Monthly Archives: October 2010

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19
Oct 10

This weeks readings

I, personally, was more interested in the Radinsky and Chin/Osborne artices then the Varelas drama article. I don’t know if it’s my lack of experience working with very young children or my inability to act, but I’m still not sure I’m convinced. 

At any rate, Radinsky article and the Chin/Osborne article both seemed to be pretty similar. Chin/Osborne looked at the discourse that students engage in while trying to decide which of two graphs best represents boiling water. Radinsky’s article looked at the discourse surrounding the development of a theory to explain data. I especially appreciated the use of theory building, data analyzing, and representation building activities to scaffold students to the point where they could think and/or argue as the scientific community would. 
Additionally, both articles made some mention of the need for students to “be aware of and articulate their puzzlement” (Chin/Osborne 893). Reading the discourse between Camila, her teacher, and her classmates (especially when they seemed to be frustrated) made me think about my experiences with student teaching thus far. I’ve noticed in several cases that some of the students ask me a lot of questions that seem to be out of frustration. I think a lot of it has to do with my inability to explain things clearly, talk slow, and take my time, but part of me enjoys their frustration. It gives me something to work with. I asked students today to list the forces acting on a pen as it falls to the floor. One girl raised her hand and said “We don’t know any forces! What do you want? Gravity?” to which I responded “Yes, gravity makes the pen fall but what stops it from falling?” Still frustrated she responded “So the floor is a force?” When she said it, although she was clearly still frustrated, something clicked with her in a way that it wouldn’t have if I had simply walked them through an example. By experiencing a moment of not having a clue what to do, she was forced in some small way to engage in the lesson. 
I haven’t taught hardly at all, but I can already tell that getting students to talk to each other, feel comfortable and be verbal about what they don’t know, and work to participate in figure out how to better understand the concepts is going to be an uphill battle. I found myself wondering, as Matt mentioned in his blog, how these teachers got these students to engage in such meaningful dialog with each other about water boiling or the amount of day light in a given day. I wonder if students in other classrooms would respond to these activities in a similar way. 
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19
Oct 10

JRST readings for the week

Of the three readings for the week, I was most interested in the Radinsky et al. piece, so I’ll talk about that one last.  I’ll do a quick reaction to the other pieces below:

Chin and Osborne seem to open up the idea of analyzing the questions that students ask during argumentation and using the questions themselves as a basis for the quality of the argumentation.  The idea of the centrality of argumentation in science learning seems likely to be from the situated folks side, and it was interesting (given the prior class discussions) to see something from the situated camp using more quantitative methods (even with data from conversations).  The big thing I learned from this piece was to try and avoid being too hands-on with students in group discussions — the example from page 900 where the teacher steps in the middle of the discussion seems to shut down the open-ended nature required when students are still trying to get their questions out on the table and identify their differences.

Varelas et al. is interesting in the completely novel teaching method used (drama) for science classes.  I did think that they could have connected with the conceptual change framework, though — I interpreted the “plays” they described as ways for students to develop the mental model they have for a given concept: state changes in matter, or ecosystems in a forest in these examples.  They mention Vygotsky at the end, and I certainly could see that influence in the work, but I still see this largely as a way for a teacher to help students build an internal mental model of the concept.  I’ll admit that I was pretty skeptical of the idea (using drama in science class) at first, but as they described the interactions I could see how this would help students in discussing and thinking about these abstract concepts.

The winner for me, though, was Radinsky et al., which seems completely in the situated/distributed learning camp.  I’m really intrigued by the idea of students engaging in theory development on their own, and in questioning each other to build up a collaborative theory.  I was impressed that a teacher would be willing to devote that much time to working through what we’d typically see as a misconception during class, but thought that by getting the students to come to the conclusion that this misconception didn’t work on their own, they would be more likely to really internalize it (I know I shouldn’t use that sort of word with this type of theory…).  Given the process the students went through, I’d guess that they would be more likely to accurately describe the reason for seasons out when they graduate from college than our poor Harvard grads from Private Universe.

I do wonder about pacing constraints with this process though — this type of process would take a long time if it was the only way that content was covered, and yet I’m not sure how well a hybrid model (both this type of activity and more lecture/lab activity mixed up) would work.  It seems like it would take time for students, especially high school students, to get used to the different style of class outlined here.

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19
Oct 10

Radinsky/Chin/Varelas

I often wonder when reading research articles such as these about what these classes actually look like.  Do the authors just do a great job writing that makes these classes look like supremely productive, democratic, organized, and efficient places to learn, or are they just such effective teachers that the students respond so well?  They just don’t seem to look like what my class looks like/sounds like.

I have a few points from the articles:

1) I love the idea of putting Camila in “the hot seat.” Again, we could argue that the learning was happening because of the social context, while another would say it was entirely cognitive.  No matter how it happens, putting her in a position to have to explain/defend her thoughts puts a lot more pressure on her to form a strong understanding, and I think that this kind of pressure can be an effective means of motivation.  However, the amount of skill needed by the teacher to coordinate and conduct these “science talk” lessons is great, and I think carries a steep learning curve for the teacher as well as the students.

2) In the Chin/Osbourne article, I found myself again questioning if this “acting like scientists” approach is as valuable as they are trying to proclaim.  First, the 12-14 students are more insightful than any group I’ve ever been associated with.  While this is a very positive aspect for the classes in the article, students with enough science knowledge and awareness are not difficult to teach, no matter the arrangement of the class.  However, I love the structured norms of question webs and explicit instruction of how to carry on these scientific arguments.  On the other hand, one of the arguments we’ve had before is whether participation in traditional instruction is just another social norm that is learned, so too, I would argue that these “science talks” are a learned social engagement that bears little resemblance to the collaborations I’ve been a part of in my days of being a “real” scientist.

3) Varelas made me realize that having different styles of teachers is essential.  If I would have had myself for a teacher, I’d have loved it….obviously, I teach the way I think works best.  On the other hand, I know some students to not like my intensity, sarcasm, and desire to compete.  In the classes I’ve had where I had to role play or dance around the room re-creating mitosis, I despise going to class!  These different styles allow for a variety, and as long as the teacher motivates, engages, and has the students take ownership of the class…all styles have to potential to be effective.

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18
Oct 10

Socially constructed learning articles

The readings for this week from the Journal of Research in Science Teaching all had a familiar theme: learning in social setting through internalization of tools and interactions with other students.  Whether acting out science as dramatic scenarios, or constructing shared ideas through classroom discourse, all papers attempted to break away from the simple cognitive “what is going on inside my head” to how we construct meaning through social interactions.  In all, I found most of the articles had the Vygotsky view of social learning as the root of the valued learning in each situation.  I also thought some of the articles were pretty simplistic (not necessarily a bad thing) in that they took seemingly normal classroom discourse and methods and turned them into groundbreaking research.  Perhaps I am taking too much for granted, but I didn’t find anything extremely outstanding about acting out scenarios, even for science, for 1st through 3rd graders; nor during student’s presentation of ideas, having other students help to refine some of the thinking to come to a more complete group consensus of the science presented.  Maybe I have been reading so many articles that I have come to expect these actions as norms when they really aren’t.

The article by Varelas argues that using drama as a method for acting out science scenarios provides multimodal learning opportunities for students that are not found in the typical classroom setting.  Students can move beyond just textbook science and begin to inject feelings and emotions into the science concepts in order to get more into character of the science.  She argues that this whole-hearted commitment by all students contributed to much more robust activities that engaged students in both the real world and imaginary world of science scenarios, and as students continue to act out the science, refinement in group thinking will lead to more accurate science.  While this may definitely be good for young students, I question the value students of late middle-school to high school would get from this.  Moreover, we now begin to assign anthropogenic qualities to objects such as worms, termites, the forest, etc.  Is this really good science practice?  While entertaining for young children, I don’t see myself using this in my classroom.

Radinsky’s article focused on constructing ideas as shared intellectual property in the classroom.  The research method focused on students presenting ideas on the seasons and length of days.  As one student presented her thoughts to the class, she combined her own understanding with other students thoughts, to move the entire groups understanding to a new level of accuracy.  This sharing began a snowball of ideas and refinement, moderated by a teacher who asked some key questions.  As each student considered other’s ideas, and offered their own insight, the intellectual level was raised to new levels of science for all.  Certainly, this research shows how a well monitored scientific discussion can benefit an entire group when grasping concepts that are slightly out of reach for any individual.  The importance of a good teacher can’t be overstated in this case, as someone who facilitates robust conversation between individual students.  While I think this article presents some very solid science discourse, I didn’t find this to be ground-breaking in any fashion.  In fact, isn’t this one of the major tenets of inquiry?  As I stated in the beginning, maybe I am getting used to reading articles on these methods for science discourse in the classroom, so I am beginning to think of articles like these as par for the course for good science teaching and practice. Not questioning the learning theory here, just the novelty of the research. 

Similarly, I found the Chin article to hold very inquiry based research overtones, and overall I certainly agree that argumentation during group discussion is a valid way for students to think as scientists.  Students must move well beyond simple claims by offering data and resources, and fending off counter-arguments when arguing their point.  Much like true scientists, arguments do occur and we must cover our bases when defending our points.  I can’t emphasize enough how much I consider the teacher as the key to this type of learning to occur effectively.  After dealing with 8th graders for the last 4 weeks (Matt, I have a new respect for you), an effective scientific argument will need some strong leadership to keep the norms of discourse in place and keep students moving forward in a manner that is constructive in learning, not just arguing.

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18
Oct 10

Science Ed Articles

Both the Zimmerman and Bell paper and the Gutwill and Allen paper were about learning in an informal learning setting. In this case, both were set in a museum. The paper by Gutwill and Allen was a good example of how to utilize inquiry to induce learning in a museum. While the Zimmerman and Bell paper explored how parents are the ones to induce learning in the museum through questioning and guidance to find the right answer. Both of these articles held the cognitive and situated theory of learning. I thought this was great because I feel that both of these theories should be combined when used to explain how learning occurs. I think on their own they are missing some critical aspects of learning.

The third article by Roth and Eijck differed from the other two articles in that they were presenting their own theory of learning. To me their theory of learning was building on previous learning theories. Their theory embraced the social aspect of the situated learning theory when they state that when trying to solve a problem, the person will engage others to help solve the problem. Their term knowledgeability was pulling from the cognitive learning theory in that the person is constructing knowledge. Their term Total Life pulls from what Vygotsky said that learning is occurring throughout your entire life. Their theory attempts to make sense of how people use learning to solve problems that they encounter in life. I find this to be similar to apprenticeship because you are immersed within the situation and are using the help of others to help solve a problem.

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18
Oct 10

Science Ed Articles

These articles really interested me this week because of the fact that they took place outside of the classroom and involved more family oriented learning than structured classroom learning.  With the use of interactive science centers, students, or in this case the general public, may be better able to take what they have learned in the classroom and transfer it to other novel situations.  The less structured environment would also lend itself to a more relaxing situation where children may not feel as pressured to get the right answer and may be more willing to have open discussions or engage in open inquiry.
One question that I found myself thinking about while reading was, how much of a benefit are these individuals/families gaining from these experiences?  It seems to me that the people who are going to frequent science centers and museums are probably well educated or highly value education.  These people are more likely to engage their children/families in discussions and activities at these places.  So how much more are they benefitting from these facilitated exhibits than they would normally on their own?
The Gutwill article reminded me of a conversation that occurred in one of my classes las semester.  The discussion centered around how to make museums, and field trips, more educational for students.  Most often when students take a field trip with their class they see it as a pass; a day free of school and learning.  How can an educator make a field trip more meaningful for the students and also fit into the curriculum?  I think motivation plays a large role here just as it would with the family groups visiting a museum.  There usually needs to be some type of motivation or reward for students to want to learn.  How do you go about doing this in a museum setting and still give the students a chance to learn and explore on their own in a less confined setting?  I’d be interested in reading the further studies stemming form the Gutwill paper on how to improve students learning and inquiry processes in an environment outside of the classroom. 
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18
Oct 10

Journal of Science Teacher Education

I’m not sure what I was expecting from these articles, but I must say it left me disappointed. Apparently, after spending weeks reading articles with seminal ideas, this was the mind-frame which I was bringing as I began reading these articles.  Of course I’ve been working hard at removing the “classroom application” thoughts during my readings and reflections, and now that was precisely the necessary requirements needed for these readings.  However, each of these articles were interesting in their focus and suggestions towards increasing student learning through the use of language.

These articles all focused on situated cognitive theories even if their theoretical framework was only implied.  I appreciated the article by Dolan and Grady (2010) which specifically stated their theoretical framework prior to explaining their research work.  The implied theoretical framework of the others left me a bit unsatisfied.  I find this quite interesting, as prior to this class, I never really thought about writers’ theoretical framework when I read articles.  My reading was focused more upon my own application rather than a more critical approach to their work and the foundations.

Two articles focused closely on the use of carefully selected language in the science classroom; one focusing on the creation of well written focus questions in guiding effective scientific investigations and the other looking carefully at teacher’s use of hedges and personal pronouns in classroom discourse.  In Lustick’s paper, “The Priority of the Question: Focus Questions for Sustained Reasoning in Science” he provided an interesting typology regarding focus questions.   He makes an important point that many textbook derived focus questions are generic and are “generated for a mass audience, lack authenticity and contextual cues that allow learners to immediately appreciate a question’s relevance” (pg. 495).  He makes a good point about the importance of looking beyond the textbook generated focus question and to develop “a framework that builds upon cognitive appropriates of questions” (pg. 502).  

The second article, “Developing Elementary Teachers’ Understandings of Hedges and Personal Pronouns in Inquiry-Based Science Classroom Discourse” focused on the teacher’s use of language during science discourse.   This article moves beyond the “sociocultural theoretical perspectives on science talk” (pg. 104), to what I think is establishing a trusting and risk-free classroom environment.  This trusting and risk-free environment in the science classroom can be enhanced or stifled by the teacher’s use of personal pronouns.  This paper really brings to light the small differences in language can make a huge impact.  To highlight this, there was a discussion between a teacher and group of students.  They are working on a science problem and the teacher states, “if you are not sure, come back and check in with me, and I will tell you”.  Of course there are several issues with this comment, but focusing on the pronoun issue, the facilitator of the study states “that the expression “if you are not sure” should be replaced with “if there are any more questions.” (pg. 113).  This changes the focus from the student looking for the right answer or feeling inadequate, to a more open, inviting environment for further discussions.

What struck me about this article and the last one read, “Recognizing Students’ Scientific Reasoning: A Tool for Categorizing Complexity of Reasoning During Teaching by Inquiry” by Dolan and Grady is the interventions they describe require teacher reflection on their practice.  While this analysis is vital to teacher change, I question how professional development providers can effectively provide this type of support.  Results from both papers indicate the success of their study and the importance of providing these types of learning opportunities for teachers, but how can this be done on a large scale?  

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18
Oct 10

Science Education

            Interesting pick of articles from Science Education.  I feel like I definitely have a new perspective when reading research-reporting articles now that I know to look for authors’ theoretical frameworks and consider them against the rest of the article.  Also, the chosen articles helped me to improve my understanding of the situated perspective of learning. 

            I thought that much of the theoretical background in the Gutwill/Allen piece jumped between both cognitive and situated perspectives on learning.  It was difficult to categorize them as adhering to one or the other.  Their experiment design and results focused on family units and family learning (like communities of practice in the situated perspective).  However, they also talk about individualized learning and transferability of skills in a way that would seem more cognitively oriented.  I think that their findings showed the benefit of participating in a learning activity as a family in a way that encouraged sharing of knowledge and verbalizing of reasoning processes.  (I used to go to the Exploratorium as a middle schooler when my family lived in the Bay Area in the mid-90s.  It was awesome!  Every city needs a museum like this! http://www.exploratorium.edu/)

            The Zimmerman et al. article was certainly written from a situated perspective with its “Everyday Expertise Framework” (p481).  I was surprised to see a discussion of transfer in this piece and felt that they tried to talk about transfer not on an individual level, but on the family unit level.  They found “families used various narrative forms… to transfer their understandings across and within knowledge domains” (p500).  This was an interesting way to attempt to fit the cognitive perspective’s concept of transfer into a situated discussion.  I think they were pretty successful at using this explanation. 

            I was excited to read about STEM learning in the Roth/Eijck article – STEM is kind of my “thing.”  These authors tried to focus the importance of what people should learn on how it plays out across the lifespan and in everyday problems.  They brought in the idea of creative problem solving with a French word I can’t pronounce (I took Espanol) – debrouillarde (p1028).  They also put forward the concept of “knowledgeability,“(p1028) also known as learning as you go. These guys like Vygotsky and seem to have evolved their personal understandings of learning to become more and more social/cultural over time.  They said that other frameworks could not explain what they had observed in their laundry list of research projects (p1033).  A good quote summarizing Roth/Eijck is from p1035: “What really matters is what happens in total life interactions not what people purportedly have in their heads.”  The cognitive side of me says that while this may be true when you consider the big picture of someone’s life, that doesn’t change that understanding learning is still fundamentally about what goes on inside a person’s head.  Side note:  from my former life in water quality regulation and environmental engineering, I really related to the opening story of the fish kill find. 

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17
Oct 10

Journal of research in science teaching

This week’s readings are from Journal of Research in Science Teaching.  After reading articles about various learning theories, it was inevitable to pay attention to the perspectives authors took when reading the articles. Before this class, I was also paying attention to the frameworks while reading the articles, but I was not successful at identifying them especially if the authors didn’t explicitly mention their framework. However, this time I feel like I am capable of at least having an idea of their frameworks from the way they choose their words about learning concepts even though they don’t mention them explicitly.

Varelas and et al. (2010) mentioned, ” Considering learning as a process mediated through various material and symbolic spaces, artifacts, and activities (Roth, 2005) particularly nurtures such an emphasis on multimodality and exploration of its role in improving understanding of, and engagement with, ideas.”(p.303) They investigated “how dramatic enactments of scientific constructs, ideas, and phenomena mediate and are mediated by scientific understandings and everyday knowledge along material, social and representational dimensions.”(p.306) Even though they didn’t cite directly Vygotsky until the discussion part of the article, I assume from the quotes above that their framework aligns with the Vygotsky’s sociocultural view of learning. Varelas et al. used Holiday’s (1978) three metafunctions of language, “ideational” (constructing and representing characteristics and processes of the world around us),”interpersonal” (constructing and enacting social interactions between people as they engage with ideas), and “textual” (constructing the drama activity as a recognizable, coherent multimodal text expressing ideas)(p.305) when coding their data. I think using these dimensions of language is consistent with the framework since Vygotsky’s theory emphasizes the tools and signs when constructing knowledge.

Radinsky et al. emphasized social, co-constructed and distributed nature of knowledge while mentioning that past research emphasized more individual, what is in the head type of view.
“Recent research has challenged traditional assumptions that scientific practice and knowledge are essentially individual accomplishments, highlighting instead the social nature of scientific practices, and the co- construction of scientific knowledge. Similarly, new research paradigms for studying learning go beyond focusing on what is ”in the head” of individual students, to study collective practices, distributed cognition, and emergent understandings of groups.”(p.619)
“This body of research instead highlights the essentially social nature of scientific practices, and the co-constructed and distributed nature of scientific knowledge. It emphasizes that professional communities of scientists generate new knowledge through a collective, contested, negotiated process, based on communication and mutual accommodation of ideas, rather than simply through the individual exercise of abstract logical reasoning.”(p.619)
Radinsky et al. used discourse analysis; specifically they looked at discourse moves in order to understand how classroom discussion took place when discussing one student’s representations on her understanding about the scientific phenomena.

I think Chin and Osborne article has touched upon both social and cognitive perspectives of learning. The following quotes from the article are some of the examples of them. “Both sociocognitive conflict, engendered through disagreement, and cognitive
elaboration have been proposed to explain why collaborative discourse and argumentation may foster conceptual learning in socially mediated learning. Disagreement and cognitive conflict are believed to play an important role in conceptual change.”(p. 884)
“This exploratory study, therefore, sought to investigate how such questions might scaffold students’ argumentative thinking by acting as ”thought- starters” and metacognitive or epistemic tools. It also aimed to compare the differences in students’ discursive interaction that lead to more and less successful argumentation of opposing viewpoints during group discussions.”(p.886) When they are mentioning the purpose of the study they emphasized group discussions as a social mediator of knowledge construction and argumentation, and metacognitive and epistemic tools as a more individual learning component.
When authors mentioned, “It has been argued that, if our students are to be enculturated into the workings of the scientific enterprise, argumentation should be a core component of school science” (p.883), I thought about the apprenticeship models in which students can experience scientists’ roles via argumentation as an example of authentic practices.
Authors used discourse analysis and argumentation diagrams to analyze the data, I think it is compatible with their perspective.

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17
Oct 10

Science Education articles

Since these articles all had different points I am going to do each article separately.

First the Fullness of Life as a Minimal Unit article:

The major thing I was thinking about in this article is how broad their theory is. We talked in class the one week about the more broad a theory is the more information it will cover, but at the cost of truly explaining one concept. Life as the minimal unit of study makes sense to me because to know how to teach a student you have to know the entire person. “This study shows that we need to understand the total life of a student to understand the levels of engagement of students in the classroom, what a student wants to learn, how a student learns, his motivation, his orientation toward school tasks, his learning needs, and so forth when we look at science through life as a whole” (pg1036). I feel this covers most of the theories and concepts we have talked about so far this semester, but when the theory is this broad how useful is the information?

Facilitating Family Group Inquiry at Science Museum Exhibits

Ok I am going to admit that my science brain took over for this article. I think their idea was admirable and possibly a good start into inquiry work in museums but there are major gaps in their research. I think this goes back to when we talked in class of the problems in the cognitive theory- How do you measure? First off I had problems getting past the fact that each group went to four different exhibits in the same order. I kept thinking to myself that the amount of inquiry they have in one exhibit can’t be measure against another. Everyone has different interests, and these interests could be involved in the amount of time taken in each exhibit. Also the interviews, especially the ones held over the phone 3 weeks later. They considered these statements to be significant without thinking about the chance of the participants giving the acceptable answer. Lastly the conversation examples they gave to prove their points didn’t include educational levels of the parents. Parents who were more highly educated in science would be better at playing the games then parents with little to no background. To end with a positive, I do think the games they used in the museum setting may be a useful tool in science classrooms as an ease in to higher inquiry assignments.

Family Sense-Making Practices in Science Center Conversations

As with the last article there were some holes in this research. First being the sample. It was very limited in that it was mostly all the same ethnicity and they only used family’s that used the facility often. Do you think the results would have been the same if they used families who were not frequency museum goers? I feel that the samples had more science talk because they were already comfortable with the ideas seen in the museum. Also the conversation explanation they choose was with two parents that were educated to the master’s level in science. These parents were much more able then most parents who take their children to the museum. I think this study may have been a good starting point along with the article above to get inquiry out of museums but much more work needs to be done.

 

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