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

This week’s readings are related to learning progressions. As far as I understand from the articles, learning progression research is based on cognitive learning perspective and concerns about individual students and attempts to classify students’ understandings in specific LPs levels.
   
    That being said, I am really glad that I read first the Learning Progression chapter from Taking Science to School and Duncan and Hmelo-Silver editorial piece from Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Because these pieces provide historical development of the learning progressions, they helped me to understand where LPs are coming. Before reading these articles, I have been hearing learning progressions but haven’t really read articles about them. I was interesting to learn that the roots of learning progressions are coming from Bruner’s notion of a spiral curriculum and also Gagne’s hierarchical concepts. Duncan piece provided an overview of this week’s articles. Since it is the editorial piece, it provides the gist of all articles. According to the articles LPs provide better alignment between standards, curriculum, and assessment. The purpose of the LPs emerged from the desire to develop assessment systems to track student progress. Duncan and Hmelo-Silver stated that LPs must be informed by empirical research on student thinking and learning in the domain. They mentioned three approaches to validate LPs. 1) An initial progression is developed solely based on existing research and analyses of the domain. 2) LPs could be based on carefully designed cross-sectional studies that document development of students’ knowledge and reasoning on a particular topic across multiple grades. 3) The third approach involves the development of a progression based on the careful sequencing of teaching experiments across multiple grades. This bottom-up approach provides evidence of what students are capable of given carefully designed instructional contexts.
    Steedle and Shavelson’s (2009) study tried to determine whether students’ observed responses reflect the systematic application of ideas associated with a single learning progression level and whether they provide a valid interpretation of learning progression level diagnoses. They found that students cannot always be placed in a single level LP. They concluded that interpretations of learning progression level diagnoses on a proposed learning progression would be invalid. They provided evidence that students’ do not always express ideas that are consistent with a single learning progression and thus raise questions about the validity of diagnosing students’ level of performance based on a given LPs. They demonstrated that it is not feasible to develop learning progressions that can adequately describe all students’ understanding of problems dealing with a topic.
    Wilson (2009) provides a particular approach; construct maps, to measure LPs. In this article, the manner in which the measurement approach supports the learning progression is referred to as the assessment structure for the learning progression.  I think Wilson article demonstrates how complex learning progressions and assessment of them are. Especially his figures with the “thought clouds” as LPs and the relationships between these LPs and construct maps were demonstrating how complex these concepts are.
    Schwarz et al article (2009) was interesting in terms of providing LPs for scientific practice rather than a scientific topic.  Their learning progression for scientific modeling has two dimensions that combine metaknowledge and elements of practice – scientific models as tools for predicting and explaining and models change as understanding improves. They found that students moved from illustrative to explanatory models and developed increasingly sophisticated views of the explanatory nature of models, shifting from models as correct or incorrect to models as encompassing explanations for multiple aspects of a target phenomenon.

We can conclude from these articles, LPs are new to the field, and there is not enough evidence to judge whether or not they are useful. Research shows that it is difficult to develop LPs, but at the same time since they are evidence based they are promising. I think as more research provides evidence; we can have a better sense about them. 

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