SCIED 552: Science Teaching and Learning Developing Models of Science Teaching

I shall answer the prescribed questions for the Furberg and SIlseth answer in numerical order.

1.) What research questions were asked by the authors?

a.) In what ways do student resources become mediational means in whole-class conversations?

b.) What opportunities and challenges does the teacher face in whole-class conversations where students invoke resources from their everyday lives?

2 & 3.) What key constructs did the authors consider and how did they define them?

Student resources- Experiences, ideas, and assumptions from students’ everyday lives which can be built upon

Mediational means- Tools that allow us to do stuff we otherwise couldn’t. Resources have “meaning potentials” that are created by the students and their teachers.

Conceptual Framing – The way participants organize info through foregrounding & backgrounding in attention.

Alignment- The process in which students’ differing conceptual framings are mutually understood and integrated into one.

4.) What data was collected?

The data collected by the researchers included direct classroom observations, transcripts of classroom dialogue, and coding data for the dialogue transcripts.

5.) What conclusions did the researchers present?

a.) Invoking student resources might have an impact on engagement and whole-class discussion and curiosity.

b.) Invoking student resources can increase students’ willingness to engage in academic discourse

c.) Teacher time and attention, as well as authoritative distribution in the classroom, influences the impact of student resource on whole-class discussion.

Overall, Ferburg and Silseth presented research that exemplifies how educators can be directly responsible for students’ willingness to engage in classroom discussion by facilitating the uptake of student resources acquired from extracurricular settings. On this note, teachers can be the gatekeepers for students’ understandings of complex scientific concepts that are enrobed in a students’ casual syntax and prior knowledge/experiences.

This article contained two main research questions:

1. In what ways do student resources become mediational means in
   whole-class conversations?
2. Which opportunities and challenges does the teacher face in
   whole-class conversations where students invoke resources from their
   everyday lives?

They then defined a few important terms that they use throughout the paper:

Conceptual framing: “the way in which participants organize information by bringing it to the fore–ground or background of their attention when they try to achieve mutual understanding of a concept or problem.” p.8
alignment: when differing conceptual framings are brought together to a mutual understanding.
positional framing: Basically how students view the power structure in the classroom and where they see themselves in it
student resources: relevant information that a student brings to the classroom from outside of it. Can include directly relevant info, or just examples from their day to day experiences.
mediational/mediating sources: anything that bridges the gap between student resources

The data they collected was from a single classroom in Norway over the course of four sixty minute sessions during which the class worked on a science project related to genes and gene transfer. The structure of the class in particular used a lot of whole-class discussion by both opening and closing the classes with it. Researches both recorded the classroom sessions and observed them. They then coded the whole class discussions by “episode” or chunks of related thematic talk, and even further down to triadic and more open sequences. They then labeled/ identified all the instances where student resources were brought up in the classroom and specifically discussed three such instances.

They concluded that at the surface level, student resources can often temporarily increase student engagement and interest in the subject at hand. They can be constructive if the teacher can recognize and leverage the underlying conceptual framing that the student is using with/for/within the resource, or also by giving students the “source” positional framing and providing probing questions to move forward classroom-wide discussion and understanding. 

Furberg and Silseth present two main research questions for this paper: “In what ways do student resources become mediational means in whole-class conversations?” and “Which opportunities and challenges does the teacher face in whole-class conversations where students invoke resources from their everyday lives?” (p9)

The key constructs in these questions include student resources, mediational, whole-class conversations, conceptual and positional framing.

• student resources – anything brought by the student from their everyday lives into the classroom discussion
• mediational – a bridge between the resource and the process or concept being studied
• whole-class conversations – in this study it was discussion sequences involving both teacher and multiple students
• conceptual framing – (conceptual dimensions) how students are organizing information by what they bring to the foreground vs background when trying to understand a concept or problem in a group situation
• positional framing –  how people position themselves with regard to others in a group situation; relative level of “expertness” for participants in class discussions (social dimensions), particularly how students are positioned as learners: in situation 1 & 2:teacher as source, student as learner, in situation 3 students were positioned as sources, i.e. accountable and authoritative.

In order to answer their research questions, they collected data from one class of 38 lower secondary school students (age 15-16, even distribution by sex) in a school in Oslo, Norway.  The class was doing a science project focused on genetics, and the data was originally gathered as part of a larger project, but they realized they had a wealth of whole-class conversations that they could analyze to learn more about student-teacher interactions.  This project used data collected from 60 min lessons over a period of 4 weeks.  11 of these lessons were spent on the science project, and the researchers were present during all of the lessons.  Data was gathered from transcribed video recordings of 330 min of class.  Classroom observations were also used.  A coding scheme was used to break the discussion down by whole-class session, episodes, sequences, and either triadic or true discussion sequences.  The transcripts were also coded for every time students introduced resources, or “empirical examples, analogies, stories, or references to something they had seen or heard in their everyday lives” (p12).  Furberg and Silseth used 3 true-discussion, whole-class sequences where students introduced everyday life ideas for their analysis.

The authors conclude that including student resources in whole class discussion provide opportunities for students to test their conceptual understandings and use their scientific reasoning.  The teacher’s involvement with the student resources provided the teacher the opportunity to better understand the student’s understanding and reasoning.  These resources also engendered greater student engagement and participation in the discussion from many members of the class by sparking interest and increasing participation.  The way the teacher positions themself in regard to the concepts being discussed also impacts the class discussion.  In the first 2 sequences where the student’s conceptual framing differed from the canonical framing, the teacher positioned himself as source and student as learner.  In the third sequence, where multiple conceptual framings could exist within the context of canonical science, the teacher positioned the students as sources instead of listeners, and this framing sparked more discussion and scientific reasoning from the class.  Ultimately, the authors conclude that teachers need to be aware of both conceptual framing and positional framing, or the conceptual and social dimensions of the discussion, in their classrooms.

(Key constructs in italics)

Furberg and Silseth (2021) investigate how student resources (“experiences, ideas, and assumptions about science matter that students ring to school” p. 3) that are “brought in spontaneously by students” are made sense of and used to make sense of (mediational means, or meaning-making”) to canonical science knowledge during whole-class discussions.  They also study what circumstances and situations are useful to support students’ conceptual development using student resources, how student resources can help students engage in and contribute to academic discourse, and what role the social and structural dimensions (defined as factors including the “authoritative distribution” between teachers and students, discourse moves used or not used by the teacher including elicitation, contextualization, and revoicing, as well as teacher time spent on the resource, etc.) of whole class discussions play in making meaningful use of student resources as a learning tool in the classroom.

Furberg and Silseth (2021) recorded the entirety of 11 lessons over a four-week period in a lower secondary school science classroom.  They used transcripts of the recordings as a basis for coding and analyzing discussion types from whole-class sessions including episodes (a stretch of conversation about one thing) and sequences (defined speech units within episodes).  Sequences were coded in further detail as either dyadic** (teacher and 1 student) or true discussion (including a minimum of three participants).  Sequences were the primary unit of analysis.

They found that student resources become mediational means when teachers allow and embrace students’ use of basic interpersonal communicative skills rather than insisting on cognitive academic language.  Allowing students to speak in ways that are comfortable seems like it might also function to increase expansion.  Also, when teachers respond positively and give time to student resources, then student curiosity, participation, and engagement increase.  However, there are implications for teachers.  To handle student resources skillfully, in a way that allows them to act as mediational means, teachers must “devise dialogic moves that explicitly elicit sensemaking in the intersection between everyday and traditionally scientific ways of engaging with subject matter” (p. 33).  Teachers must also devote time to the resources, rather than interacting with them in a purely “superficial way” and they must be on the lookout for the “conceptual framings” that underpin student resources, which may not always align with scientific understandings but might be able to be built upon (p. 33).

**Why is this “triadic” if it’s only two people?  Why not “dyadic”?

This week’s reading helped me understand the difference between eliciting students’ prior knowledge, misconceptions, as something to overcome (cognitive) or eliciting students’ resources, preconceptions, as something to build off of (sociocultural). Furberb and Silseth (2021) use a sociocultural perspective to explore the mediating properties of student resources when taken up in the whole-class discussion. Specifically, they are looking to answer the questions: In what ways do student resources become mediational means in whole-class conversations? Which opportunities and challenges does the teacher face in whole-class conversations where students invoke resources from their everyday lives? (pg 9). If we take a look at the research question I bolded constructs I thought were present in the RQs. The authors define student resources as “their preconceptions and ideas about science that might be intuitive and raw but remain the basis upon which scientific knowledge can be built” (pg. 2) and “experiences, ideas, and assumptions about science matter that students bring to school” (pg. 3). They are trying to make the case for students’ resources to be mediational means. On page 7, they kind of define mediational means as something that “enables us to deal with tasks and engage competently in activities that we would not be able to do without these resources” and they revisit this definition on page 29 in terms of student resources being mediational means “that enable students to verbalize, visualize, and test out their conceptual framing.” Conceptual framing is another construct they use throughout the paper to mean “understanding of science concepts, ideas, and principles” (pg. 29). Throughout the findings and the discussion, the authors discuss the alignment of the students’ and the teacher’s conceptual framing and how that impacts the teacher-student social and structural dimension of source vs listener. In a typical classroom, the teacher is the source and the student is the listener.

To answer their RQs with regard to their constructs they collected video recordings of the class’s genetic unit. The video recordings were then transcribed and broken into episodes and sequences where the student and teacher discussion could be analyzed. They had three main claims supported by the transcription of three separate sequences. To summarize, the authors found that student resources being taken up in the class discussion can allow students to express and test ideas, increase participation, engagement and curiosity and promote students as authoritative and accountable participants. All this is dependent on the teacher and students’ conceptual framing being aligned because these resources are not “ready-made” and the teacher needs to scaffold the students working through their experiences by positioning them as sources and not simply providing the “right” answer.

As someone who is heavily invested in inquiry/exploration/discovery/investigation-based teaching, I found Zhang’s paper quite interesting.  Zhang’s major issue with exploration-based teaching is the lack supporting evidence for it from randomized controlled studies and correlational studies, and that the program-based studies that have been “dominant in driving education practices” in the direction of exploration-based teaching aren’t controlled.  Zhang goes so far as to say “the development of students’ science conceptual knowledge is not best obtained by having students go through exploration-based investigation activities.”  While randomized controlled studies may be the gold standard of research, in this case, I think they may be too limiting.  The efficacy of investigation-based teaching practices depend on the experience of the teacher in leading them, which may not be accounted for in a randomized-controlled study.  Even if they do account for teacher experience and efficacy, and Zhang’s conclusion (that students learning through investigation-based means results in less understanding than a more traditional, direct-instruction approach) might be true in the short-term span of such a study, but may not account for lasting impacts on student learning and understanding of concepts and material.  Investigation-based teaching, led by an experienced teacher, may result in longer-lasting and more robust comprehension than direct teaching—which might make it easier for students to “learn” material, if learning is measured by regurgitation of facts on a test.  I also think that Zhang’s focus on contrasting investigation-based teaching with direct instruction sets up a false dichotomy.  In AST at the local middle school, for example, students develop sophisticated understandings of concepts through investigation, but once the understanding is developed, teachers provide the “science words” for what students have investigated, observed, and understood.  What students call “grabam” during their investigation becomes gravitational potential energy during direct instruction.

Throughout this reading of Furtak and Penuel, I was even more irritated with the discussion of the shortcomings of using the term “hands-on” as a short cut for practice/process/investigation-based learning because I am not a prescriptivist.  Language changes and evolves constantly, and I don’t think the words people use are especially important as long as there is a shared understanding of what is meant by them.  F&P seem concerned that there is NOT a shared understanding of the term “hands-on” and that the general understanding of the term is very limited as compared to the actual processes and practices of science education as informed by the Framework/NGSS.  I wonder how much of this gap actually exists in the minds of “the public” and how much it matters. Larkin suggests that it’s very important to a “loss averse” public, who might interpret the evolution of science education practices as a loss—perhaps a shift from content-heavy learning to concept-rich understanding—but, really, can’t science educators and science education researchers talk to “the public” in a way that helps them understand without arguing about how best to do it through academic journals?

Osborne sways me toward thinking of “minds-on” as a more apt description of the process/practice/investigative approach of the Framework/NGSS, and, while I agree with most of his points (science education is oriented to explaining phenomena, explanations of phenomena can involve struggling with difficult ideas, discourse is important to evaluating explanations, etc.), I do not agree that commonsense reasoning consistently fails to explain what we know about the world.  Like language, what we think of as commonsense reasoning is ever-evolving and is influenced by more developed understanding of science concepts, by technology, and by access to information.  For example, it is no longer commonsense reasoning to believe that thunder and lightning are caused by beings in the sky.  I also disagree with Osborne’s assertion that science education’s purpose is to help students understand old knowledge, while science’s purpose is to discover new knowledge.  At its best, I think, science education does both.

I agreed most with Parsons and with Hammer & Manz.  Both take the approach that science education is not an either/or proposition.  Parsons says “Learning is a complex social activity that occurs within a convoluted ecosystem” and that hands-on and minds-on approached inform each other.  Hammer & Manz say that practices that are productive for scientists are also productive for students because “scientists are professional learners.” This comes closest to my belief about the relationship between science and science education.

Finally, I appreciated F&P’s assertions in the final paper of this group that science is not an exclusionary practice intended just for some people and that the traditional sage-on-the-stage approach to teaching marginalizes students’ experiences and their abilities to construct their own knowledge.  Science is for everyone.

Furtak and Penuel (2018) provide a description of how the current take on science education as exemplified through the Framework differs from previous reform efforts including the push for “hands on” and “inquiry.”  They argue almost exclusively for the value of practice in classroom education in their first article; though in the response, they do acknowledge the need for all dimensions of the framework.  They come from a sociocultural perspective, and they are trying to demonstrate, in the paper, how to use a situated view of learning to help teachers and the larger community better understand how the NGSS approach differs from prior reform movements.

What Furtak and Penuel’s first paper did not do was address the role of content (and cognitive development in general) in the new framework, and I think that this lack of discussion is what Osborne was addressing from a primarily cognitive perspective.  Osborne’s argument is based on the need for students to not just participate but also to be introduced to and retain certain disciplinary content that is considered standard in science.  This is a cognitive view, which Parsons argues against by framing it as positivism and an approach to cognitive theory that is incompatible with sociocultural theory.  As opposed to Parsons, I thought Osborne was bringing to light a major omission in Furtak & Penuel’s article which is the question about the relationship between practices and content that I haven’t really seen adequately addressed by sociocultural learning theory.

Hammer and Manz take a bit more middle of the road view of Osborne’s piece and see it as an example of the complexities within the science education scholarly community.  This is probably an example of a more situated view – they acknowledge some of the issues within the approach but still push against the idea of a “canon,” which makes me place them on the situated continuum.

Larkin discusses the importance of the public’s understanding of science education and reform and points out that NGSS and the Framework don’t provide a vision of science pedagogy that demonstrates what this looks like in practice.  On the bottom of p1298, he acknowledges the vagueness of NGSS for high school chemistry and physics in a footnote where he suggests that the ground for specifics has been ceded to The College Board through AP tests which “serve as a de facto curriculum guide for upper-level high school science.”  While he doesn’t specifically say that the NGSS and Framework lack the specific content usually associated with standards (cognitive focus?) and push the practices instead (situated focus), he at least acknowledges that there is a difficulty there – particularly in high school – on what this is supposed to actually look like.

Reflecting on my experiences as a chemist, teacher, and now education policy grad student, I can’t help but remember when I became aware that I was responsible for every theory, idea, equation, and practice that I had been exposed to during my undergraduate chemistry studies.  One area I am still struggling with is how the intense emphasis on practice, particularly in high school, will create environments where students can master the content knowledge that they need to be ready for entering the next level of science education – particularly in states that only require 2 or 3 years of science courses where NGSS will have to be severely condensed since it really has 4 years worth of high school science standards.   Perhaps  AP has become the default curriculum guide for high school chemistry and physics because it fills a gap in the Framework/Standards and because it is outside of public education.  Therefore it can be appealed to as an external gatekeeper that implementors, i.e. administrators and  teachers, have little to no control over.

The readings this week were really interesting. At times I felt like they brought a lot of clarity to some things I did not really even realize I wasn’t fully grappling with and at other times they just muddied the waters even more. I appreciated that Hammer and Manz (2019) recognized that understanding knowledge and learning is not easy. They eluded to it being “dizzy business” and related it to the Dashiell Hammet quote that learning is “a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can.” This is how I feel as I read these articles and have our discussions in class. I feel like I am closer to understanding the learning theories and understanding how people learn than I was prior to this experience but there are some moments when I cannot for the best of me piece together the “foggy glimpses.” The series of articles we read this week were recent articles debating the ideas of hands-on, minds-on, inquiry, discrepant events, prior knowledge, power, etc. The authors were trying to understand these ideas better themselves and figure out better ways to explain them to people outside of the field. A few weeks ago when we read a set of articles like this it felt a lot like a heated debate. This set felt more like a discussion post we do in class. Furtak and Penuel (2018) were the first responders and they provided some answers to how we can talk in everyday discussions about practice turn and common terms that people throw out like hands-on. Then Osborne (2019), Parson (2019), Hammer and Manz (2019), and Larkin (2019) come in and comment how they agree and disagree with the original post and the other commentators. I thought it was interesting that it seemed the commenters each came from a different learning theory camp (e.g. Osborne seemed pretty cognitive, Parson was critical, Hammer and Manz seemed more situated I think). Because of these different perspectives on learning, we were able to see a lot of different takes on the same ideas so this will be interesting for us to unpack in class.

The other article we read was the evidence crisis piece. At first, I was a little concerned because I felt like I had bought into this inquiry/exploration-based instruction and now this article is telling me it is not supported by all the evidence. The evidence they want to include is from studies that control for other factors by isolating inquiry/exploration as the only factor that was changed. These studies show that explicit instruction is more effective than inquiry. This is in contrast to the program-based studies that show inquiry and exploration as more effective than explicit instruction. I feel like this makes sense though because one of the factors the studies want to control for is professional development. Inquiry/exploration-based instruction is not easy for a teacher to lead and I would imagine is the most successful when the teacher knows how to properly scaffold the students’ exploration. Therefore, if the study controls for the teacher being taught how to lead an inquiry-based class then it would make sense that the class would not be successful. However, the article states that the controlled studies are historically thrown out because they are too simplistic which is exactly what I just did so I think that maybe means I am part of the problem that Zhang et al. are describing. I am super interested to see what others have to say about this article.

This weeks readings were incredibly interesting to me! As a space/science nerd, I never knew that the history of space exploration had such a profound impact on the state and focus of k-12 education. I’d honestly love to know more about that.

Not knowing a ton about NGSS, I actually didn’t realize that they didn’t suggest any sort of pedagogical practices. In my limited teacher training, we were taught how to facilitate and scaffold a lot of inquiry/discovery based lessons in alignment with the standards, so I guess I just sort of assumed that those sorts of lesson structures were suggested by NGSS.

I do have to agree with one of that papers where they talk about how hands-on doesn’t necessarily mean minds-on. After leading one too many freshman level physics labs at PSU, I completely understand that concept. Students will blindly follow the directions without any real thought, and I have to admit that I was guilty of that too in college – especially during classes that I didn’t really care for (like chem lab). However, I also agree with a few of the rebuttals in that I’ve seen lessons like that done well with appropriate scaffolding where students leave having enjoyed the lesson, and probed the concept at hand. Whether or not students gain more “knowledge” from those sorts of lessons over a typical lecture style remains to be seen, but I personally enjoy leading that style more.

The first article was also surprising to me. I wish I had the time to dig into some of their claims. However, apparently NGSS doesn’t actually suggest a pedagogy structure, so I’m not sure why they are particularly upset about the NGSS standards when you could, in theory, teach all of them lecture style if you wanted to (at least as far as I understand). I would imagine that that is actually why they didn’t suggest a particular lesson style, so that teachers have the freedom to do whatever they want with the information laid out.

These were honestly a lot to unpack. I’ll be excited to hear what others have to say during class on Monday!

After going through the readings this week, I must admit that I was more confused than I have been in the last few weeks. Not in terms of content, as I believe all of the articles gave great insight into practices that will help me be a more efficacious and thoughtful educator, but rather the educational frameworks that the researchers are drawing from in their research. Primarily, the DeLisi paper really had me struggling to identify whether or not they were actually cognitive or sociocultural. DeLisi and her co-investigators communicated that the study was focusing on students’ utilization and formulation of SEPs in the context of science fairs, which originally made it easy for me to determine that they were focusing on situative learning. This easy determination was upheaved though, when I read that the majority of the data that they analyzed was from interviewing participants, educators, and administrators  out of the science fair context. They did mention that some of their data came from science fair observations, but it didn’t seem like this data was utilized as much to fuel their final conclusion that it is important for students to engage in critiquing practices, arguementation form evidence, and evaluation and communication of information within the science fair context (pg. 5`17). Overall it seemed that the their data was mostly out of context and focusing on participants’ cognition rather than observing their actions/learining in the context that they were studying.

Similarly, the Huang article seemed to be pretty easy to identify as a cognitive research study, as their focus on was on students’ individual development rather than their functioning within a classroom community. Although Huang was focused on topics that are typically viewed as social, such as team-work and collaboration, her methods of data collection only measured students’ self-perceptions of how they function in the context of groupwork. That decontexutualization fundamentally make this research cognitive, as students’ learning and actions aren’t being observed in the context that they are produced. The Isaacson paper can be described in a similar way to the Huang article though, as the data being collected was in the form of surveys. Once again, students self-reported how their competencies and interest in STEM had changed as a result of implementing new educational tech, which isn’t a direct observation of how they function and think in the laboratory context. Overall, at the onset of the week I had assumed that the majority of the articles would be sociocultural, but now I can see how data collection and the data itself can really change the underlying framework a study draws from.