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

Pintrich et al’s elaboration on the role of affective factors in conceptual change in transition from a ‘cold’ version of it rings true for any student who has ever been through a school science classroom. I’m inclined to take a softer view of the role of affective factors in scientific communities with the belief that at the end of the day, ‘ultimate acceptance of substantive content … is determined by emperical and logical factors’ (p. 170). However, in the classroom, the criteria for such epistemic judgements is far ‘hotter’ than in scientific communities as the pursuit of a ‘relatively stable homeostasis’ (p.171) necessarily involves affective factors regarding how much assimilation and accommodation a student can relate and how such changes are brought about in the classroom. The conditions of dissatisfaction, intelligibiity, plausibility and fruitfulness stem from a students internal perceptions of science in general and the classroom environment. The view the authors hold of students seeking a “good life” lends the idea of adopting practices of scientific communities in the classroom a misaligned prospect. It seems to suggest that epistemologies of the classroom must take into account factors that are specific to the context of the classroom and can’t be blindly modeled on scientific communities.

I really enjoyed this week’s readings as they built upon this semester’s readings that we have read and discussed in class. Most of the articles from Dewey (1929) and Skinner (1954) we discussed the first week of the semester to Lave and Wenger (1991) that we read last week were integrated into the three readings for this week. It was nice to be able to have some previous understanding and knowledge on the learning theories as the authors this week discussed and integrate them into their own arguments.

With that said, Pintrich and his colleagues (1993) bring to light the idea of motivation in relation to conceptual change, a topic we have discussed previously this semester. In a broader view though, the idea of motivation – which the authors break into goal orientation beliefs, interest and value beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs, and control beliefs – is an entirely new concept this semester and has not been discussed in relation to any of the learning theories so far, even though it could. As a student and future teacher, motivation play a huge role in student learning and willingness to engage in conceptual change. If students do not have faith in their ability to accomplish a specific task or understand how the task has value or interest in their learning/lives, students are likely to not engage when doing the task (even if the know how to do the behavior or have the toolset available to them) or not likely to do the task at all. I found it interesting that the authors assume “students’ motivational beliefs are more situation or context specific in contrast to older, traditional personality models of motivations that proposed that student motivation was a stable personality trait” (p. 176). I tend to think of a person as motivated or not, i.e. a personality trait, but looking at the students I currently am student teaching I can this argument made by Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle. For example, let’s say there is a student who is interested in the STEM field, he/she may be more motivated to learn and engage in science and mathematical practices than those of English or history. The “context” here, i.e. the subject area, has the impact to influence students’ motivation and “influence student’s selective attention, effort and willingness to persist at the task, and their activation and acquisition of knowledge” (p. 183). This leads me to wonder how we, as future teachers, get students who say “I’m not good at science” or “I’m not going into this field” to learn when they are not motivated, do not want to continuously persist, and have low quality of processing on a task? I know the authors hint at activities that include “challenge, choice, novelty, fantasy, and surprise” (p. 184) but I am curious to know how of ideas of how these can be directly applied to science learning.

Meanwhile, Driver and his colleges (1994) helped me to think over all the readings we have done this semester, as they illustrated how scientific knowledge is both socially and individually. constructed. The first few readings this semester by Dewey, Skinner, and Posner focused more on how science learning is an individual behavior while the later readings by Brown, Collins and Duguid, Vygotsky, and Davy and Wenger focused more on learning between individuals such as through apprenticeships or learning through social interactions. It was interested to see how Driver et. al (1994) combined these two theories together and it made me realize that this learning theory was very similar to my own. Taking into account “commonsense”, as the authors put it, and having “individuals have to make personal sense of newly introduced ways of viewing the world” while engaging in social community practices, is how the authors argue students learn. In regards to teachers, Driver and his colleagues argue that their roles are 1) to introduce new ideas and cultural tools when needed and 2) to listen to and dragonizes how instructional activities are being interpreted. This leads me to wonder how children who do not possess the skills to make sense of the presented science (maybe they have learning differences, they are very young, or not motivated) can construct scientific knowledge?

Lastly, it was interesting to see how the articles referenced communities of practice. This topic has been discussed in previous weeks. Pintrich, et. al (1993) expand on the idea that they do not believe that classrooms operate the same as science communities but that science communities should influence classroom communities while Driver et. al (1994) take a more social perspective on science communities of practice. Interestingly, Brown and her colleagues (1993) see schools as a community of practice unlike most of the authors we have read so far. They believe that where these in communities of practice of scholars, i.e. students and teachers, include “individuals develop ownership of separate parts of that common knowledge through a process of majoring… mutual appropriation and negotiation… and participation in increasingly more mature forums of scholarly research” (p. 224), basically they learn to learn. This leads me to ask: do you think schools can be considered communities of practice, and why/why not?

Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed expertise in the classroom. Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, 188–228.

Driver, H., Asoko, H., Morimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5–12.

Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (2016). Beyond Cold Conceptual Change : The Role of Motivational Beliefs and Classroom Contextual Factors in the Process of Conceptual Change, 63(2), 167–199.

For this week’s blog, I will start with the Pintrich et al. paper (Pintrich et al. 1993). This paper was concerned with the of conceptual change with the added component of motivation. Other papers, like Brown et al., did not incorporate this aspect of learning (). The authors go through several different types of motivation and theories on conceptual change. One statement that I thought was particularly relevant was the idea that lab activities often act to confirm knowledge rather than allowing students to explore or learn through observations (p. 181). As an undergrad, I thought that this problem was particularly pronounced in chemistry labs. The labs never worked out the way they were supposed to so we would go through the motions and write up the lab as if it did work. The reason that we could do this was that we already knew what was supposed to happen because we had already studied the reaction. The authors spoke of this as a problem because it leads to a tendency to seek closure but I think it is also a motivational problem in other ways. The question that the students had, as did I, was what is the point of doing a lab if you know what is going to happen. This problem is similar to the motivational issue of learning something without a clear application (i.e. when am I ever going to use this?). I think that if a teacher is going to include labs in their teaching then it is crucial to avoid this problem.

The next paper by Brown et al. discussed an approach to applying the concept of situated cognition in a classroom setting (Brown et al. 1993). The rational for the approach that they developed leaned heavily on Vygotsky, particularly with respect to the zone of proximal development, as well as Lave (Lave & Wenger 1991). Their approach focuses on intentional learning and a concept that they term “distributed expertise” (p. 194). Distributed expertise in this case means that students are taught in groups in which each member of the group focuses on a certain aspect of the subject that they are learning. They then teach this aspect to the rest of the group, typically through a type of teaching called the “jigsaw method” (p. 194). The authors also used a group method called reciprocal teaching (p.194). In the method that the described the teacher acts as a facilitator of the student’s learning through exploration rather than the sole keeper of knowledge. This method resembles the Ambitious Science Teaching method but I would need to see it demonstrated to fully understand how it would work in a classroom setting (Windschitl et al. 2018). One thing that I did like about it was that it allows for the use of books and other resources as part of the discovery process (. This is the first time that the subject of books or written material has come up in our discussions of learning theory, to my memory, which I find odd. The other aspect of this paper that I found interesting is that the authors focus on the aim of teaching students to “learn how to learn” (p. 190). I have often spoken to people, older people, who state that the point of college or school in general is not to just teach people information but to teach students how to learn. They often say that that is the thing that is missing from the modern education system so I found it interesting that the authors of this paper reflect that opinion.

The last assigned paper, by Driver et al., also presented a method of classroom application based on teaching science while understanding that students do not come to the classroom as a blank slate (Driver et al. 1994). They have prior knowledge gained through their private life and cognitive strategies that have been developed in a similar manner. The methods of social, discovery based education make a point of exposing the students inherent thought processes or knowledge and showing the student how to think of new material through a scientific view rather than their previously held understanding. The authors approach is similar to the previous paper but different in that the methods are less specific. There are no mentions of jigsaw teaching or other specific teaching methodologies. The examples of conversations between students and teachers and conversations between students demonstrate their strategy but in a slightly vague way. There is also seems to be a certain amount of prior knowledge required in terms of common manners of thinking about particular subjects. The way that students think about the behavior of light, in the authors example, would not be something that I would have thought of without being previously told (p. 9).

References

Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed expertise in the classroom. Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, 188-228.

Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Scott, P., & Mortimer, E. (1994). Constructing scientific knowledge in the classroom. Educational researcher, 23(7), 5-12.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Vol. 521423740). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (1993). Beyond cold conceptual change: The role of motivational beliefs and classroom contextual factors in the process of conceptual change. Review of Educational research, 63(2), 167-199.

Windschitl, M., Thompson, J., & Braaten, M. (2018). Ambitious Science Teaching. Harvard Education Press. 8 Story Street First Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.

In Pintrich et al’s (1993) discussion of motivation in conceptual change, the authors discuss both the individual links between motivation and conceptual change as well as the role the classroom environment plays in conceptual change. Towards the beginning of the article the authors explain that some classroom tasks are not clearly defined, causing students to define the tasks for themselves. In this case, students may not understand which cognitive resources to use in going about the task. I feel like I have definitely felt like this more than once in my schooling– wondering ‘what am I supposed to be getting from this?’ during a lesson. In other cases, tasks like drill worksheets are too over-structured and require little to no cognitive engagement. This reminded me of the model we constructed for conceptual change. In the case where tasks are not clearly defined and students must provide their own goals and structure, it seems as though students may not be actively progressing toward the assimilations/accommodations the teacher wanted out of the task– i. e. students may not be rearranging their concepts/making links between their “mind islands”. In the case that is over structured, the task may not require any assimilation or accomodation to their already existing web. Pintrich et al make the point that “a focus on mastery or learning goals can result in deeper cognitive processing on academic tasks than a focus on the self (ego-involved) or a focus on performance (grades, besting others), which seems to result in more surface processing and less overall cognitive engagement ” (p. 173). This seems fairly straightforward to think about, in a class where we “just want to get an A”, it makes sense to cram right before an exam and immediately forget everything afterword. In a class where the beans (and mill) feel useful to the learner in some sense and learning and mastery goals motivate the learning, the cognitive engagement is much deeper. Not only does Pintrich et al discuss the conceptual change model of learning, they touch on the idea that learning is situated in the classroom context. The article states: “it appears that tasks that are more challenging, meaningful, and authentic in terms of actual activities that might be relevant to life outside of school can facilitate the adoption of a mastery goal” (p. 177).  The authors go on to discuss that schools are often inauthentic in their activities. We have seen this throughout the semester– schools are “unnatural” and exist as a culture of their own.

Brown et al (1993) agree with the idea that schools are communities/cultures in and of themselves, however, they don’t see this in a negative light. Brown et al state: “Even without an appreciation for daily life in grade school, the armchair philosopher must see the impracticality of suggesting that children be enculturated into the society of historians, biologists, mathematicians, and literary critics” (p. 190). So, if Brown et al suggest that we should not attempt to enculturation students into these authentic communities, what then is the point of school? Their answer is that “schools should be communities where students learn to learn” (p. 190). Schools should produce “intelligent novices” who, though they may not have the knowledge needed to do a task, they have learned how to go about getting it. Essentially, schools should help individuals learn to learn so that they can go about using this skill (learning) in the “real world” throughout their lives. This seems like a reasonable argument, however my question is, how similar is learning in school to learning out in the “real world”?

Driver et. al 1994 suggest that learning science goes beyond extending children’s knowledge of the natural world and rather challenges young people’s views on how the world works through discrepant events. This is in agreement with the model for conceptual change, in which an assimilation or accomodation only happens if there is “dissatisfaction with existing conceptions” (Poser, 1982, p.214). Driver et al explain that a critical piece of the learning process and being socialized comes from the discourse and dialogue process between teacher and student. This reminded me of our discussion of Vygotsky, in which we determined that internalization comes from language and talk between individuals over time. Lastly, Driver at al touch on the idea that there are different kinds of learning and say: “we suggest that these differences in student response can, in part, be accounted for by considering the ontological and epistemological demands for learning in the separate science domains in question” (p. 11).  How does this idea of different kinds of learning depending on the scientific domain in question relate to our previous models? Does each scientific domain need individual models of how learning works?

The reading by Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle (2016) considered how conceptual change models of learning theory often fail to account for student motivation in a learning environment, ‘cognition-only models of student learning do not adequately explain why students who seem to have the requisite prior conceptual knowledge do not activate this knowledge for many school tasks, let alone out-of-school tasks, (p.167).  I think this argument addresses a gap between how theory and reality of learning describe the behavior of an individual by including the needs of that individual, their expectations and personal goals. Up until this point we have encountered learning theory and modeled theory under the assumption that the learner is a willing participant in the scenario. Yet this fails to explain how individuals participate in a classroom at varied levels of engagement or motivation. Having reviewed our classroom discussion on conceptual change, I can understand why Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle (2016) have developed their argument in such a way. The conditions that need to be met in order for accommodation of knowledge to occur include; ‘dissatisfaction’ with current understanding, ‘intelligible’ therefore understandable, ‘plausible’ therefore fits in with other understandings in explaining or application, and ‘fruitful’ therefore, has the ability to explain and be of use in the future. These factors can now be taken and looked at in a way that considers who that learner is and what other influences will either enable or restrict their ability to undertake this cognitive analysis (p.172). The initial cognitive change model does create a foundation for understanding how people learn but removes the individuality of the person from the learning context, the argument for the importance of motivation appears to address this. 

The article also outlines some structural problems from a classroom perspective, it is not sufficient to just present knowledge in a way that adheres to the above four factors of conceptual change. ‘The linkages between context, motivational goal orientation, and cognition suggest that it may not be enough for teachers to present new information in a conceptual change instructional format that creates disequilibrium or dissatisfaction on the students part…It appears that teachers must consider how the instruction is embedded in the task, authority, and evaluation structures of their classrooms’ (p.178). A key point regarding motivation that is raised by Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle (2016) is this idea that conceptual change model is constructed to improve learning under the guise that instruction should aim to create little scientists (p.192). This has been something that we as a class have mulled over for a few weeks and something that I have had to consider, 1. Is the goal of school class to create scientists by mimicking the behaviors of professionals? And 2. What does it really mean for a community of scientists to do science? What does this practice look like and how can we make a generalizable statement about this, and implement it into teaching? Do we need or want to do this?

I feel as though I have come about this point in a roundabout manner, but what I am trying to get at is, what are we hoping our students to get out of school?

Brown et.al (1993) answer a similar question and argue that ‘schools should be communities where students learn to learn,’ (p.190).  This argument is based on the notion that we cannot conceivably expect grade school students to enact the authentic learning of graduate-level students in science, history, literature and or any other academic field during their time in school. So then, the question is posed, what are the learning objectives of an authentic school activity? Brown et.al (1993) share their answer in what is described as ‘lifelong learning’ (p.190). Their idea of apprentice learning opens up the options for the student post-schooling, by teaching how one can pursue learning and knowledge in whatever field that is of interest. In doing this, the student is not bound by the community of practice in which the subject is taught, but rather acquires the skills to learn, and reason across all domains. What stood out to me as being important from the authors’ critique included the ethos of that classroom and the community of discourse. The authors make note of the role of the teacher as not an all-knowing gatekeeper of knowledge, but rather a facilitator of classroom discussion by allowing students to negotiate and re-negotiate meaning through talk between peers and with the teacher. Encouraging this as a norm within the classroom provides a tangible way that students can gain practice at questioning and reasoning across all domains. I found the summary in Table 7.1 (p.203) to be particularly useful to describe the alternatives for classroom instruction but I do wonder how wide-ranging these philosophical changes can be. Can we reasonably expect music classes to undertake a philosophy of distributed expertise? What about history? I agree with the authors in that traditional schooling does need some kind of transformation, but can we reasonably implement this strategy across classes? Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

The reading by Driver et.al (1994) discusses how scientific knowledge is constructed within a formal classroom setting. From the standpoint of the argument, knowledge is considered a social construct and a product of an individual and social process. When I look back at our discussions so far on learning theory, I think that this idea of social learning is discussed but not clearly in the sense that all knowledge is a product of the community in which it is generated. What I mean by this is that instead of seeing knowledge as objective, rational and there to be discovered by scientific communities, constructivism asserts that communities create this knowledge.  From my own interests and standpoint, I think about the way that science is taught in formal school settings and what kind of dominant discourse this is reinforcing. The authors discuss how scientific knowledge enculturation is unique in that it is ‘discursive in nature’ (p.11). Therefore, students are required to engage with scientific reasoning and discussion in a way that is different from their everyday practices of observing and discovering. A point that I want to talk about in class, as evidenced again in this article, involves what are the true objectives for our students? Do we want to enculturation students into scientific communities as little scientists or are we searching for more general literacy skills? From this reading, I feel as though authors were describing a school classroom with aims at the former. What does everyone else think?

Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed expertise in the classroom. Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, 188–228.

Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (2016). Beyond Cold Conceptual Change : The Role of Motivational Beliefs and Classroom Contextual Factors in the Process of Conceptual Change, 63(2), 167–199.

Driver, H., Asoko, H., Morimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5–12.

Brown et al. (1993) began their chapter mentioning a quote from Lave (1998) that, to paraphrase, stated that learning is observed in practice and is stretched over mind, body, activity and cultural settings. The articles this week, in my eyes, tried to portray some ways this articulation of learning exists in the world. The articles this week argued for specific areas surrounding the design of learning environments and how to think about learning in more complex ways.

Pea (1993) emphasized the learning and knowledge being stretched over mind, activity, and settings by explicating their position on distributed intelligence. They argued for understanding intelligence as “distributed.” From this vantage point, any technology is given agency and “holds” intelligence of an individual or a community of designers. While the author outlined several dilemmas with using this framework, I thought the discussion about access and understanding was most relevant for classrooms. Personally, I tend to fall on the side of letting students use technology. In many ways, the technology is designed to “scaffold” thinking. Without the use of this scaffolding, learning more complex ideas could become less accurate or unnecessarily complicated; why use pen and paper for complicated algebra when a calculator can do most of the “hand calculations?” I understand the argument that students may not understand the intelligence within the calculator, but I believe that is where the teacher is involved. They can press and probe for these understandings. However, I do think there are points where the learning is lost within the technology which is exemplified within the Brown et al. (1993) article.

Brown et al. (1993) discussed how expertise can be distributed throughout a classroom. They detail how various pedagogical exercises and structuring a classroom to promote the idea of how to learn within a field. In these classrooms, students held expertise in various ways. However, while the students were learning how to learn through discussing, asking questions, doing research online, among other things, the authors took the idea of “breeding ‘intelligent novices’” (p. 190) to an extreme level. In their conception, if students engage as a research team would, they would learn how to do science. The image of this classroom is powerful. Students working together to solve problems is exactly what I think of when I think about a useful learning environment. I also appreciated how the authors called this “guided discovery” learning to allow for the teacher’s control; this type of teaching really relies on the professional judgement of the teacher to build the community of learning and its practices the ways they need to built in order to help students learn. However, the vignette of the student emailing various people to find answers troubled me. This student, while engaging in a practice to “learn,” was in my opinion, only learning how to ask a more knowledgeable other for help. Again, I understand the graduate student was scaffolding their learning, but at the same time, this scaffolding also took the form of giving some answers and suggestions. This essentially takes the same model of teaching they railed against at the start of the article and placed it into a new form; someone is lecturing through an email instead of in front of the class. The benefit of this however is that the student asked for the information rather than simply being told and this distinction is important. Yet, it still raises questions discussed by the Pea (1993) article, what are the trade offs of such a learning environment? Was this student learning how knowledge is created in science specifically or just understanding how to find science answers?

The idea of constructing knowledge in science was taken on by Driver et al. (1994). This explanation attempted to explain both conceptual change and situative learning ideas while merging them into an idea of how students learn about science. This was tricky for me because it took on two ideas that fit together in some ways but not others. While this could be a post in and of itself, the main confusion I encountered was how the authors clung to the idea of the individual mind while attempting to promote the idea that science is learned through socialization. What makes these ideas seem disjointed is where I see the knowledge as being held. In one model the knowledge is held by the individual’s conceptions, whereas in the other, the knowledge is held by the community in question’s practices. I also struggled with this because I viewed this model of learning to be loaded with danger. When I say this I mean it implicitly acknowledges the power dynamics at play within communities by invoking situative perspectives, yet it affords itself an explanation as to why individuals do not integrate into a community that does not place any repercussions on said community because of how it promotes a more personal model of learning. When extrapolating this, it opens a can of worms where power and representation is concerned. However, I do think the article did address some ideas I have struggled with. Primarily, what is happening in a student’s mind? Maybe this is my inability to let go that the mind is negligible in understanding learning under some perspectives on learning because I want to be able to understand a mechanism I cannot see but FEEL as a result of embodied experiences does exist. With all this said, what was clear is that science reasoning and commonsense reasoning are vastly different and this was something I do not know if it was directly addressed by the model of classroom portrayed by Brown et al. (1993), however as the Pintrich et al. (1993) article discussed, maybe this was because of the motivation behind that classroom.

To make things brief, I felt the Pintrich et al. (1993) article was a “no duh” moment for me that had serious play throughout each of the other articles. Motivation appeared when thinking about the goals of commonsense reasoning versus reasoning in science. It also appeared when thinking about making a classroom for learners versus making little scientists. Lastly, distributed intelligence’s tradeoffs are the result of different motivations. Goals and values are embedded in everything and dramatically alter how learning happens and what is learned. While I know very little about motivation, it is something that appears all the time. For example, in every reflection I, without realizing, included something related to social justice ideas because that is a major motivation for me being in graduate school.

Overall, each article touched on an area learning is “stretched over.” Pea (1993) stretched it over activities, the mind, and setting. Pintrich et al. (1993) was the mind and activity. Brown et al. (1993) and Driver et al. (1994) leveraged all four in different ways. This was interesting to see and helped drive home some of the models we have been thinking about the past few weeks of class.