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

The Gunkle et al. (2012) article discusses two major challenges of developing learning progressions. The first challenge is defining what progresses in a learning progression and the second is  describing the role that instruction plays in defining a learning progression. I think it is interesting that the authors thought it was important to not only focus on the conceptions and reasoning, but the sociocultural context or various communities as well. This combines the cognitive and situative perspectives. More specifically, Figure 1 shows the embedded relationships showing that knowledge is nested within practices which is nested within discourse community. The authors made another important point when they defined learning:

“the processes of learning involves mastering the ways of talking, thinking and acting associated with secondary Discourses” (p. 43)

Initially, when I thought of learning progressions I thought it was just a progression of cognitions that occurred. However, this quote indicates that it is not just cognitions. Being able to communicate those cognitions well enough as well as behave in such a way that actions parallel the cognitions is also quote important. In regards to school interventions, the authors found that the current methods of teaching lead to Level 3 reasoning on the structure-first pathway in which naming exceeds explaining. However, this does not reach principle-based reasoning so the authors devised a plan to get there with the help of matter and energy Process Tool. One important limitation to all of this, which is also a global problem in general with teachers integrating tools into lessons like this, is knowing when and how to integrate them.

This brings me to the Metz (2009) article about what is “developmentally appropriate” from a learning progression perspective. I chose this article because I’m coming from a “what is developmentally appropriate” from a psychological perspective and I wanted to compare/contrast those two perspectives. Another interesting quote that I thought was important to point out:

“I assume that knowledge-development is too varied and complex to closely accord with such a singular, linear form” (p. 7)

This quote pretty much defines how developmental psychologists think. In fact, there is still a push from switching gears from defining normal/typical development to analyzing individual differences—studying the actual variation from the mean. I think this is important to understand why some individuals deviate and if this deviation is actually better and more adaptive than the mean. Applying this principle to learning progressions, I think, it very important and can lead to some important educational interventions. This is why I think Taking Science to School is important so educators can impact the majority of individuals through a “broad-based consistency”, but I still think many individuals are left out of these target curricula and interventions. Another important criticism that I think goes unnoticed quite a bit is that the school-age literature may have frequently underestimated the reasoning capacities that these children actually have. This is why it is so important for teachers to know their actual students and the levels of understanding and reasoning these children are at. I know KeriAnn mentioned that she pre-assesses her students before a certain topic, which is great! Is this standard? Do all teachers do this? I’m trying to remember back when I was in school and I don’t remember taking any kind of pre-assessment to gage my current understanding of a topic.

One interesting point that Gotwals and Songer (2013) bring up is the fact that there is barely any longitudinal data that exists out there that speak to the hypotheticalness of learning progressions. Do these learning progressions actually work when integrated with educational curricula and intervention? Another interesting point that these authors discussed was the consideration of learning progressions to be an “epistemic enterprise” because the field is both producing and refining knowledge about learning progressions at the same time. This is important for any science and should most definitely be applied to child development and education.

Well, for this week we will be looking at an area of Science Education research that is very much in the fore just now. There is a lot of attention on Learning Progression and how they might impact assessment, curriculum and teaching. The vast amount of recent work in the area made choosing difficult, so I did a bit of cheating. Everyone will read Gunkel et al. (2012) as it gives a good overview of the idea and how it can be approached empirically. Then you get to choose: one empirical reading and one critique reading, in appropriately labeled folders on angel. Let me know if you have an questions and I look forward to the conversation next Monday.

While I liked the ideas of the Sawyer (2006) article on the learning sciences, I didn’t like its tone.  It sounded like they were saying “After years of searching, we’ve finally found the answer — this is how learning takes place and how we need our schools to be.”  This tone was due in part to the many times they used the phrase “came to a consensus.”  Most articles are presented as a new idea to consider, but this one made it seem as though everyone finally agrees and we now have a definitive answer about the process of learning.  I suppose this attitude might be coming from the fact that the learning sciences sort of combines the feuding factions of cognitive and situative, but as we saw in the diSessa article from two weeks ago, there is still plenty of debate within each camp.  Therefore it seems inappropriate to imply that the learning sciences are the be all and end all of education research.

I liked the distinctions made between deep learning and traditional classroom practices (and that I now have the term “instructionism” to refer to traditional practices).  The one about memorizing facts and carrying out procedures without understanding made me think of a conversation I had just had with my roommate.  He was studying for a Math 141 test on converging series and said that the tricky thing wasn’t knowing how to do each convergence test, but remembering what the results of each test mean for the convergence of the series.  I said it would probably be easier if he actually understood what each test was doing, because then the results would have real meaning to him, but unfortunately professors tend to teach this topic as “Here’s how you do these tests, don’t ask why they work.  If you get this it means it converges.  Remember that.”  He said he felt his professor would like to teach for understanding, but he doesn’t have time with everything he has to cover.

This brings up the issue of breadth versus depth, which is also relevant to the Sister Gertrude article.  As Beeth (1999) points out, Sister Gertrude has a lot of freedom in designing her curriculum, and therefore has the time to focus on depth without worrying about being required to cover a certain set of topics.  However, most teachers don’t have that freedom, and large-scale changes will need to take place if we decide that more depth is needed in education.  Another issue with trading breadth for depth is that some topics will need to be considered less important than others, which gets to be a very touchy subject since nobody wants their favorite topic to be neglected.  But since time is a finite resource, if more time is going to be spent going deeper in one topic, less time is necessarily going to be spent on another.  While I think we need more depth than we currently have, especially since so many things are currently “covered” without students remembering them the next year because the learning was so shallow it easily eroded, I also think we need to be careful not to overcorrect.  It’s no good if a student has an amazingly deep understanding of evolution, but has never heard of photosynthesis.  Our goal should be to maximize the area covered by the breadth and depth of education.  This occurs when breadth and depth are equal in size.  A mile deep and an inch wide is just as bad as a mile wide and an inch deep.

At first I thought the Beeth (1999) article might be both cognitive and situative because of quotes like this one: “although her writing about students does not specifically refer to sociocultural perspectives on learning, observations of her instruction over the past several years demonstrate that her practice incorporates a variety of social practices that engage students in learning some of the criteria by which knowledge in the scientific community is justified.”(pg.743-744)  However, then I remembered that the cognitive perspective doesn’t completely ignore social aspects of learning and say they don’t exist, so it is still consistent for this article to be a cognitive one.  It was interesting to see how Sister Gertrude explicitly applied the principles of conceptual change to her classroom.  We said earlier that conceptual change assumes a rational learning process that might not be the way students actually think.  Instead of taking it for granted that students take this rational approach to learning naturally, Sister Gertrude incorporates that rational structure into her classroom by making sure students do things like considering whether ideas are plausible.

The Cross (2008) article actually reminded me a bit of my own AP Bio class, since we had a month where we just did online activities with a partner because the teacher had gotten sick from a flu shot.  I was most interested by the amount of quantitative data they had with the seemingly qualitative methods of discourse analysis and identity work.  It also showed that the same intervention can have quite different effects on each student.  The researchers attributed this difference to differences in the quality of each student’s argumentation, indicating their situative perspective.  However, this raises the issue of how to ensure students participate in the social activities such as argumentation in the ways that will benefit them.  How do you get students to participate like Steve and not Jack?  Is that even possible, or is it an inherent part of their personalities?  If so, would some different intervention work better for the Jacks of the classroom?

I thought that the two empirical readings selected for this week’s reading fit very well together. Although one predominantly followed the cognitive perspective while the other followed the situative perspective, there was definitely evidence of overlap in both of these studies. This also seemed to fit with the overarching theme of the week.

I felt that Sawyer’s (2006) introductory chapter about the Learning Sciences was the most persuasive of all the theoretical works that we have read so far. However, this may be because I agreed with many of the points that were made. Although Sawyer only briefly described how theorists view learning from the Learning Sciences perspective, I felt that this perspective aligns with my view of learning. However, because the descriptions were so brief, I found myself wanting to know more! For example, Sawyer describes the learning environment as playing a key role in student learning. However, the description that is provided does not give any insight into what a learning environment should look like from the Learning Sciences perspective. Should this learning environment focus on the layout of the classroom, the discourse of the classroom, etc.? This “wanting to know more” feeling is one of the reasons why I immediately signed-up for the Learning Sciences class that is being offered in the spring. Although I thought the course would be interesting, I was hesitant to take another theory-based course, especially a course that is focused around a theory that I had no knowledge of. After this introductory chapter, I am extremely excited for the course because I wonder if I fall into the Learning Sciences perspective. There is one specific line within this chapter that makes me feel like I am most aligned with the Learning Science perspective: “situativity means that knowledge is not just a static mental structure inside the learner’s head; instead, knowing is a process that involves the person, the tools and other people in the environment, and the activities in which the knowledge is being applied” (Sawyer, 2006, p. 5). I think the reason why I am so drawn to this is due to the combining of the cognitive and situative perspectives. To me, this does not seem like it would be a potato head!

Although both of the empirical articles were focused on the use of argumentation, the implementation of the argumentation was different in both of the studies. In the Cross, Taasoobshirazi, Henricks, and Hickey (2008) article, the students were evaluated based on the quality of argumentation that they used to justify their responses to questions on an assessment that was previously completed. The researchers used Toulmin’s framework as a staring point for evaluating the quality of the students’ argumentation, but found that additional categories were needed. Because of this, the researchers added in categories that identified whether a claim/warrant was prompted. Although I found this to be interesting, I think that the researchers put too much emphasis on this. The researchers stated that students who prompt other students for claims/warrants are engaging in high-quality argumentation; however, I think that it is possible for a student to prompt other students for claims/warrants because he/she does not feel comfortable engaging in argumentation. Therefore, I feel that the focus should be on how the prompting is used. The researchers used the quality of argumentation that the students’ engaged in when justifying their answers as a way of determining whether or not their ability to engage in argumentation could be an indicator of performance on the assessments. I found this to be a bit confusing; I think it would have made more sense for the researchers to look at the argumentation the students were engaging in prior to completing the assessment. I think that it is possible that these students did not fully participate in the argumentation because they already completed the assessment and that this activity would not help them to improve their score, even if their understanding of the content improved.

The Beeth and Hewson (1999) article was extremely interesting because it described the teaching pedagogy that Sister Gertrude used with her students. However, from this information I think that it is possible to identify Sister Gertrude’s theoretical framework. The statement that I found to be most useful for doing this was: “A central feature of the learning in Sister Gertrude’s classroom is that consensus about ideas is achieved, not on the basis of who contributed an idea, but on explicit epistemological criteria” (Beeth & Hewson, 1999, p. 756). Although Sister Gertrude put a great emphasis on having her students use the “status language” presented by Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog (1982), she also places an emphasis on group negotiation of scientific ideas. Therefore, I believe that Sister Gertrude follows a theoretical perspective that includes both cognitive and situative perspectives.

I enjoyed reading this week’s articles on learning theory. I thought of it as a challenge to look for cognitive and situative elements based on the identifiers we have been addressing and illustrating in class. We discussed how articles can include cognitive and situative elements but usually lean toward one side or the other. However, I found the empirical studies articles to include both elements somewhat equally. That makes me wonder if I am identifying these aspects correctly. I also enjoyed reading the history chapter on science education and the shift from instructionalism to the learning sciences. This was especially helpful to read because I do not have a strong background in science education’s history.

Chapter one of Sawyer (2006) discussed the history of science education. A lot of this reading seemed like commonsense such as the shift from instructionalism to the learning sciences in education. It was interesting to think about the needs surrounding educational choices, such as the move from an industrialized economy to a knowledge economy. Sometimes I have to take a step back and reflect on the origins of schools in the United States. However, I feel today’s policy makers claim their main objective is to prepare students to enter the workforce, but yet we seem to be moving away from this in actual classroom practices. An example of this is teaching toward ‘the test.’ Even in the school district where I most recently taught, elements of instructionalism without authentic activity were apparent. While reading the NRC (1996) standards I was hoping they would discuss the importance of authentic activities and motivation, but I did not find anything in the bulleted points. I found these to be good in theory, but not practical in most school settings. I believe most public schools are still struggling with the effects of No Child Left Behind, (2001) rather than what their students need educationally to compete in a global economy.

What students need was part of what was so great about reading Beeth’s (1998) article about Sister Gertrude and her amazing science teaching/learning environment. In education, we often read about problems and parts of teaching that are not working, so it was refreshing to read about a teacher who was achieving content accessibility and learning with her students. I think most of her learning sciences success was based on the fact she was teaching in a private school and had her students from grades 1 through 5. This gave her the ability to approach instruction as she pleased, form a relationship with her students, identify what they need in science education, and then implement her curriculum. What also struck me was how the authors’ described Sister Gertrude as patient and empathetic toward her students. I believe this was one of the major reasons her teaching was so successful. The climate of her classroom appeared open and energetic. I identified both cognitive and situative elements in the Beeth (1998) article. Cognitive aspects were discussed in Sister Gertrude’s framework for conceptual change learning goals, yet her instructional methods seemed situative in nature. I kept wondering if this was a carefully crafted and successful Mr. Potato Head.

The Cross et al. (2008) argumentation article also seemed both cognitive and situative. However, it did seem mostly situative, for example examining elements of group discourse during analysis of the BioBLAST! program. I could not stop thinking about how they stressed assessing the individual learner (pre- and post-tests) but then discussed comparing the groups as part of this case study. I especially liked the idea of a ‘projected identity’ within the classroom and having students take on the discourses of a specific community. This reminded me of the saying, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” I kept wondering if you begin acting and talking like a scientist you help yourself become part of the community. I think that was the point Cross (2008) was trying to make with ‘projected identity.’ While aspects of the BioBLAST! program were identified as unsuccessful, I felt there were learning successes for the students.