developers to understand the possible origins of students' knowledge so as to have instructional models that challenge and build on students' prior knowledge about genetic inheritance. ...
... The Scaffolded Knowledge Integration (SKI) was proposed as a result of work done over a period of more than two decades by the partnership between experts that include science educators, natural scientists, technologists and classroom teachers (Linn and Hsi, 2000). SKI views learners as adding ideas to their repertoire and reorganizing their knowledge (Linn, 1995;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Williams et al. 2010). Next I highlight the principles of SKI. ...
... In this section, I discuss the theoretical foundations that helped me to gain some understanding of some patterns observed in students' responses. The students' responses were scored using a Knowledge Integration (KI) rubric framed around the SKI (Linn and Hsi, 2000;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Williams et al., 2010). As described in more detail later, SKI views learners as adding ideas to their repertoire and reorganizing their knowledge (Linn, 1995;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004). ...
The main goal of school science is to enable learners to become scientifically literate through their participation in scientific discourses (McNeill & Krajcik, 2009). One of the key elements of scientific discourses is the ability to construct scientific explanations that consist of valid claims supported by appropriate evidence (e.g., McNeill & Krajcik, 2006, Sadler, 2004; Sandoval & Reiser, 2004). Curricula scaffolds may help students construct scientific explanations and achieve their learning goals. This dissertation study is part of a larger study designed to support fifth through seventh grade students' learning about genetic inheritance through curricula scaffolds. Seventh grade students in this study interacted with a Web Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) unit called "From Genotype to Phenotype" that had curricula scaffolds. Informed by the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration, two versions of the unit were developed around concepts on genetic inheritance. Version one of the units was explicit on explaining to students how to make a claim and support it with appropriate evidence. Although the science concepts covered were the same, Version two was not explicit on claims and evidence use. Embedded in the units were scaffolding supports in the form of prompts. This dissertation study explored students' responses to the scaffolding support prompts using a knowledge integration (KI) rubric as described by Linn and His (2000). Two teachers, each with about 150 students in five classes of about 25 each, participated in the study. Each teacher had three classes of students that received a version one and the other two classed received version two of "From Genotype to Phenotype" unit. Using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS), I explored whether students' scores, as measured by the KI rubric, varied by the unit version the students received or by the teacher they had. The findings suggested that the two versions of the unit were equally valuable as there were no significant differences in test scores between students who interacted with different unit versions, F(1, 141) = 3.35, p = 0.07. However, there was a significant difference between test scores of students who had different teachers, F (1, 141) = 12.51, p = 0.001. Furthermore, apart from scoring for scientific accuracy, responses were also examined to establish whether students held some of the conceptions reported in literature about genetic inheritance. Where possible, attempts were made to identify whether students were using evidence from the unit or their out-of-school experiences in their responses to the scaffolding support prompts. It was evident that about half of the students attributed most of their inherited traits to a specific parent they resemble for that trait. In this dissertation study, the term students' resemblance theory was used to refer to the aforementioned students' reasoning. Additional, I argue that students' resemblance theory may be used to explain students' thinking when they incorrectly believe that boys or girls inherit more genes from their father or mother based on gender resemblance. Consequently, I argued that students' resemblance theory may influence students' learning and understanding about Mendel's law of segregation which include the following principles; genes exist in more than one form, offspring inherit two alleles for each trait, allele pairs separate during meiosis and alleles can be recessive or dominant. This study documented students' conceptions related to Mendel's law of segregation.
... The game was intended to provide an engaging environment in which first and second year students could tackle an open-ended problem (e.g. a problem with unknown elements and multiple solution paths) and in the process improve their content knowledge and scientific literacy. Science educators suggest that one way to promote scientific literacy is to provide learners with the opportunity to tackle open-ended problems in relatively risk free settings (Hume, 2009;Krajcik, McNeill, and & Reiser, 2008;Linn, Eylon & Davis, 2004). Over the past decade, science educators have expressed concern about the preparedness of students enrolled in undergraduate science courses, specifically with regard to their level of scientific literacy. ...
... The principle of relevance to the students' lived experience came into play throughout the design of the game. The thinking was that if learners were provided with the opportunity to apply what they learned to their own lives (Boon, 2009, Linn et al., 2004Zohar & Nemet, 2002) they would gain a better understanding of the scientific phenomena being explored in the game. ...
This design case describes the work involved in developing a digital game-based learning environment, work that was part of a PhD research project. The designer was involved in all aspects of the project: conducting research into content that was included in the game, exploring the gaming platform (Second Life), adapting scientific literature for use in the game, consulting with science instructors, building the gaming environment, and writing scripts for objects in the environment. The gaming environment was a fictional town site called Budworm. The game was designed to promote scientific literacy in first and second year science undergraduate students through collaborative work on an open-ended problem related to the management of water resources in a region of western Canada subject to extremes in water availability. One of the design goals was to model the kind of environment that scientists encounter while they formulate research questions, a complex environment that involves collaboration with colleagues, creativity and a willingness to explore. Instructional experts in three scientific fields (biology, chemistry, and geosciences) were consulted during the course of this design, as was an expert in instructional design. The final product was the game and a set of game design principles that were informed by the literature on educational gaming and consultations with the instructional experts.
... In addition, the connectedness within students' knowledge structures is also an important aspect to determine levels of knowledge integration. To measure the connectedness, the knowledge integration rubric developed by Linn et al. [55][56][57][58] is incorporated into the design of the assessment questions used in this study. The rubric of Linn et al. categorizes students' knowledge structure into six levels: ranging from low to high: no answer, no link, partial link, full link, complex link, and systemic link [57]. ...
The galvanic cell is a typical interdisciplinary topic, which is primarily taught in chemistry but its underpinning is closely related to physics. Student learning in galvanic cell has been extensively studied in chemistry education, which has revealed a large number of misconceptions that are difficult to change through traditional instruction. A source of the learning difficulties is that most students lack an explanatory framework to integrate the many complex phenomena and processes into a coherent knowledge system. As a result, students often rely on memorization of terms, laws, and equations in solving problems but without a meaningful understanding of their reasoning. To address the deficit in learning, this study aims to help students develop an explanatory framework for supporting an integrated knowledge structure. Specifically, a conceptual framework model for galvanic cell is developed based on the central idea from physics, which is used as the core concept for mechanistic explanations of the related chemistry concepts. Guided by the conceptual framework, an instrument is developed to assess the knowledge integration in student learning of galvanic cell. A combination of qualitative and quantitative measures was used to assess the levels of knowledge integration in learning galvanic cell with a large number of Chinese high school and college students. The assessment results show that the conceptual framework model can effectively represent the knowledge structures of students at different levels of knowledge integration. The galvanic cell conceptual framework and assessment results can provide useful resources for teachers to develop instruction for promoting knowledge integration.
Published by the American Physical Society 2024
... After the hypotheses were created, the students performed their experiments. Active student involvement in learning processes while emphasizing supporting knowledge claims with observations and experiences is one of the features of inquiry-based learning (Linn et al., 2004). The first was related to the production of oxygen; the water plant elodea was used for this. ...
... ENA was originally developed to model cognitive networks such as patterns and structures of knowledge, values, or skills (Shaffer et al., 2016). It has been evidenced that students' conceptions during science learning may be in isolated pieces initially, but are working towards integrated knowledge structures (Gerard et al., 2022;Linn et al., 2004). Research has started to employ ENA to identify structures of students' epistemic ideas of science (Peters-Burton et al., 2022) and their conceptions of a science topic related to food webs (Rachmatullah & Wiebe, 2022). ...
The study employed epistemic network analysis (ENA) to investigate students’ conceptions of science learning with technology. One-hundred and eleven tenth-grade students were asked to express via drawings their conceptions of experienced and ideal learning of science with technology. Their drawings were coded into 20 elements in seven categories. ENA was then employed to generate and compare network models that show structures of the students’ conceptions. The results suggest that the students’ conceptions are diverse and connected. It was found that (1) the students’ conceptions of experienced and ideal learning of science with technology were significantly different, (2) the students who emphasized understanding as the main goal of science learning were better able to envision ideal learning of science with technology in light of how innovative technology can be used to enhance learning experiences, (3) the students who emphasized testing showed conceptions of science learning with technology limited to inside classrooms, and (4) the students who emphasized both understanding and testing demonstrated a pragmatic view of science learning and paid more attention to the affordances and effects of technology. Implications include that the potential of technology has yet to be fully taken advantage of to support science learning and that specific learning experiences may be tailored for students to address or broaden their conceptions of learning. The study may contribute to research by introducing new analysis methods of combining ENA with drawings and to theory and practice by revisiting theoretical frameworks of learning environments based on understanding of students’ conceptions.
... Recognizing a gap in one's own knowledge has a crucial role in learning. This recognition prepares the learners to form connections between the newly acquired knowledge and their prior knowledge where the gap exists (Chen, 2022;Linn et al., 2004). Recognizing gaps in knowledge also creates a motivation for learning by stimulating the learner's curiosity. ...
Many studies have characterized students' difficulties in understanding and reasoning about scientific mechanisms. Some of those studies have drawn implications on teaching mechanisms and how to guide students while reasoning mechanistically. In this theoretical article, I claim that one component that has not garnered much attention in the science education literature, unlike other components of mechanistic explanations, is the black box construct, that is, missing mechanistic parts within mechanistic explanations (explanatory black box). By reviewing the literature on mechanisms and mechanistic explanations in the philosophy of science and cognitive psychology, I argue that explanatory black boxes are an inherent part of mechanistic explanations and that their recognition is essential for learning mechanisms, scientific literacy, and understanding the nature of science. Examples from biology education are provided as a case of a complex multileveled scientific field. In the absence of a pedagogical approach for teaching explanatory black boxes, I turn to studies and frameworks from computer science education that may guide educators on how to begin discussing this construct in the science classroom.
... Ibourk et al. (2017) investigated how upper-elementary students' understanding of the core ideas of inheritance of traits and variation of traits changed as they participated in an inquiry-based technology-enhanced online unit that uses the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) https://wise.berkeley.edu (Linn, Eylon, et al., 2004). Ibourk et al. (2017) found that students made significant improvement from the pre-test to the post-test, 13.93-18.17, ...
Although extensive research has shown the important educational value of technology-enhanced online units on students' science learning, few studies have looked at upper elementary students' knowledge integration in a web-based inquiry science environment (WISE). This case study investigates how upper-elementary students responded to an online prompt, in an embedded assessment tool, to construct a scientific explanation around the variation of traits in their class and how a teacher provided feedback to encourage student discourse. Our findings show that students were able to identify which traits were more common in their class; however, they struggled with making a connection between variation of traits and inheritance of traits when analyzing data from their pie chart. Additionally, we show that an upper-elementary teacher used an embedded assessment tool to scaffold the iterative process of learning and feedback that occurs in an online platform that leverages learning technologies by engaging in high-level discourse moves. We suggest that teachers' use of embedded assessments in a technology-enhanced environment can encourage student self-reflection and support teachers in making evidence-based instructional decisions as well as provide immediate feedback along the way, which is a key support when students are not participating in traditional face-to-face classroom environments. ARTICLE HISTORY
... ENA was originally designed to address the challenges in learning analytics (Shaffer et al., 2009). Since its development, it has been used effectively in multiple fields to demonstrate the interrelatedness of cognitive elements in learning, including (a) surgery trainees' operative performance during a simulated procedure (Ruis et al., 2018); (b) development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) expertise (Linn et al., 2004); and (c) individual versus collaborative problem solving (Csanadi et al., 2018). ENA is an appropriate method for any study in which the structure of connections between coded data is meaningful, thus making it an appropriate research methodology for this study in which we explored the relationships among strategies readers self-report for navigating multimodal science books. ...
This convergent mixed-methods study investigated what urban fourth-grade students self-reported for navigating multimodal science books. Reported strategies included general reading processes, clarifying understanding, selecting portions to read, choosing an order to read the text, and interpreting the process in the text. A range of metacognitive awareness in navigating multimodal science books included categories of Limited, Novice, Competent , and Expert. Using Epistemic Network Analysis to visually map the cognitive processes students reported, we found urban students within this study relied on general literacy strategies including comprehension strategies , traditional text directionality, and identifying infor-mational text features. Fewer students reported using more sophisticated strategies for interpreting multimodal science books, such as previewing or integrating written text and visual representations. This study provides evidence that disciplinary literacy instruction should go beyond general literacy strategies to equip students with more specific strategies for integrating the written text and visual representations in multimodal science texts.
... These attributes may have a hierarchical structure (Templin & Bradshaw, 2014). Cognitive and educational research suggest that building conceptual understanding requires incorporating novel knowledge to preliminary or more basic knowledge (Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Smith, Wiser, Anderson, & Krajcik, 2006;Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). Therefore, acquisition of domain related attributes may proceed sequentially. ...
... There is a considerable body of research that construes active thinking not as the mere possession of particular bits of knowledge or the demonstration of skills in isolation, but as a process of integrating them to frame, investigate and solve complex problems (see, eg, DiSessa, 1988;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Madani et al., 2017;Shaffer, 2012). The theory of epistemic frames (Shaffer, 2012), for example, suggests that active thinking consists of the cognitive connections that people make among the knowledge, skills, values and ways of making decisions characteristic of some domain. ...
Learning‐in‐action depends on interactions with learning content, peers and real world problems. However, effective learning‐in‐action also depends on the extent to which students are active‐in‐thinking, making meaning of their learning experience. A critical component of any technology to support active thinking is the ability to ascertain whether (or to what extent) students have succeeded in internalizing the disciplinary strategies, norms of thinking, discourse practices and habits of mind that characterize deep understanding in a domain. This presents what we call a dilemma of modeling‐in‐context: teachers routinely analyze this kind of thinking for small numbers of students in activities they create or customize for the needs of their students; however, doing so at scale and in real‐time requires some automated processes for modeling student work. Current techniques for developing models that reflect specific pedagogical activities and learning objectives that a teacher might create require either more expertise or more time than teachers have. In this paper, we examine a theoretical approach to addressing the problem of modeling active thinking in its pedagogical context that uses teacher‐created rubrics to generate models of student work. The results of this examination show how appropriately constructed learning technologies can enable teachers to develop custom automated rubrics for modeling active thinking and meaning‐making from the records of students' dialogic work.
Practitioner Notes
What is already known about this topic Many immersive educational technologies, such as digital games and simulations, enable students to take consequential action in a realistic context and to interact with peers, mentors and pedagogical agents. Such technologies help students to be active‐in‐thinking: engaging deeply with, reflecting on and otherwise making meaning of their learning experience.
There are now many immersive educational technologies with integrated authoring tools that enable teachers to customize the learning experience with relative ease, reducing barriers to adoption and improving student learning.
Educational technologies that support learning‐in‐action typically contain student models that operate in real‐time to control the behavior of pedagogical agents, deliver just‐in‐time interventions, select an appropriate content or otherwise measure and promote active thinking, but these student models may not work appropriately if teachers customize the learning experience.
Much as there are authoring tools that allow teachers to customize the curriculum of a given learning technology, there is a need for authoring tools that allow teachers to customize the associated student models as well.
What this paper adds This paper presents a novel, rubric‐based approach to develop automated student models for new activities that teachers develop in digital learning environments that promote active thinking.
Our approach combines machine learning techniques with teacher expertise, allowing teachers to participate in the design of automated student models of active thinking that with further development could be scaled by leveraging their skills in rubric development.
Our results show that a rubric‐based approach can outperform a machine learning approach in this context. More importantly, in some cases, the rubric‐based approach can produce reliable automated models based on the information that a teacher can easily provide.
Implications for practice and/or policy If integrated into authoring tools, the rubric‐based approach could allow teachers to participate in the design of automated models for educational technologies customized to their instructional needs.
Through this design process, teachers could develop a better understanding of how the automated modeling system works, which in turn could increase the adoption of educational technologies that promote active thinking.
Because the rubric‐based approach enables teachers to identify key connections among concepts relevant to the pedagogical context, rather than general concepts or linguistic features, it is more likely to facilitate targeted feedback to help promote the development of active thinking.
... Following the Knowledge Integration framework (Linn et al. 2004), the unit's activities first elicited students' initial ideas on global climate change, added to students' repertoire of ideas, encouraged them to develop criteria in order to sort and distinguish these various ideas, and then guided them to refine the connections among ideas toward developing a normative understanding of the topic. Embedded prompts guided students' inspection of graphs and their explorations of NetLogo simulations (ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo) as they attempted to understand how solar radiation interacts with the surface and atmosphere of the earth, and the associated impacts of human activity on levels of greenhouse gases (Svihla and Linn 2012). ...
To begin to align curriculum and instruction with children’s cognitive abilities, the field requires a theoretical lens to examine how students engage in scientific reasoning for knowledge-building. This chapter employs a learning performance (LP) perspective as a lens to examine what it means for early learners to develop representational competence over a single “big science idea” within a single grade band in the elementary classroom. This lens includes: (a) identifying the knowledge elementary students bring with them into the lesson and the ways in which they build upon this knowledge through the practices of modeling, and (b) how elementary students scientifically reason about phenomena when engaging with the practice of modeling. The chapter will first describe the characteristics and design of learning performances, and the ways that this perspective is useful for describing development of both conceptual understanding and sophisticated reasoning about scientific phenomena. Next, it will examine how elementary students progress through a learning performance and how their progressions anchor learning progressions to productively inform instruction and assessment.
... There are several instructional models available to guide the implementation of inquiry-based instruction, and its five essential features, in science classrooms. Commonly used models include predict-observe-explain (White & Gunstone, 1992), knowledge integration (Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004), and learning cycle models (Lawson, Abraham, & Renner, 1989). Another commonly used inquiry-based instructional model is the 5E instructional model. ...
The purpose of this study was to investigate and better understand
preservice science teachers’ (PSTs’) practices when critiquing and
revising 5E (engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate) lesson
plans. A single instrumental case study approach was used. The study
was conducted at a public university in northeastern Turkey. The
participants, chosen using a convenience sampling method, were
51 second-year PSTs. They were asked to create 5E lesson plans on
a given objective in a total of 20 groups of two to three. Then each
group was asked to present its plans while other groups critiqued
each step of the 5E lesson plans presented. Data sources were the
participants’ written critique forms and the lesson plans that they
created in their groups. Data were analyzed using content analysis
and a rubric for the inquiry orientation of each lesson plan. Findings
indicated that the PSTs made both structural and procedural critiques
of the 5E lesson plans. Three of the most repeated critiques were a
lack of scientifically oriented questions, a lack of alternative assessment,
and a lack of gathering and analyzing data. The participants
adopted some critiques on the essential features of inquiry and
inquiry orientation of the lesson plans, such as formulating explanations.
However, they failed to address critiques on organizing data
and evaluating explanations by considering alternative explanations.
After the critique activity, the inquiry orientations of half of the lesson
plans increased. Implications for science teacher education concerning
the 5E lesson plan critique activities are discussed.
... In this study, the Knowledge Integration (KI) framework was used to inform both the curriculum and the assessment design of the unit. The KI framework views science learning as a process of eliciting, adding, distinguishing, and organizing ideas to explain scientific phenomena (Linn & Hsi, 2000;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Linn & Eylon, 2011;Kali, Linn, & Roseman, 2008;Gerard, Spitulnik, & Linn, 2010). This framework was also instrumental in helping design a unit that encourages learners to be actively involved in making sense of knowledge about genetics, in reflecting on their learning, and in connecting their classroom experiences with real life situations. ...
Genetics is an increasingly important topic in today's society, yet continues to be an ongoing challenge to the science education community and an important aspect of school student learning. This chapter examines how STEMGenetics, an inquiry-based technology-enhanced online unit, engages upper elementary students in building a better understanding of the concepts of inheritance of traits, variation of traits, and the life cycle of plants. Using pre/post measures, supplemented with qualitative analyses of students' responses, the authors show how upper elementary students' understanding of inheritance and variation of traits, as well as the life cycle of plants, resulted in greater learning gains. In addition, engaging in learning technologies, such as dynamic visualizations, provided the students opportunities to interact with the scientific phenomena and enhanced their reasoning about inheritance of traits and its relationship to the life cycle of plants.
... For example, DiSessa (1988) describes learning as a process whereby phenomenological primitives -isolated elements of experiential knowledge -are connected through theoretical frameworks to develop not just new knowledge but deep, systematic understanding. Similarly, Linn, Eylon, and Davis (2004) argue that students develop expertise by constructing a knowledge web: a repertoire of ideas and the connections among them. Such theories have also been developed in specific domains. ...
Learning to solve complex problems — problems whose solutions require the application of more than basic facts and skills — is critical to meaningful participation in the economic, social, and cultural life of the digital age. In this paper, we use a theoretical understanding of how professionals use reflection-in-action to solve complex problems to investigate how students learn this critical 21st-century skill and how we can develop and automate learning analytic techniques to assess that learning. We present a preliminary study examining the automated detection of reflective discourse during collaborative, complex problem solving. We analyze student reflection-on-action in a virtual learning environment, focusing on both reflection in individual discourse and collaborative reflection among students. Our results suggest that it is possible to detect student reflection on complex problems in virtual learning environments, but that different models may be appropriate depending on students’ prior domain experience.
... Knowledge integration (KI) ( Linn & Hsi, 2000;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004) focuses on connections between ideas (represented as "concepts" in concept maps) and includes the processes of eliciting existing repertoires of ideas, adding new ideas to the repertoire, developing criteria to distinguish ideas, and sorting out various connections and ideas. In a concept map, ideas are represented by concepts, connecting arrows, the labels of arrows, and the placement of concepts in specific areas. ...
Concept map activities often lack a subsequent revision step that facilitates knowledge integration. This study compares two kinds of concept map critique activities embedded in an evolution unit: Student dyads in one group compared their concept maps against an expert map while dyads in the other group conducted a peer-review. Analysis of the concept maps suggests that both treatment groups significantly improved their understanding of evolution. However, the two groups developed different criteria: The expert-map group focused mostly on concept-focused criteria like concept classification while the peer-review group used more link-focused criteria like link labels and missing connections. This paper suggests that both critique activities can be beneficial to making more coherent connections across different topics in biology.
... As students develop meaningful understandings, they relate new information to existing knowledge, forming connections that incorporate the new information into an organized, integrated knowledge structure (Ausubel, 1968;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Taber, 2001). Students' knowledge structures may not always be well organized, but consist of ideas from prior experiences that are not put together in a systematic, consistent manner (diSessa, 1988). ...
The development of learning progressions is one approach for creating the types of coherent curriculum frameworks that have been identified as predictors for high-performing scores on international stem assessments. We have developed a learning progression that describes how secondary students may build more sophisticated understanding of the structure, properties, and behavior of matter, and that also outlines the connections and relationships among ideas needed to develop more expert understanding. We used data collected from 82 individual interviews with secondary students and from assessments administered to 4000 Us middle school students to characterize how learners select and apply ideas to explain a range of transformation of matter phenomena. We found that most students relied on a limited set of ideas in their explanations, but that with the proper support, even middle school students were able to appropriately integrate ideas involving the structure of matter, conservation, interactions, and energy to provide mechanistic explanations of transformation phenomena.
... Für die Umsetzung von Informatik in der Schule sind Informatiklehrer notwendig, deren Wissen integrativ drei Bereiche umfasst: das disziplinäre Wissen über den Fachinhalt (science subject matter knowledge), das allgemein-pädagogische Wissen (pedagogical knowledge), das Wissen über die didaktische Aufbereitung des Fachinhaltes (pedagogical content knowledge) (Zeidler, 2002;Davis, 2004;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Abell, 2007). Im Besonderen muss sich die Informatiklehrerausbildung der Herausforderung stellen, was die Fachdisziplin Informatik ist und was sie nicht ist: "One of the challenges we face when discussing computer science education is that the field of computer science seems to progress so quickly that is difficult even for computer scientists to clearly define its contents and proscribe its boundaries." ...
Die besondere Rolle von Informatik in der Schule ist unter verschiedenen Aspekten erkannt. Für die Umsetzung von Informatik in der Schule sind Informatiklehrer notwendig, wel-che die Fachdisziplin Informatik adäquat vertreten können sowie profundes Wissen auch über deren neueste Forschungsfortschritte besitzen. Vor dem Hintergrund eines konzeptbasierten Ansatzes zur curricularen Grundlegung der Informatik in der Schule wird empirisch untersucht, ob zentrale Informatikkonzepte von Informatikprofessoren gegenüber -lehrern unterschiedlich beurteilt werden. Im speziellen wird untersucht, ob Informatiklehrer zentrale Inhaltskonzepte (z.B. data, model, process), die in Ausbildungsmodulen von Lehrerausbildungsprogrammen hoch gewichtet sind, anders beurteilen als Informatikprofessoren. Es zeigt sich, dass sich Infor-matikprofessoren gegenüber -lehrern in der Beurteilung zentraler Inhaltskonzepte unter Einbe-ziehung zentraler Prozesskonzepte (z.B. analyzing, finding relationships, generalizing) unter-scheiden. Zum anderen zeigt sich, dass die Gewichtung zentraler Informatikkonzepte in Lehrer-ausbildungsprogrammen einen Einfluss auf die Beurteilung von Informatikkonzepten durch Informatiklehrer besitzen. Die Ergebnisse sind bedeutsam für die Bewertung von Informatik-lehrerfort-und -ausbildungsprogrammen.
... Situated opportunities to learn, such as classroom-based professional development or master's-level course work focused on analyzing one's own students' work, allow teachers to integrate their knowledge (Davis, 2004;Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004;Putnam & Borko, 2000), making it more robust. This knowledge can be applied in multiple contexts, such as across science disciplines or in different lessons. ...
In this article, the authors argue for a design process in the development of educative curriculum materials that is theoretically and empirically driven. Using a design-based research approach, they describe their design process for incorporating educative features intended to promote teacher learning into existing, high-quality curriculum materials. The process entails analyzing a set of curriculum materials, character-izing students' opportunities to learn through teachers' enactment of the curricu-lum materials, and assessing students' learning outcomes. The authors then describe ways in which both theoretical perspectives and empirical data guided their design, development, and refinement process for educative features to enhance the curricu-lum materials, and give examples of the resulting features. Given the current policy environment in which there are heightened expectations for science teaching at the elementary level, the authors argue that testing and refining processes for developing curricular supports for teachers is of paramount importance. While the illustrations provided focus on science curriculum materials and instruction, the authors argue that the principles and processes applied generalize to the design of educative features across subject-matter areas.
... Projects present students with compelling inquiry questions embedded within relevant topics such as global climate change, airbag safety, and genetic inheritance. By making science accessible, and by providing instruction that encourages students to make their thinking visible to themselves and others, WISE projects promote the development of both integrated understanding as well as skills for autonomous, lifelong learning (Linn, Eylon, & Davis, 2004 ) . Dynamic visualizations refer to external representations used for learning that display processes of scienti fi c phenomena that change over time. ...
In our research we view metacognition and cognition as interacting pro- cesses that together promote coherent understanding. We propose that the use of the knowledge integration pattern to design instructional scaffolding encourages the interplay between these two processes. In this chapter, we present and discuss findings that indicate that instructional activities designed using the knowledge integration pattern promote student learning from dynamic visualizations by helping to overcome deceptive clarity.
This paper demonstrates that recurrent difficulties students encounter in learning subject-matter knowledge can be traced, in part, to assumptions about how students best learn knowledge that significantly shape instructional approaches. First, I review the significant influence of empiricist epistemological assumptions on education, covering student-centred pedagogical principles and instructional methods applied in progressive, constructivist, and conventional education. Empiricist epistemological assumptions presume that students learn best by relying primarily on and directly building upon their existing knowledge, experiences, and reasoning, particularly those familiar from everyday life. These assumptions have shaped pedagogical principles and methods such as relying on students' preinstructional knowledge and reasoning, concrete experiences, direct observations, or concrete visual images for learning. Next, I review evidence that empiricist-informed instructional applications often induce learning difficulties, such as erroneous inferences stemming from students' preinstructional knowledge, difficulty understanding content that diverges from students' prior knowledge, and confusion between concrete supports and abstract concepts. By tracing these difficulties to empiricist epistemological assumptions, this paper employs a genealogical epistemological analysis, which tracks the influence of epistemological assumptions on education across several levels, from pedagogical principles to instructional methods, down to students' learning. This analysis (a) explains the roots of certain learning difficulties and aids in anticipating them, (b) challenges pedagogical approaches by questioning their epistemological foundations, and (c) examines how the influence of problematic assumptions is connected to alignment with internationally promoted educational purposes. The influence of epistemological assumptions on education is significant yet understudied. Thus, the genealogical epistemological analysis proves crucial to critically analyze education.
Um der strukturellen und inhaltlichen Trennung zwischen fachwissenschaftlichen, fachdidaktischen und bildungswissenschaftlichen Studienelementen zu begegnen, sind in den letzten Jahren vielfältige und innovative Ansätze zu Kohärenz und Verzahnung von Studienelementen konzipiert worden. Ziel einer Verzahnung auf Lehrveranstaltungs- oder Materialebene ist dabei insbesondere die Förderung vernetzten Wissens bei Studierenden, das als Voraussetzung für ihre professionelle Handlungskompetenz als Lehrkraft gilt. Dieser Sammelband widmet sich der Wissensvernetzung bei Lehramtsstudierenden unterschiedlicher Fächer aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln und als Ergebnis verzahnter Lernangebote. Die Beiträge präsentieren eine facettenreiche Auswahl aktueller theoretischer, praxiserprobter und empirischer Ansätze zur Initiierung, Visualisierung und Messung von Wissensvernetzung. (DIPF/Orig.)
Context is regarded to crucially affect teachers’ application of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). However, whether and how contextual variables, such as instructional context or teaching experience, influence the concrete application of the different TPACK-components remains an open question. To explore teachers’ application of TPCK in various contexts, we re-analyzed data from two studies composing n = 198 pre-service and n = 243 in-service teachers. All teachers were asked to reason about the potential integration of educational technology across three instructional contexts (i.e., individualized learning, collaborative learning, and practice tasks). We analyzed the application of the different first-order TPACK-components (i.e., technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) using percentages and logistic regressions to determine the effects of instructional context and teaching experience. Additionally, we examined the co-occurrences of these components using Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). Overall, we found that technological knowledge played a dominant role across all instructional contexts regardless of teaching experience. However, the application of content knowledge varied considerably across instructional contexts. The analysis of the co-occurrences showed that technological and pedagogical knowledge was consistently applied together across all instructional contexts, while content knowledge co-occurred predominantly in practice tasks. Qualitative analyses further revealed that in-service teachers applied their TPCK in a more situated way in specific teaching scenarios, whereas pre-service teachers’ reasoning was more fragmented. These findings suggest that TPACK may be conceptualized as a dynamic construct that is applied differently depending on the context and teaching experience rather than a static integration of its components.
The ability to reason with representations is pivotal for successful learning in Organic Chemistry and is closely linked to representational competence. Given the visual nature of this discipline, this comprises competency in extracting and processing relevant visual information. With regard to the resonance concept, proficiency in identifying whether electron delocalization applies in a molecule is an essential prerequisite to using this concept in problem-solving. However, prior research shows that students struggle to recognize whether molecules profit from electron delocalization, and seldom use this concept in problem-solving. As it remains unclear how the variation of structural features affects students’ consideration of resonance, this quantitative study seeks to identify characteristics regarding students’ perception of electron delocalization. To this end, undergraduate students enrolled in an Organic Chemistry I course ( N = 699) completed an online survey in which they had to decide on resonance stabilization for molecular structures with varying structural features. K -means cluster analysis was performed to explore patterns in students’ proficiency in discerning resonance stabilization and how they relate to other performance variables ( e.g. , time-on-task). The results suggest pattern recognition approaches with students’ attention being guided by singular structural features or structures’ visual similarity to familiar patterns ( i.e. , allylic carbocations), with less attention to implicit features.
A central objective of science education is to foster a profound comprehension of fundamental scientific principles among students. Research has shown that a highly integrated knowledge structure is a key factor in achieving a deep understanding. This research has developed a friction force conceptual framework to model students’ different understandings of friction force from a knowledge integration perspective. Utilizing the established conceptual framework, this study devised and implemented an evaluation of friction force among a cohort of 598 grade-10 students in China. The assessment outcomes were then analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that the conceptual framework model effectively represents the knowledge structures of students at different levels of knowledge integration, and the students’ understanding of friction force can be divided into three levels: novice, intermediate, and expert. Furthermore, emphasizing the passivity of friction force can help students gain a deeper understanding of the concept of friction force, thereby forming a more comprehensive knowledge structure. This study provides an effective strategy for students to progress from novices to experts. Keywords: conceptual understanding, knowledge integration, conceptual framework, friction force
Inquiry-based instruction has played an important role in science education, and been recognized as a critical approach to improve students’ scientific learning effectiveness. However, current research revealed that it is a challenge for teacher education programs to improve pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional activity design competency. Due to the dynamic and complicated process of the instructional design competency improvement, there is a strong need for new methods that could trace this process. Considering the Knowledge Integration (KI) theory has been demonstrated to be able to help science teachers design their inquiry-based instructional activities in a large amount of existing research, in this study, a KI-based collaborative learning environment was designed to support 19 pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional activity design. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) was applied to trace the development process of their inquiry-based instructional activity design e behaviour patterns. Data analysis results revealed that the pre-service science teachers demonstrated gradually more active in “guiding students to design exploratory activities” and “guiding students to communicate and cooperate” in their instructional designs during the process of using the KI-based collaborative learning environment. Through identifying and comparing the design patterns of the high-performing and low-performing groups, the results showed that the low-performing groups demonstrated more active on “posing inquiry questions” and “guiding students to formulate scientific explanation,” while the high performing groups demonstrated more active in “guiding students to design exploratory activities” and “guiding students to communicate and cooperate.” Furthermore, the semi-structured interview results demonstrated that the KI-based collaborative learning environment not only provided the pre-service science teachers a convenient way on online collaboration, but also helped them form more normative and integrated understandings on inquiry-based instruction. However, this study demonstrated that quite a few pre-service science teachers still had misconceptions on inquiry-based instruction. Suggestions are provided for improving pre-service science teachers’ inquiry-based instructional design competency in a technology-enhanced learning environment.
Science teachers have to master representational to communicate and be aware of the students’ difficulties in understanding science concepts. This study aims to determine representational fluency as part of science communication skills in pre-service physics teachers. This study uses descriptive analysis techniques based on the percentage. The research subjects are 50 pre-service physics teachers aged between 19 and 22 years. This study was conducted at the Study Program of Physics Education of a college in Maluku. How fluent is a pre-service physics teacher in representing the concept of electrostatic was measured using 15 valid and reliable representational fluency multiple choice test that includes four component of representational fluency: constructing single representation, constructing multiple representation, translating between representation and reviewing single representation. The findings of the present study indicate that although students had started to learn concepts of electrostatic their representational fluency is still low. The preservice teachers’ rate of giving correct answers to the test items varies between 8% and 48%. The mean score of the pre-service teachers was found to be 4.06. Keywords: representational fluency, electrostatic
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To reduce biological risks, raising awareness for dual-use issues already at the level of university education is essential. Currently, most life sciences education programs do not incorporate biosecurity and dual-use in their regular curricula. Consequently, the responsibility rests with individual lecturers and depends on their initiative to incorporate dual-use topics into teaching activities. Students interested in biosecurity and dual-use topics often only have the option to educate themselves in external or online courses. Here, we provide practical guidance on how to initiate and integrate a dual-use education program within the curriculum and provide a selection of existing teaching materials. In addition, we suggest key learning objectives to guide the planning of dual-use courses. Different course formats like lectures, seminars, or stand-alone events are discussed regarding their advantages, disadvantages, and suitability for conveying the learning objectives to different educational stages and audiences. As a minimum, we recommend the incorporation of dual-use issues into at least one mandatory course. Ideally, students should additionally participate in in-depth seminars, which can be voluntary and offered in cooperation with external organisations.
Understanding how genes affect traits is an important part of scientific literacy in the twenty-first century. However, studies have shown the challenges of teaching and learning these multilevel mechanisms. Research in science education has mapped some of the reasons for students’ difficulties and has explored possible approaches to overcoming them. Those studies have found that the way in which genes, proteins and the complexity of genetic mechanisms are presented to students is inadequate. By reviewing some of the literature in the field of genetics education, I identified three milestones in the progression toward a mechanistic understanding in genetics: (a) establishing a correct causal connection between genes and traits; (b) establishing an understanding of genes–proteins–traits mechanisms, and (c) identifying points of regulation and understanding how environmental signals can modulate gene-to-trait mechanisms. In this chapter, I present the identification of these three milestones and propose novel scaffolds for moving along the progression of mechanistic understanding. I also discuss these milestones in the context of genetics learning progression and draw implications for teaching genetics and for future studies in the field.
Social VR's characteristics, by offering authentic learning environments that enable interaction remotely and synchronously and permit learning experiences that affect learners in a multi-sensory way, offer great potential for teaching and learning processes. However, concerning its use to promote pre-service teachers' TPACK in initial teacher education, there remains a research desideratum. In this context, this exploratory study addressed the following research question: How did pre-service teachers' TPACK develop using a social VR learning environment prototype in comparison to a video-conferencing platform throughout a semester? Following a design-based research approach, an action-oriented pedagogical concept for teaching and learning in social VR was designed and implemented for initial teacher education at a German university with a convenience sample of 14 participants. The lesson plans were collected and analyzed with the help of Epistemic Network Analysis (Shaffer, 2017) at three points of time during the semester and the GATI reflection process (Krauskopf et al., 2018). Further, 14 GATI diagrams gave insights into pre-service teachers' self-estimated TPACK. As the results indicate, pre-service students constructed more complex mental models of TPACK in social VR compared to the video-conferencing platform, indicating that more interrelations between knowledge domains could be constructed by planning and designing VR-integrated lesson plans.
Virtual learning environments have the potential to support students’ development of design skills in engineering education. However, few approaches exist for modeling and measuring design learning as it emerges in authentic practices, which often includes collaboration. This study merges learning sciences research with engineering design education to develop an approach for modeling and measuring design thinking. I propose a connected design rationale model which identifies relationships among design moves and rationale. Results from a qualitative examination of how professional engineers make connections among moves and rationales were used as the foundation to examine students in virtual internships. Using digital collaborative chat data and Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), the discourse networks of students who had high and low scores in the virtual internship were compared to the discourse patterns of professional engineers to determine if measuring connected design rationale reveals meaningful differences between expert and novice design thinking. The results show a significant difference between high and low-performing students in terms of their patterns of connections and that high-performing students in the virtual internship made connections that were more like experts than low-performing students. Results suggest that a connected design rationale model distinguishes between experts and novices in meaningful ways and can be a robust approach for research in learning sciences and engineering education.
A fundamental goal of education is to inspire and instill deep, meaningful, and long-lasting conceptual change within the knowledge landscapes of students. This commentary posits that the tools of network science could be useful in helping educators achieve this goal in two ways. First, methods from cognitive psychology and network science could be helpful in quantifying and analyzing the structure of students’ knowledge of a given discipline as a knowledge network of interconnected concepts. Second, network science methods could be relevant for investigating the developmental trajectories of knowledge structures by quantifying structural change in knowledge networks, and potentially inform instructional design in order to optimize the acquisition of meaningful knowledge as the student progresses from being a novice to an expert in the subject. This commentary provides a brief introduction to common network science measures and suggests how they might be relevant for shedding light on the cognitive processes that underlie learning and retrieval, and discusses ways in which generative network growth models could inform pedagogical strategies to enable meaningful long-term conceptual change and knowledge development among students.
Knowledge-in-Use, i.e., the ability to apply what one has learned, is a major goal of education and involves the ability to transfer one's knowledge. While some general principles of knowledge transfer have been revealed, the literature is full of inconclusive results and it remains hard to predict successful transfer. However, research into expertise suggests that how one organizes one's knowledge is critical for successful transfer. Drawing on data from a larger study on the learning of energy, we employed network analysis to investigate how the organization of students' knowledge about energy influenced their ability to transfer and what role achievement goal orientation may have played in this. We found that students that had more coherently organized knowledge networks were more successful in transfer. Furthermore, we also found a connection between mastery goal orientation and the organization of students' knowledge networks. Our results extend the literature by providing evidence for a direct connection between the organization of students' knowledge networks, their success in transfer, and their goal orientation and hint at the complexities in the relationship between mastery approach goal orientation and successful transfer beyond what is reported in the literature.
Zusammenfassung
Die Vermittlung von Wissen über chemische Phänomene und eines Verständnisses grundlegender Begriffe, Gesetzmäßigkeiten und Prinzipien der Chemie zählen zu den zentralen Zielen des Chemieunterrichts. Zu diesem Zweck sind bildungsadministrative Vorgaben zunehmend durch zentrale fachliche Konzepte bzw. Denk- und Arbeitsweisen strukturiert, die entsprechend den Fokus der unterrichtlichen Aktivitäten bilden sollen. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Untersuchung wurde den Fragen nachgegangen, inwieweit ein Kompetenzzuwachs bezüglich der Basiskonzepte des Fachs Chemie (Chemische Reaktion, Energie sowie Materie als Zusammenführung der beiden Basiskonzepte Stoff-Teilchen und Struktur-Eigenschaftsbeziehungen) über die Schuljahre 9 bis 12 festgestellt werden kann und inwieweit mit diesem Zuwachs auch ansteigende Zusammenhänge zwischen den Konzepten über Schuljahre hinweg einhergehen. Die erhaltenen Befunde werden dabei als Indiz gedeutet, inwieweit kohärente und kumulative Lerngelegenheiten vorliegen, die letztlich zu einem systematischen Kompetenzaufbau bzgl. der einzelnen Konzepte führen sollten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sowohl hinsichtlich des Kompetenzzuwachses als auch hinsichtlich der Zusammenhänge zwischen den drei erhobenen Konzeptbereichen eher geringe Effekte vorliegen. Zudem lässt sich nur bedingt eine systematische Kompetenzentwicklung aller drei Konzeptbereiche festhalten, sondern das Befundmuster deutet vielmehr an, dass es zu einer Verschiebung des Fokus vom Konzept Materie zum Konzept Chemische Reaktion über den Verlauf der Jahrgänge 9 bis 12 kommt, während der Konzeptbereich Energie kaum im Fokus des Unterrichts zu stehen scheint.
Education goals have evolved to emphasize student acquisition of the knowledge and attributes necessary to successfully contribute to the workforce and global economy of the twenty-first Century. The new education standards emphasize higher end skills including reasoning, creativity, and open problem solving. Although there is substantial research evidence and consensus around identifying essential twenty-first Century skills, there is a lack of research that focuses on how the related subskills interact and develop over time. This paper provides a brief review of physics education research as a means for providing a context towards future work in promoting deep learning and fostering abilities in high-end reasoning. Through a synthesis of the literature around twenty-first Century skills and physics education, a set of concretely defined education and research goals are suggested for future research, along with how these may impact the next generation physics courses and how physics should be taught in the future.
This mixed methods study explored the relationship between what beginning readers say about their thought processes for self-monitoring their reading and their ability to self-correct. Using Epistemic Network Analysis to visually map the metacognitive processes first-graders reported, results indicate a statistically significant difference (p ≤ 0.001) related to ability to self-correct miscues. Students more proficient in self-correcting miscues relied on an integrated use of strategies related to visual, structure, and meaning cues. Those less proficient in self-monitoring provided more general responses or were less likely to explain their thinking processes; however, they were also more attentive to specific meaning cues. This study provides visual evidence for building upon the unique strengths of all readers.
Web-based learning is a growing field in education, yet empirical research into the design of high quality Web-based university science instruction is scarce. A one-week asynchronous online module on the Bohr Model of the atom was developed and implemented guided by the knowledge integration framework. The unit design aligned with three identified metaprinciples of science learning: making science accessible, making thinking visible, and promoting autonomy. Students in an introductory chemistry course at a large east coast university completed either an online module or traditional classroom instruction. Data from 99 students were analyzed and results showed significant knowledge growth in both online and traditional formats. For the online learning group, findings revealed positive student perceptions of their learning experiences, highly positive feedback for online science learning, and an interest amongst students to learn chemistry within an online environment.
In this exploration of the evolution of the work I have done as an elementary science teacher educator, I focus on the goals I have set for my elementary methods class, the pedagogies I have used and privileged, and my own changing identities as a science educator and teacher educator. I draw on my syllabi, assignment descriptions, and published scholarship to discern themes and shifts in goals, emphasis, expectations, and values. I illustrate how the evolution of my course reflects key developments in science education and teacher education: the move toward an emphasis on practice. The chapter provides a meta-self-study, examining a science teacher educator’s work and identity as evidenced by instrumental artifacts of that work and scholarly products resulting from it.
Concept map activities often lack a subsequent revision step that facilitates knowledge integration. This study compares two collaborative critique activities using a Knowledge Integration Map (KIM), a form of concept map. Four classes of high school biology students (n = 81) using an online inquiry-based learning unit on evolution were assigned to one of two conditions. Student dyads in one condition compared their concept maps against an expert map while dyads in the other condition conducted a peer-review. Analysis of the concept maps suggests that students in both conditions improved their understanding of evolution from pretest to posttest. However, the two conditions lead to different criteria: Students in the expert-map condition focused mostly on concept-focused criteria like concept classification while students in the peer-review condition used more link-focused criteria like link labels and missing connections. This paper suggests that both forms of KIM critique activities can be beneficial for constructing more coherent connections across different topics in evolution education. These results support the value of collaborative KIM critique activities and help clarify the forms of collaborative activities that are most likely to be effective to facilitate knowledge integration processes. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach
The purpose of this study was to analyze how mobile technologies were incorporated and implemented in an outdoor learning activity. Two classes of primary school students participated in the experiment. Using activity theory as an analytical framework, it is found that underlying tensions provided rich insights into system dynamics and that technological affordances could be limited by mismatches between the Tools themselves, and between Tools and the ways that were used by learners or arranged by the instructor. The subtle human factors present in the use of technologies should be carefully considered. The influence of mobile devices on learner experiences in experiential learning is also thoroughly discussed.
In this paper, we examine students' reflections about the value of two photo-sharing activities that were implemented in undergraduate Biology and Chemistry subjects. Both activities aimed, broadly, to provide support for authentic and meaningful learning experiences in undergraduate science. Although the activities were similar - both required students to capture and share images as part of an independent inquiry activity - students in the Biology case study were more positive, overall, than the Chemistry students in their evaluation of the activity. In this paper, we examine the findings from the two case studies in parallel to provide insight into our understanding of meaningful learning in undergraduate science. The results suggest that, for meaningful learning to occur, the learning activity needs to be well aligned with students' individual learning goals and with the objectives and characteristics of the course. In the two case studies examined in this paper, this alignment was successful for the Biology case study but less successful in the Chemistry case study.
The 16 German states exhibit substantial differences regarding the organization as well as the substantial focus of computer science education at their schools. This empirical study investigates how teachers from two German states with different educational systems assess the value of central concepts of computer science. We asked 120 teachers in each country to complete our questionnaire, received 38 responses and applied a specific split-plot design to evaluate the results. The findings show that the assessments by the two groups differ regarding the content concepts model, system, computer, and information. Additionally, we detected differences in the rating of some individual process concepts (analyzing, classifying, finding relationships, generalizing, comparing, and ordering) in relation to the content concept model. These results are consistent with the differences in the focus of the curricula as well as with the content of the teacher education programs in the two states.
Energy is a fundamental unifying concept of science, yet common approaches to energy instruction in middle school have shown little success with helping students develop their naïve ideas about energy into more sophisticated understandings that are useful for making sense of their experiences. While traditional energy instruction often focuses on simple calculations of energy in idealized systems, we developed a new middle school energy unit that focuses qualitatively on the energy transformations that occur in everyday, nonidealized, systems. In this article, we describe our approach to energy instruction and report the effects this approach had on students' energy conceptions, ability to perform on distal criterion-referenced assessments, and preparation for future energy-related learning. Results indicate that during instruction, students' energy conceptions progress from a set of disconnected ideas toward an integrated understanding that is organized around the principle of transformation, and that these more integrated conceptions both boost students' ability to make sense of everyday phenomena and lay the groundwork for more efficient and meaningful energy-related learning in the future. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed95:670–699, 2011
We describe efforts toward the development of a hypothetical learning progression (HLP) for the growth of grade 7–14 students' models of the structure, behavior and properties of matter, as it relates to nanoscale science and engineering (NSE). This multi-dimensional HLP, based on empirical research and standards documents, describes how students need to incorporate and connect ideas within and across their models of atomic structure, the electrical forces that govern interactions at the nano-, molecular, and atomic scales, and information in the Periodic Table to explain a broad range of phenomena. We developed a progression from empirical data that characterizes how students currently develop their knowledge as part of the development and refinement of the HLP. We find that most students are currently at low levels in the progression, and do not perceive the connections across strands in the progression that are important for conceptual understanding. We suggest potential instructional strategies that may help students build organized and integrated knowledge structures to consolidate their understanding, ready them for new ideas in science, and help them construct understanding of emerging disciplines such as NSE, as well as traditional science disciplines. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:687–715, 2010
How should the information age affect teaching goals and methods? One of the claims voiced by educators is that computerized
information tools make systematic study and acquisition of information redundant. Put bluntly this claim states that students
should no longer ‘waste’ their time learning or memorizing texts and facts that can be retrieved in a keystroke. We attempted
to examine the current role of information acquisition in learning processes by interviewing 24 expert academic researchers
who work regularly with computerized information tools. Analysis of the researchers’ descriptions of their learning and thinking
processes revealed that, according to the majority of the researchers, computerized information tools have not reduced the
importance learning and acquiring information. These exploratory findings suggest that information acquisition should still
be an important part of the curriculum in the age of information.
The metaphor of children and lay adults as intuitive scientists has gained wide acceptance. Although useful in one sense, pertaining to scientific understanding, in another, pertaining to the process of scientific thinking, the metaphor may be fundamentally misleading. Research is reviewed indicating that processes of scientific thinking differ significantly in children, lay adults, and scientists. Hence, it is the instruments of scientific thinking, not just the products, that undergo “strong restructuring” (Carey, 1986). A framework for conceptualizing development of scientific thinking processes is proposed, centering on progressive differentiation and coordination of theory and evidence. This development is metacognitive, as well as strategic. It requires thinking about theories, rather than merely with them, and thinking about evidence, rather than merely being influenced by it, and, hence, reflects the attainment of control over the interaction of theories and evidence in one's own thinking.
Tested whether Ss' incorrect beliefs about motion, which were apparent in pencil-and-paper abstract problems, were actually held in real situations. Several findings in the literature suggest that abstract or unrealistic tasks may fail to tap knowledge and reasoning abilities that are routinely used in more concrete or realistic situations. Three experiments examined this possibility in the context of a specific naive belief, the curvilinear impetus belief. In Exp I, 90 undergraduates were presented with the ball-and-string problem under 3 conditions: no motion, rotation, and trajectories. In Exp II, 72 Ss viewed the spiral tube problem under 6 trajectories. In Exp III, 50 Ss threw a puck through a curved tube. Contrary to expectations, results suggest that the curvilinear impetus belief is used not only on pencil-and-paper problems but also in situations where people observe and interact with moving objects. (18 ref)
This article is a sequel to the conversation on learning initiated by the editors of Educational Researcher in volume 25, number 4. The author’s first aim is to elicit the metaphors for learning that guide our work as learners, teachers, and researchers. Two such metaphors are identified: the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor. Subsequently, their entailments are discussed and evaluated. Although some of the implications are deemed desirable and others are regarded as harmful, the article neither speaks against a particular metaphor nor tries to make a case for the other. Rather, these interpretations and applications of the metaphors undergo critical evaluation. In the end, the question of theoretical unification of the research on learning is addressed, wherein the purpose is to show how too great a devotion to one particular metaphor can lead to theoretical distortions and to undesirable practices.
This 2003 book comprehensively covers all major topics of Vygotskian educational theory and its classroom applications. Particular attention is paid to the Vygotskian idea of child development as a consequence rather than premise of learning experiences. Such a reversal allows for new interpretations of the relationships between cognitive development and education at different junctions of the human life span. It also opens new perspectives on atypical development, learning disabilities, and assessment of children's learning potential. Classroom applications of Vygotskian theory are discussed in the book. Teacher training and the changing role of a teacher in a sociocultural classroom is discussed in addition to the issues of teaching and learning activities and peer interactions. Relevant research findings from the US, Western Europe, and Russia are brought together to clarify the possible new applications of Vygotskian ideas in different disciplinary areas.
Recent research in science education examines learning from four perspectives which we characterize as a concept-learning focus, a developmental focus, a differential focus, and a focus on problem solving. This paper illustrates how these perspectives, considered together offer new insights into the knowledge and reasoning processes of science students and provide a framework for identifying mechanisms governing how individuals change their knowledge and thinking processes. An integrated examination of the four research perspectives strongly suggests that in-depth coverage of several science topics will benefit students far more than fleeting coverage of numerous science topics.
Everyday literacy practices are changing at an unprecedented pace, and speculation as to
the impact of media and interactive communication technologies on current conceptions of
youth’s reading, writing, and viewing is evident on many fronts. The implications of this for
teacher educators and classroom teachers are discussed.
This book synthesizes the most current literature and research on scientific inquiry and nature of science in K-12 instruction. It is unique in its presentation of the distinctions and overlaps of inquiry and nature of science as instructional outcomes. The text would be appropriate for individuals preparing to become science teachers as well as experienced teachers. Researchers and teachers will find the text interesting as it carefully explores the subtleties and challenges of designing curriculum and instruction for integrating inquiry and nature of science.
In this article, Timothy Lensmire reflects on his teaching and research in a third-grade classroom in order to raise new questions about the theory and practice of writing workshop approaches. Using Bakhtin's notion of carnival, Lensmire highlights both the captivating strengths and perhaps less apparent weaknesses of such literacy practices in schools. As writing workshop approaches become increasingly popular, his work opens an important dialogue between theory and practice.
How do children acquire the vast array of concepts, strategies, and skills that distinguish the thinking of infants and toddlers from that of preschoolers, older children, and adolescents? In this new book, Robert Siegler addresses these and other fundamental questions about children's thinking. Previous theories have tended to depict cognitive development much like a staircase. At an early age, children think in one way; as they get older, they step up to increasingly higher ways of thinking. Siegler proposes that viewing the development within an evolutionary framework is more useful than a staircase model. The evolution of species depends on mechanisms for generating variability, for choosing adaptively among the variants, and for preserving the lessons of past experience so that successful variants become increasingly prevalent. The development of children's thinking appears to depend on mechanisms to fulfill these same functions. Siegler's theory is consistent with a great deal of evidence. It unifies phenomena from such areas as problem solving, reasoning, and memory, and reveals commonalities in the thinking of people of all ages. Most important, it leads to valuable insights regarding a basic question about children's thinking asked by cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists: How does change occur?
Roger Schank's influential book, Dynamic Memory, described how computers could learn based upon what was known about how people learn. Since that book's publication in 1982, Dr Schank has turned his focus from artificial intelligence to human intelligence. Dynamic Memory Revisited contains the theory of learning presented in the original book, extending it to provide principles for teaching and learning. It includes Dr Schank's important theory of case-based reasoning and assesses the role of stories in human memory. In addition, it covers his ideas on non-conscious learning, indexing, and the cognitive structures that underlie learning by doing. Dynamic Memory Revisited is crucial reading for all who are concerned with education and school reform. It draws attention to how effective learning takes place and provides instruction for developing software that truly helps students learn.
What is intelligence? Can it be increased by teaching? If so, how, and what difference would an increase make? Before we can answer these questions, we need to clarify them. Jonathan Baron argues that when we do so we find that intelligence has much to do with rational thinking, and that the skills involved in rational thinking are in fact teachable, at least to some extent. Rationality and Intelligence develops and justifies a prescriptive theory of rational thinking in terms of utility theory and the theory of rational life plans. The prescriptive theory, buttressed by other assumptions, suggests that people generally think too little and in a way that is insufficiently critical of the initial possibilities that occur to them. However these biases can be - and sometimes are - corrected by education.
A Dutch policy scientist once said the information and knowledge in the twenty-first century has the shelf life of fresh fish, and learning in this age often means learning where and how to find something and how to relate it to a specific situation instead of knowing everything one needs to know. On top of this, the world has become so highly interconnected that we have come to realise that every decision that we make can have repercussions somewhere else. To touch as many bases as possible, we need to work with knowledgeable others from different fields (multiple agents) and take heed of their points of view (multiple representations). To do this, we make increasing use of computers and computer-mediated communication. If computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is not simply a newly discovered hype in education, what is it and why are we writing a book about it? Dissecting the phrase into its constituent parts, we see that first of all CSCL is about learning, and in the twenty-first century this usually means constructivist learning.
Although research in collaborative learning has a fairly long history, dating back at least to the early work of Piaget and Vygotsky, it is only recently that workers have begun to apply some of its findings to the design of computer based learning systems. The early generation of the!le systems focused on their potential for supporting individual learning: learning could be self paced; teaching could be adapted to individual learners' needs. This was certainly the promise of the later generation of intelligent tutoring systems. However, this promise has yet to be realised. Not only are there still some very difficult research problems to solve in providing adaptive learning systems, but there are also some very real practical constraints on the widespread take up of individualised computer based instruction. Reseachers soon began to realise that the organisational, cultural and social contexts of the classroom have to be taken into account in designing systems to promote effective learning. Much of the work that goes on in classrooms is collaborative, whether by design or not. Teachers also need to be able to adapt the technology to their varying needs. Developments in technology, such as networking, have also contributed to changes in the way in which computers may be envisaged to support learning. In September 1989, a group of researchers met in Maratea, Italy, for a NATO-sponsored workshop on "Computer supported collaborative . learning". A total of 20 researchers from Europe (Belgium.
Education has traditionally studied the world by bringing it into the classroom. This can result in situated learning that appears to students to have no relevance outside the classroom. Students acquire inert, decontextualized knowledge that they cannot apply to real problems. The obvious solution to this shortcoming is to reverse the situation and bring the classroom to the phenomena: to learn in a rich, real-world context. The problem with the real world is that it is complex and filled with interactions that are hard to sort out. The editors and authors believe that the right tools might help students with this sorting process and result in learning in rich contexts. This book is an account of a series of experiments designed to explore the validity of this insight.
Constructivism is one of the most influential theories in contemporary education and learning theory. It has had great influence in science education. The papers in this collection represent, arguably, the most sustained examination of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of constructivism yet published.
Topics covered include: orthodox epistemology and the philosophical traditions of constructivism; the relationship of epistemology to learning theory; the connection between philosophy and pedagogy in constructivist practice; the difference between radical and social constructivism, and an appraisal of their epistemology; the strengths and weaknesses of the Strong Programme in the sociology of science and implications for science education. The book contains an extensive bibliography.
Contributors include philosophers of science, philosophers of education, science educators, and cognitive scientists. The book is noteworthy for bringing this diverse range of disciplines together in the examination of a central educational topic.
Computer Supported Argument Visualization is attracting attention across education, science, public policy and business. More than ever, we need sense-making tools to help negotiate understanding in the face of multi-stakeholder, ill-structured problems. In order to be effective, these tools must support human cognitive and discursive processes, and provide suitable representations, services and user interfaces. Visualizing Argumentation is written by practitioners and researchers for colleagues working in collaborative knowledge media, educational technology and organizational sense-making. It will also be of interest to theorists interested in software tools which embody different argumentation models. Particular emphasis is placed on the usability and effectiveness of tools in different contexts.
Among the key features are:
- Case studies covering educational, public policy, business and scientific argumentation
- Expanded, regularly updated resources on the companion website:
www.VisualizingArgumentation.info
"The old leadership idea of "vision" has been transformed in the face of wicked problems in the new organizational landscape. In this excellent book we find a comprehensive yet practical guide for using visual methods to collaborate in the construction of shared knowledge. This book is essential for managers and leaders seeking new ways of navigating complexity and chaos in the workplace."
(Charles J. Palus, Ph.D, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA)
The almost universal rejection of the notion of symbols as `carriers of meaning' has created the need to find an alternative for the use of models as embodiments of mathematical concepts. By taking its point of departure as a concern for the way students actually use tools and symbols, and for what these signify for them, this book explores the option of building on symbolizing, modelling and tool use as personally meaningful activities of students. This theme is approached from different angles and different perspectives. One dimension is that of setting, varying from the study of informal, spontaneous activity of students, to an explicit focus on instructional design, and goals and effects of instruction. Another dimension is the theoretical framework of the researcher, varying from constructivism, to activity theory, cognitive-psychology and instructional-design theory. This book will appeal to a wide audience, varying from researchers, instructional designers, educators, and graduate students.
Arguing to Learn: Confronting Cognitions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments focuses on how new pedagogical scenarios, task environments and communication tools within Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments can favour collaborative and productive confrontations of ideas, evidence, arguments and explanations, or arguing to learn.
This book is the first that has assembled the work of internationally renowned scholars on argumentation-related CSCL research. All chapters present in-depth analyses of the processes by which the interactive confrontation of cognitions can lead to collaborative learning, on the basis of a wide variety of theoretical models, empirical data and Internet-based tools.
In most schools the dominant supporting technology has been either the stand-alone personal computer or a modest local network. The situation is changing rapidly as a rising number of schools provide access to the Internet for their staff and pupils, opening avenues for communication and networking hitherto not possible.
This book reflects on this change. It aims to further the vision of how these new technologies could improve and transform aspects of education. Yet in parallel it asks serious questions about the realities of an interface between the social, cultural and pedagogical contexts of education and the actual affordances that these new information and communication technologies offer.
The chapters in this book provide a heady mix of foresight and practical reporting, of planning for the future but at the same time respecting the problems education already has with current technologies. The richness of the points presented here stems in part from the range of experience of the international authors - from academics and administrators, to teachers and curriculum designers. This mix ensures that the central questions on communications and networking in education are considered not simply from a variety of personal perspectives, but also from different cultural and environmental experiences. And yet interest also lies in the commonality of reporting and discussion based on activity in the field. All the contributions draw heavily on research and experience in devising and running projects and experimental activities in a range of schools and teacher-training institutions and environments. The opinions expressed are thus grounded in knowledge gained from work embedded in the reality of today's educational settings. This must be the only sound base upon which to consider the issues of the future.
This book is essential reading for all professionals involved in all aspects of information and communication technologies in education. Teachers, lecturers, researchers, students and administrators will find it invaluable.
Biology education, like science education in general, is in the midst of a revolution that is worldwide in scope. The changes in the ways science education researchers think about learning and understanding represent a major paradigm shift. In this book, international leaders in the field of biology education research give summaries of problems and solutions in biology learning and teaching at various grade levels. Based on a NATO workshop in the Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology, it provides practical information for teachers, especially in using new interactive, constructivist teaching methods. For science education researchers, it offers a concise summary of a number of research issues in biology education.
The NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Mathematics Education and Technology was held in Villard-de-Lans, France, between May 6 and 11, 1993. Organised on the initiative of the BaCoMET (Basic Components of Mathematics Education for Teachers) group (Christiansen, Howson and Otte 1986; Bishop, Mellin-Olsen and van Dormolen 1991), the workshop formed part of a larger NATO programme on Advanced Educational Technology. Some workshop members had already participated in earlier events in this series and were able to contribute insights from them: similarly some members were to take part in later events. The problematic for the workshop drew attention to important speculative developments in the applications of advanced information technology in mathematics education over the last decade, notably intelligent tutoring, geometric construction, symbolic algebra and statistical analysis. Over the same period, more elementary forms of information technology had started to have a significant influence on teaching approaches and curriculum content: notably arithmetic and graphic calculators; standard computer tools, such as spreadsheets and databases; and computer-assisted learning packages and computer microworlds specially designed for educational purposes.
This book presents comprehensive results from case studies of five innovations in science education that have much to offer toward understanding current reforms in this field. Each chapter tells the story of a case in rich detail, with extensive documentation, and in the voices of many of the participants-the innovators, the teachers, the students. Similarly, Volume 3 of Bold Ventures pre sents the results from case studies of five innovations in mathematics education. Volume 1 provides a cross-case analysis of all eight innovations. Many U.S. readers certainly will be very familiar with the name of at least one if not all of the science innovations discussed in this volume-for example, Project 206l-and probably with their general substance. Much of the education community's familiarity with these arises from the projects' own dissemination efforts. The research reported in this volume, however, is one of the few detailed studies of these innovations undertaken by researchers outside the projects them selves. Each of the five studies was a large-scale effort involving teams of researchers over three years. These teams analyzed many documents, attended numerous critical project meetings, visited multiple sites, conducted dozens of individual interviews. The team leaders (Atkin, Huberman, Rowe), having spent much time with science education over long careers, looked at these innovations through many lenses. It was a daunting task for each team to sift through the mountains of detail in order to bring the most compelling themes to the surface.
This book is based on the workshop that kickstarted the NATO Science Committee Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology. We invited the leaders in the field to attend this inaugural meeting and were delighted by the quality of the attendance, the papers delivered at the workshop and this book. Many of the authors have subsequently run other meetings funded by the Special Programme and have, or are in the process of, editing books which focus on particular topics. This book covers all the major themes in the area ranging from fundamental theoretical work to empirical studies of state of the art technological innovations. Tim O'Shea chaired the NATO Survey Group which planned the Programme and the subsequent Panel which disbursed funds in the first two years of the Programme. He would like to thank the other group and panel members, namely, Professor N Balacheff, Professor D Bjomer, Professor H Bouma, Professor P C Duchastel, Professor A Dias de Figueiredo, Dr D Jonassen and Professor T Liao. He would like to offer his special thanks to Dr L V da Cunha the NATO Programme Director for his unfailing support and patience. Eileen Scanlon was the Director of the Workshop which is the basis of this book. She offers heartfelt thanks to the contributors and to the following who provided practical help with the meeting or the production of this book: Mrs Pauline Adams, Dr Mike Baker, Mrs Kathy Evans, Mrs Patricia Roe, Mr Dave Perry and Ms Fiona Spensley.
Science curricula at the elementary school level frequently emphasize the “concrete,” with a focus on the processes of observation, ordering, and categorization of the directly perceivable. Within this approach, abstract ideas and the planning of investigations and analysis of their results are in large part postponed until higher grades. This practice stems from purported developmental constraints on children’s thinking. This article analyzes these constraints in light of the writings of Piaget, to whom they are frequently attributed, and contemporary developmental theory and research. Neither the Piagetian nor the non-Piagetian research supports the validity of these developmental assumptions. The article also identifies several intrinsic problematic aspects of this approach to children’s science, including the failure to appreciate the challenge of adequate scientific description, the liabilities of decontextualization, and the epistemological messages it conveys to children. Both Piagetian and non-Piagetian literatures support the feasibility of children’s science curricula in which the processes previously approached as ends become tools in contextualized and authentic scientific inquiry.
Moving beyond the general question of effectiveness of small group learning, this conceptual review proposes conditions under which the use of small groups in classrooms can be productive. Included in the review is recent research that manipulates various features of cooperative learning as well as studies of the relationship of interaction in small groups to outcomes. The analysis develops propositions concerning the kinds of discourse that are productive of different types of learning as well as propositions concerning how desirable kinds of interaction may be fostered. Whereas limited exchange of information and explanation are adequate for routine learning in collaborative seatwork, more open exchange and elaborated discussion are necessary for conceptual learning with group tasks and ill-structured problems. Moreover, task instructions, student preparation, and the nature of the teacher role that are eminently suitable for supporting interaction in more routine learning tasks may result in unduly constraining the discussion in less structured tasks where the objective is conceptual learning. The research reviewed also suggests that it is necessary to treat problems of status within small groups engaged in group tasks with ill-structured problems. With a focus on task and interaction, the analysis attempts to move away from the debates about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and goal and resource interdependence that have characterized research in cooperative learning.
We stand poised to many the fruits of qualitative research on children's conceptions with the machinery of psychometrics. This merger allows us to build upon studies of limited groups of subjects to generalize to the larger population of learners. This is accomplished by reformulating multiple choice tests to reflect gains in understanding cognitive development. This study uses psychometric modeling to rank the appeal of a variety of children's astronomical ideas on a single uniform scale. Alternative conceptions are captured in test items with highly attractive multiple choice distracters administered twice to 1250 8th through 12th-grade students at the start and end of their introductory astronomy courses. For such items, an unusual psychometric profile is observed-instruction appears to strengthen support for alternative conceptions before this preference eventually declines. This lends support to the view that such ideas may actually be markers of progress toward scientific understanding and are not impediments to learning. This method of analysis reveals the ages at which certain conceptions are more prevalent than others, aiding developers and practitioners in matching curriculum to student grade levels. This kind of instrument, in which distracters match common student ideas, has a profoundly different psychometric profile from conventional tests and exposes the weakness evident in conventional standardized tests. Distractor-driven multiple choice tests combine the richness of qualitative research with the power of quantitative assessment, measuring conceptual change along a single uniform dimension. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
This study examined the prevalence, conceptualization, and form of cooperative learning used by elementary school teachers. Responding to a survey, 93% of teachers (n = 85) from six elementary schools in two districts indicated they used cooperative learning. In interviews with a subset of those teachers (n = 21), all indicated having daily cooperative lessons in several subjects. The majority of teachers subscribed to cooperative learning to achieve both academic and social learning goals, structured tasks for positive interdependence, and taught students skills for working in small groups. When we applied criteria for cooperative learning derived from the research literature, few teachers were employing recognized forms of this practice, primarily because they did not tie individual accountability to group goals. Implications for communication between researcher-developer and teachers are discussed.
To improve classroom teaching in a steady, lasting way, the teaching profession needs a knowledge base that grows and improves. In spite of the continuing efforts of researchers, archived research knowledge has had little effect on the improvement of practice in the average classroom. We explore the possibility of building a useful knowledge base for teaching by beginning with practitioners’ knowledge. We outline key features of this knowledge and identify the requirements for this knowledge to be transformed into a professional knowledge base for teaching. By reviewing educational history, we offer an incomplete explanation for why the United States has no countrywide system that meets these requirements. We conclude by wondering if U.S. researchers and teachers can make different choices in the future to enable a system for building and sustaining a professional knowledge base for teaching.
Intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation have been widely studied, and the distinction between them has shed important light on both developmental and educational practices. In this review we revisit the classic definitions of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in light of contemporary research and theory. Intrinsic motivation remains an important construct, reflecting the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate. However, extrinsic motivation is argued to vary considerably in its relative autonomy and thus can either reflect external control or true self-regulation. The relations of both classes of motives to basic human needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are discussed.
Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms. Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate their own unseen behaviors with gestures they see others perform.
This study investigated whether providing reading supports for high school students who read computer-mediated text would further their comprehension. Independent variables included subjects' reading achievement level, the difficulty level of the text, passage order, and subjects' perception of the task. While most subjects in the reading support condition used them, reading supports did not improve subjects' reading comprehension scores on easy or difficult reading passages. When the subjects were blocked as high or low readers, reading supports also showed no effects on comprehension scores. It was found that reading supports were used more on the high-difficulty than low-difficulty reading passages. Suggestions for improving the presentation of reading supports are given.
Our concern in this paper is with the validity of educational tests when they are employed as critical measures of educational outcomes within a dynamic system. The problem of validity arises if an educational system adapts itself to the characteristics of the outcome measures. We introduce the concept of systemically valid tests as ones that induce curricular and instructional changes in education systems (and learning strategy changes in students) that foster the development of the cognitive traits that the tests are designed to measure. We analyze some general characteristics that contribute to or detract from a testing system's systemic validity, such as the use of direct rather than indirect assessment. We then apply these characteristics in developing a set of design principles for creating testing systems that are systemically valid. Finally, we provide an illustration of the proposed principles, by applying them to the design of a student assessment system. This design example addresses not only specifications for the tests, but also the means of teaching the process of assessment to users of the system.
Sociologists have long believed that psychology alone can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that we can explain much about social life with an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them. R. Keith Sawyer argues, however, that societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to resolve these debates is by developing the concept of emergence, paying attention to multiple levels of analysis--individuals, interactions, and groups--with a dynamic focus on how social group phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members.
Project-based learning is a comprehensive approach to classroom teaching and learning that is designed to engage students in investigation of authentic problems. In this article, we present an argument for why projects have the potential to help people learn; indicate factors in project design that affect motivation and thought; examine difficulties that students and teachers may encounter with projects; and describe how technology can support students and teachers as they work on projects, so that motivation and thought are sustained.
For hundreds of years verbal messages - such as lectures and printed lessons - have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. In Multimedia Learning Richard Mayer explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal by combining words and pictures for effective teaching. Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students' reference tools, and the world wide web is full of messages that combine words and pictures. Do these forms of presentation help learners? If so, what is the best way to design multimedia messages for optimal learning? Drawing upon 10 years of research, the author provides seven principles for the design of multimedia messages and a cognitive theory of multimedia learning. In short, this book summarizes research aimed at realizing the promise of multimedia learning - that is, the potential of using words and pictures together to promote human understanding.
Building Virtual Communities examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. Contributors to this volume explore this question by drawing on their different theoretical backgrounds, methodologies, and personal experience with virtual communities. Each chapter discusses the different meanings of the terms community, learning, and change. Case studies are included for further clarification. Together, these chapters describe the building out of virtual communities in terms that are relevant to theorists, researchers, and practitioners. The chapters provide a basis for thinking about the dynamics of Internet community building. This includes consideration of the role of the self or individual as a participant in virtual community, and the design and refinement of technology as the conduit for extending and enhancing the possibilities of community building in cyberspace. Building Virtual Communities will interest educators, psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in human-computer interaction.
Meeting ambitious content and process (inquiry) standards is an important challenge for science education reform particularly because educators have traditionally seen content and process as competing priorities. However, integrating content and process together in the design of learning activities offers the opportunity to increase students' experience with authentic activities while also achieving deeper content understanding. In this article, I explore technology-supported inquiry learning as an opportunity for integrating content and process learning, using a design framework called the Learning-for-Use model. The Learning-for-Use model is a description of the learning process that can be used to support the design of content-intensive, inquiry-based science learning activities. As an example of a technology-supported inquiry unit designed with the Learning-for-Use model, I describe a curriculum called the Create-a-World Project, in which students engage in open-ended Earth science investigations using WorldWatcher, a geographic visualization and data analysis environment for learners. Drawing on the Learning-for-Use model and the example, I present general guidelines for the design of inquiry activities that support content learning, highlighting opportunities to take advantage of computing technologies.
In this article, Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes critiques the claim that Haitian children cannot actively engage in science classrooms. Drawing from her own work as a bilingual science teacher and educational researcher, Hudicourt-Barnes highlights the Haitian cultural practice of bay odyans, a form of discourse similiar to scientific argumentation, as a potential building block for engaging Haitian children in scientific inquiry. She offers specific examples of Haitian students recreating bay odyans in science classrooms, and suggests that these students have a cultural experience that predisposes them to scientific inquiry. In making links between culture, scientific inquiry, and pedagogy, Hudicourt-Barnes seeks to broaden the research perspective on Haitian students and discourage the use of research paradigms that ignore the impact of culture in the classroom.
In this article, Maisha T. Fisher explores the resurgence of spoken word and poetry venues in the Black community and their salience as venues for cultural identity development and literacy practice. Calling them African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities (ADPLCs), Fisher describes two open mic poetry settings that recall the feeling and communal centrality of jazz, clubs and literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance. These ADPLCs are predominantly created and supported by people of African descent who actively participate in literacy-centered events outside of school and work settings. Through ethnographic research, Fisher explores how these venues function as literacy centers in two communities. Fisher discusses the cultural practices that underlie the organization and orchestration of these events, explores what inspires and motivates participants, and examines how these venues operate as sites for multiple literacies.
Proceedings of CSCL 2002 Boulder, Colorado, USA January 7-11, 2002 (http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/gerry/cscl/cscl2002proceedings.pdf)
This article examines why cognitively oriented technology innovations, designed to foster deep thinking and learning, have not become widespread in K−12 schools. We argue a key reason is that most design-based research does not explicitly address systemic issues of usability, scalability and sustainability. This limitation must be overcome if research is to create usable knowledge that addresses the challenges confronting technology innovations when implemented in real-world school contexts. This is especially important in an era when political forces push schools away from the cognitively rich, inquiry-oriented approaches espoused by the Learning Sciences. We suggest expanding our conception of design-based research to include research on innovations in the context of systemic reform as a potential solution to the problem. To that end, we introduce research questions and issues arising from our own experiences with a technology-rich innovation in the context of a systemic reform initiative as a starting point in the creation of an expanded design-based research agenda. These questions and issues have important implications for both the continued viability of research on technologies for learning and on the future of technology use in schools that stems from such research.
Recommendations for reform in science education place a premium on students' understanding of scientific concepts and their ability to identify problems, conduct inquiry, and use information flexibly. They call for an appreciation for how ideas evolve and are validated. In this article we discuss changes in ideas about learning that underpin the reforms. We then describe our experiences with project-based science, a pedagogy that addresses the reform recommendations. Project-based science focuses on student-designed inquiry that is organized by investigations to answer driving questions, includes collaboration among learners and others, the use of new technology, and the creation of authentic artifacts that represent student understanding. Finally, we illustrate the challenges this type of innovation poses for teachers' classroom practice, for professional development, and for policy.