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

To begin, I must admit that I don’t feel as if I fully understand the reading for this week. Even after having read it twice, much of it seemed to be beyond the scope of my understanding. What I can summarize from the reading though, was that Vygotsky was very much interested in the process that children go through when moving from externalization of thought processes to their internalization. Children move through different stages of this process, such as not being able to utilize special stimuli to organize their thought, then using special stimuli as an outside psychological tool, and finally internalization of the previously external stimuli. This portion did make sense to me, as it is common to hear children verbalizing their thoughts with others rather than themselves during early problem-solving. It would seem that according to Vygotsky, your inner monologue is something you learn to use for critical thinking over time and that it is a social process rather than isolated.

According to the reading, younger children would be expected to use elementary processes that arise biologically and are more intrinsic, where older adolescents/adults become familiar with higher psychological functions that arise socioculturally. This is justified as common sense in my mind, being that children don’t really have the skills to or understand how people interact with their culture and society, whereas as you get older you start to become more heavily influenced by the people and practices you surround yourself with. It seems as though adolescents and adults are more capable of learning from the world around them, the norms of formulating a discrete thought process, rather than rationalizing their actions to the outside world. The simple connections that children do make between bits of information can’t be too abstract or sophisticated being that they haven’t learned how to manage these types of relationships/ideas in their own thought catalogs. I really enjoyed how the author explained this as children’s thinking acts are more dependent upon their concrete recollections of a concept, rather than its logical structure.

Overall, I think I have a basic understanding of what Vygotsky advocated for, but I definitely need to discuss this in class to understand his arguments intrcacies.

This week’s reading was dense and full of comparison/contrast to the then current theories of psychology – particularly stimulus-response theory.  I interpretted Vygotsky’s main issue with stimulus-response theory, as practiced by the majority of psychologists, to be that it focused on objects instead of process.   It seems like he is promoting a learning theory and methodology that focuses on the process that people use to get from the stimulus to the response.

He describes this process as a spiral where children begin at one naive level, then progress to a new transitional level, then progress to a third level where the response looks a lot like the original level but in actuality the process used to get to the response is very different.

This reminds me of a hermeneutical spiral approach to literary criticism (an extension of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc) – when a person first confronts a text, they are naive about what it might mean.  After learning more about the context (we actually went through the song American Pie in the course I took a long time ago) the reader no longer can approach the text with a naive understanding – instead the understanding has developed to contain new layers of information which exist regardless of whether the person wants them to or not.

I am wondering how this learning theory fits with brain based learning approaches (or approaches that emphasize developmental stages).  Several places in the text mention the differences in learning process modeled by people of different ages.

This certainly was a dense reading! Vygotsky is certainly a clear shift from the learning is the external effect you have on the world sort of scenarios we’ve examined previously and is a deep dive into internal thinking almost exclusively. In fact, he seems to argue AGAINST studying learning by its result. One thing I do wish he talked a little more about thought was more than just memorization. He spends a lot of time on memorization and I can’t tell if he thinks that is learning, or that is separate from learning complex concepts.

So one his early ideas about younger children having the thought pattern of A to X to Y and then occasionally, it returns to X is interesting to me. I’ve heard friends describe their ADHD and this sounds a lot like how they describe their thought process as being. One association leads to another, until they’re way off from their original point and its hard to remember what that original thing was. I’m not really sure what that means in the context of this, but an interesting relation nonetheless.

The study that he discussed on sign usage in memory was really interesting to me. Given the same task, I don’t think I would have used the cards like any of the individuals he mentions and I would have assumed that the use of the cards would have varied wildly adult to adult since we not only all have different tricks for memorizing and remembering, but also for solving what I would basically call a word puzzle. I wish he had given more examples of the adults, but I understand that wasn’t really what he was focusing on.

I might be playing devils advocate here and stretching his suggestions to the limit, but later on in the article he suggests that anything that starts as a social interaction turns into an internal action. If that’s the case, why is learning in groups important, or is this the case FOR group learning? I can’t quite tell if he’s trying to say that social interaction is a key to personal learning, or that social interaction just turns to personal learning, so why not learn on your own in the first place with less steps.

The Vygotsky chapters have a big emphasis on sign usage. My understanding is that a sign is a link between a stimulus and a response that may only mean something to that particular learner (i.e. the sign is something the learner uses to remember something else or remember to do something else). The example used on pages 41-45 with the questions, colors, and cards helped me understand this. This ability of humans to make use of signs I think is what Vygotsky is saying puts our thinking above animals. He says, “comparative analysis shows that such activity is absent in even the highest species of animals; we believe that these sign operations are the product of specific conditions of social development” (pp 39). This makes me think of the “left of the blue wall” example in the RadioLab podcast. The rat was not able to make the link between left and blue and was only able to find the biscuit 50% of the time. However, humans are able to make the link between left and blue and remember that the biscuit is in the corner to the left of the blue wall. I think Vygotsky would explain this through the use of sign.

Now that I brought up the podcast I am also thinking about language and how it helps us think. I believe before I listened to the podcast I would say that thought comes before language. However, now I am thinking about how the internalization of language is what allows us to think. I think Vygotsky would agree with this. On page 46 he says, “the developmental roots of two fundamental, culture forms of behavior arise during infancy: the use of tools and human speech.” This doesn’t exactly get at what the podcast was talking about but it does allude to the fact that thinking/processing relies on culture and tools and language. Therefore, thinking probably relies on the fact that language is developed.

I thought the most interesting part of Vygotsky’s chapters was his assertion that externalization of memory—the use of “signs”—is “unique to humans” (Vygotsky, 1978, pg. 39).  Reid, et al. (2012) suggests that slime molds use externalized memory to navigate a simple choice tube.  Ants also use forms of externalized memory to “remember” pathways to food sources and shelter (Gordon, 2010).  If the truly brainless slime mold and the fairly simple (if comparatively neuron-dense) ant can externalize memory, I wonder what other organisms might.

I found it difficult to think about Vygotsky’s assertion that “for the very young child, to think means to remember”—because I am not a very young child and my brain has moved on from thinking in this way.  I thought that listening to the first RadioLab episode might help, but it left me with more questions.  The idea that language allows you to construct and develop more complex thoughts makes sense, but if kids don’t use spatial language to understand relations until they’re about six years old, do they/how do they make meaning before that?  The RadioLab episode said that they don’t: “Very young children don’t think.”  I think Vygotsky would agree: very young children don’t think, they remember. And now I’ve written the word “think” enough times that it has ceased to have meaning.

Relatedly, Vygotsky says “The preschool children (age five to six years) were generally unable to discover how to use the auxiliary color cards and had a great deal of trouble with both tasks” (pg. 42).  If children don’t make use of spatial language until six, and that, when they are younger, groups of words do exist as disconnected islands in their minds, it follows that the use of a sign/memory aid like the colored cards wouldn’t be apparent to them because they can’t yet link the islands of thoughts to signs.

To fully grasp Vygotsky’s proposed explanation of memory and language development, I feel that I might need to undergo a stroke-like event that wipes my brain back to the elementary level of individual development (like what the person in the RadioLab episode experienced).  It’s amazing to me that Vygotsky was able to conceive of this progression without his adult brain getting in the way.

As a student and an educator, I have always questioned the utility of assigning students the task of learning abstract concepts with which they probably have no outside knowledge. What’s even more boggling is that we expect students to assign value to these abstract concepts, when in nature they would be nothing but words to students. The article by Brown, Collins, and Duguid immediately gained my attention, as it purported and rationalized a framework of teaching that heavily emphasized “authentic activity”. This notion of having students take part in sense-making experiences that are authentic to problems faced in their discipline harkens deeply to me. As someone who relies on hands-on practice to tether the abstract and physical, I feel as though cognitive apprenticeship is a utopian framework that has many merits, but as Palincsar and Wineburg believe, also requires further construction.

I wholeheartedly agree with the authors that learning and cognition are fundamentally situated (Brown, pg.32), as the knowledge that students gain has its meaning altered by the community and environment it is uptaken in. So as schools emphasize their neutrality outside of cultural learning, they are further cementing their status as another community that has certain norms and practices (a culture) for learning. Within the school community, as Brown et al. discuss, the students are still figuring out situationally prevalent ways to solve problems and arrange knowledge. I especially liked the example of how students could recognize that math problems at the end of a chapter would be harder and thus would call upon concepts learned from earlier chapters. As a student, I must admit that some of my classmates and I picked up on this trend as well. Rather than being able to pull together different concepts when faced with a multi-tiered problem, it was easier to understand when you would be presented with a problem that required more prior knowledge. With the apprenticeships that Brown et al. suggest, I feel as though students would become more apt to recognize a problem for its potential solutions in that moment. Thinking about science education, I feel as though this type of education is already being enacted. Even though teachers may not be practitioners in all of the areas they teach, there is an emphasis on having students work through more authentic problems. Things like case studies that are adapted from real fieldwork give students a taste of what it is to be a professional in the field. There are some areas of study, however, such as medicine, that are capable of implementing a more conceptual apprenticeship framework. Doctoral students or even those in nursing or teaching have a large portion of their educational experiences grounded in the professional field. These students are subjected to the world of practitioners and have the agency that Brown et al. advocate for in apprentice learning. If this method of putting students into the field could be accomplished at an earlier stage of education, I believe it could be extremely beneficial to their accomplishment in academia. Similar to Wineburg, I do question the ability to create a system of education where all students have access to apprenticeships for every subject (Wineburg, pg. 9). For full implementation, I feel as though the only answer would be to have educators who have achieved a level of understanding that allows them to act as a practitioner in their field. Thus, teachers could act as a master to their pupils and create a community of apprentices that “work” on some “authentic” problems.

Brown, Collins and Duguid present a model of learning that seems to emphasize the greater picture within which learning takes place.  They seem to pull on Kuhn’s ideas about paradigms (the ways in which particular disciplines work – what is considered “normal” and how it is to be addressed) as they describe the need for what students learn to be situated within a particular practice.

As I was reading I had several thoughts about their ideas.  First I was wondering about the difference between actual practice vs learning by doing, or a similar approach to learning that is not rote but capitalizes on experience.  I ask this because, as a chemist, I remember the course (40 hours of lab a week for a semester) that indoctrinated us into actual practitioners of chemical research in my undergraduate degree.  It was the prerequisite for doing undergraduate research in a research group and it was where we were assigned to those groups.  IT was also the first course where only chemistry majors were present.  It came after pre-med and bio students were finished with their chemistry requirements because we needed the equivalent of 2.5 years of courses before having the background knowledge necessary to learn the practice (in reality, it was winter semester of the 2^nd year, but Furman had a unique course load and schedule that allowed learning practice to happen so early in the major).  It was also hard and the department did not think it necessary to enculturate non-chemistry majors into the research practices of the discipline.  I don’t know how to reproduce that in an intro high school chemistry classroom.  I also don’t know if I think it is necessary, feasible, or desirable to do that.  To learn by doing and understand how the knowledge they are learning can be tools in their lives – definitely – but to try to mimic practitioners, not so sure.

That leads me to my second question – in order to reach that level of practice (and Furman was unique because we were all publishing and presenting at conferences with other researchers as juniors and seniors while most chemistry undergraduates do not have those opportunities to really engage the practice aspects until graduate school) – what level of background is required to teach authentically within your fields’ practices?  Can someone who earns a general science certification teach at that level?  Has that person been enculturated as a field specific scientist or has that person been enculturated as a teacher?  I think this is of really high importance to consider.  I think of the addition of “Highly qualified teacher” status during NCLB as a way to require people to have at least 20 (?) undergraduate hours in the field they were teaching to promote this depth of understanding, and then I reflect on the expansion of that status to include general science, which many high schools in Georgia preferred to subject specific certification because it allowed teachers to be reassigned to courses as needed.

I think it will be very interesting to dissect this theory of learning in class on Monday.  I will leave with Wineburg’s phrasing of the question that I found myself asking the most – “But to survive in the marketplace of ideas, a theory of learning has to be situated in a theory of schooling”(p9).  I think I need to think more about what their theory of schooling would look like and how that differs from the current reality of schooling in the US.

A separation between learning and doing. I speculate the possibility of those many that speculate learning as an integral of doing. and coincidentally the authors happen to take a “speculative” approach (they just like me for real).

Where I really start to get on board with this idea is the point when the authors get into comparing syntax of math word problems and the studying of a dictionary. I can relate to this statement but at the same time its effects are just a more intense version of them mentioning that it sucks to read a dictionary.

In the section “apprenticeship and cognition” I was able to see a relationship to Posners method for conceptual development in learning. They state that the first thing a coach will do is demonstrate their tacit knowledge to the student. This reminds me of the portion of conceptual framework where the student must find a knew idea “intelligible”. This may not be so related as I originally thought but it seems that both methods of teaching demand some sort of respect for the information and it seems that apprenticeship is a more tangible example of this.

I have to admit, one of my favorite things about being a part of a collaboration is being on large telecons with groups from around the world. Most people find these tedious, but scientific smack talk just cracks me up and reading the back and forth between these groups was honestly such a joy. I can just hear the sarcasm and sometimes venom dripping out of the italics. But onto the relevant stuff.

SO this model of cognitive apprenticeship reminds me a lot of the ISLE method that Beth mentioned last week in her post, and of the method I always hear is used in Montessori schools in Baltimore. The story I always heard repeated was about elementary schoolers learning math via cooking instead of in the classroom and this weight watchers example was basically the perfect recreation of it. I agree that via personal experience, I have learned best with hands-on and experiential activities. I think most people would agree with that!

However, I have to agree with one of the commenters about application to the classroom. While it seems sensible to learn fractions, multiplication, etc this way, higher level materials seem much more difficult. How do you teach climate change this way? How could you possibly approach special relativity (aside from velocity raptor which anyone interested in physics education just simply MUST play)? How do you use students real life experiences to somehow generalize these sorts of subjects and topics?

And my same complaint carries over from last weeks discussion with Beth too. Even with a subject like fractions, how does this kind of learning work among large classroom sizes with limited time frames? With limited materials?

-Rachael

Although I now have a solid understanding of mathematics, that hasn’t always been the case.  My issues with math started in high school, with Algebra, and persisted through my undergraduate Calculus course.  I remember a particular class in high school where we were attempting to learn how to multiply binomials and can immediately bring back the feelings of overwhelm, confusion, and despair that I felt that hour.  The teacher was talking about foil, drawing lots of arrows on the board, and there were SO MANY parentheses.  The next class?  It was about something completely different— or at least I thought it was at the time.

I could not make sense of it, and, although I could remember all the formulas, I had no idea when to apply them because they were largely meaningless collections of symbols.  When I interviewed for my teaching job after grad school, I was told they were looking for someone who could teach advanced math—was that me?  I assured them it was and then I spent the summer teaching myself.

I made a promise to myself to never be like my high school math teacher.  When we got to binomials, I color-coded the FOIL process, and really thought I had made a vast improvement over his teaching methods.  I carefully explained how, really, we were just distributing twice and simplifying.  The kids got As on their homework and I thought we were good.  Then, I gave them some area problems that defined side lengths of polygons in terms of variables and asked them to solve for x.  They had no idea, but of course they didn’t.  It was painful: I was my high school math teacher, just with rainbow chalk.

We stopped.  We put away the textbook and the calculators.  We borrowed blocks from the K/1 class and built and explored area and volume.  We used the floor tiles to model and wrote on them with wet erase markers.  It helped a bit.

I wish I had known about situated cognition then.  I wish that others teachers knew about it now.  As a private tutor who often works with kids on math, it is so frustrating for me (and my students!) when they must follow a particular algorithm (that usually doesn’t make sense to them) in order to get “credit” for completing a problem.  I see a lot of teachers asking kids to draw models—like the butterfly jar example in the text—but refusing to accept a model that, though mathematically valid, isn’t the exact same one shown in the answer key.  I had a student whose teacher required them to label each step of the long division algorithm D, M, S, B.  The student didn’t know what the acronym meant.  I explained; they said “I’ll never remember that!”  We talked about how division works and how the algorithm works, but it didn’t help.  Finally, the student said, “I know!  I know how to remember it.  I’ll just think of it as ‘d*mb math sh*t, b******.  That’s what it is, anyway,”. That’s what it is, anyway, when the steps aren’t situated in a context.  That’s what it is anyway.