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

This week’s articles center around sense of belonging/STEM identity within different communities of STEM practice.  Cohen et al (2021) investigated the effects of early STEM experiences, disaggregated by gender, on STEM identity.  Hughes (2018) investigated the retention of students who identify as sexual minorities in undergraduate STEM programs.  Barton et al (2020) examined how co-production of knowledge in a middle school science classroom allowed students to be “powerful experts in science and engineering.”

All three articles primarily focus on situated aspects of  being STEM students, i.e. how interacting with both near peers and experts impact students’ desire to engage in science learning.  Barton et al takes the closest look at what individuals in the classroom were experiencing and how that experience intersects with the approach that the teacher uses.  They provide interview examples of how the group of three girls that they focus on found the engineering task, particularly with its goal of solving a real world problem and the community interaction aspects, to be the first science experience that they felt engaged in and that that desire to be engaged along with the supportive structure created by Mrs. L increased their confidence that they could contribute to the class project.

Cohen et al (2020) and Hughes (2018) both take quantitative approaches to examine the impact of personal identity on STEM involvement and identity through interaction with the community of practice.  Both find that environmental/group factors that impact “belonging” (not sure this is the most accurate word, but I can’t think of a better one right now)  effect whether or not individuals will join and stay in scientific communities of practice.  Cohen et al (2021) found that certain activities in elementary school predicted STEM identity in later life and that participation in those activities was stratified by sex, with activities that females traditionally participate in being less likely to form STEM identity.  In this case, it seems like the pressure to belong to a particular community (gendered activity norms) might keep females from participating in activities that predict formation of strong STEM identities, particularly amongst white females (the only race category found to be a significant predictor in the study).

Hughes (2018) concludes that since sexual minority students are more likely than other students to switch out of STEM majors, more research needs to be done to understand how the LGBQ climate in undergraduate STEM communities of practice may cause non-retention of students.  This points to an exclusion effect where a non-welcoming/hostile climate towards LGBQ students within the  STEM community of practice causes these students to leave the community for a different, more welcoming community.  In this case, the need to become part of a particular community of practice that is hostile towards an individual’s identity creates a barrier to entry in STEM for students who identify as sexual minorities.

All three cases are examples of the importance of the community of practice in the formation of desire to participate in STEM and how individual cognition, on its own, is not enough to make STEM accessible to everyone.  Being aware of the impact of particular community practices and how those practices either help or hinder individuals from entering the practice is particularly important.  These articles illustrate three aspects of the interaction between community of practice and the individual: exclusion; inclusion in one group precluding participation in developing the STEM identity needed to enter another group; and the navigation of building inclusion of students on the STEM periphery by a teacher – thus helping those students build STEM identity.  These articles are examples of how the situated, group practices that people experience impact what types of learning/knowledge they relate to and want to pursue.

Although not all of the articles this week explicitly utilized an educational framework, except for maybe the Barton article, it was really interesting to switch things up and read about other current topics being looked at regarding STEM education. The articles by Cohen and Hughes both highlighted the importance of community in learning as well as the impact of social interactions as well. Although the articles by Cohen and Hughes don’t necessarily undertake an educational framework, I believe they still are immersed in the world of situative learning and would advocate for those educational practices.

Starting with the Cohen article, I would have never expected them to produce the results that they did. I would have expected their results to show that girls learn the stereotypes attributed to STEM at an early age (which they do prove), but when they specifically got into the early STEM experiences that shape their STEM identities, I would have assumed things like baking would increase their interest in analytics and food science which exist in STEM (pg. 6). Sadly, their opposing results do make sense to me though seeing as cooking/baking is branded as a feminine activity that doesn’t align with a supposed masculine discipline like STEM. I feel as this result can be used to highlight the importance of educators realizing the implicit social/gender structures that undergird every domain in education. In contrast to girls having lesser STEM identities, it makes me wonder if boys have lesser literature identities being that it is a subject that is typically deemed feminine? I think this awareness is a great takeaway from this research. I think a similar message can be taken from the Hughes article as well though. Even though it is an empirical study discussing how LGBQ students are retained in STEM, the researcher’s methods of excluding prior preparation in STEM help prove that there are non-scholastic factors that influence students’ STEM identities. Once again, I feel as if this awareness should be used to emphasize the need for teachers to understand the social underpinnings of students’ self-efficacy and identities in different domains of education in order to better support their growth into practitioners.

The last article by Barton and her colleagues does fit within the situated learning framework in my opinion. The entire focus of the paper was how social collaboration and empathy can be worked into engineering education, but the results focused on 3 new discourse types that the observed teacher cocreated with her students, which in my opinion screams situated learning. Not only did the teacher foster a very diverse learning community, but she also made discourse a tenet of her curriculum. She even went further than just classroom discourse but had students discussing their ideas with the community at large and the school community. Through these discourse methods, students were able to create new understandings of things like “sustainability” and “empathy” that were then displayed in their project artifacts. I really enjoyed the teacher’s new method of empathy discourse though, as that seems to be something that doesn’t get discussed much in fact-laden STEM fields that historically don’t place much value on socioemotional practices within the domain.

This week’s readings were really interesting and a different way to look at what we have been talking about in class. The articles (aside from maybe the Barton et al. article) were not specifically about how students learn but I still think ideas of the sociocultural learning theory are embedded in the articles and these articles can be used to support the theory.

Cohen et al.’s article about STEM experiences and STEM capital talks a lot about identity and aquired “resources, skills, and knowledge through engagement with members of society.” That is basically how they define capital. From this definition it seems to me that even though they do not specifically talk about how people learn they still talk about how all the students’ resources come from their social experiences and; therefore, I think it would be an easy jump to say that you need these resources to learn (aka you need social interactions to learn).

Hughes’ article about sexual miniority students in STEM was also really interesting in that it did not mention learning that recall but in order for students to learn they need to be present in the learning environments. This article discussed important measures in the retention of LGBQ students in STEM. It seemed that the most important thing is that they feel safe and accepted and the best way they found of doing this was through research experience in their field. This is social and reminds me of apprentiship and LPP. The research experience gives them a faculty member and other students in the lab to work closely with creating a community of learners.

The Last article is Barton et al’s article about collaboratively engineering for justice. First, this article was super interesting to me just to see specific examples of how we can orient a STEM class to be justice focused. Barton et al.’s article discussed learning the most explicitly of the three readings this week but still not really in terms of theory like we have been exploring this semester. However, I think the curriculum and the choices the researchers made position this in the sociocultural realm. As far as the curriculum, the students worked in groups to co-produce a solution to an issue in the school community. I don’t think the teacher would have them do this if they didn’t think they were going to learn from it and this is clearly a very social/community based project so I think the teacher alligns with sociocultural learning theory. Also, I think the researchers probably align with sociocultural theory for multiple reasons but if I look specifically at their data collection and analysis they take field notes to look at students intereactions and discussions, they do interviews where one of the things they focus on is participation and engagement, and they capture videos to analyze class interaction and discussions etc. Their focus on co-production, community interactions and discourse seems to be hinting to me that they fall into sociocultural theory.

I didn’t really pull out much of the cognitive theory from these articles. I am interested to see if others did during our class discussion.

Cohen et al. (2020) explores the impact of early STEM experiences on the development of STEM identity capital in girls and women.  They find that encouragement from elementary teachers, interaction with STEM toys and kits, watching STEM-themed television and movies, and playing STEM-themed computer and video games all had significant impacts on development of STEM identity capital.  The paper does not examine ways in which students learn science; rather it focuses on how various activities can influence long-term self-concept and participation in STEM fields.  Some of the activities found to be significant (encouragement from elementary teachers, playing with STEM toys and kits, and playing STEM-themed computer/video games) could all have sociocultural theoretical foundations, depending on how the activities were presented to the students.   Watching STEM-themed movies and television shows seems like it would be more based in cognitive change.  Based on these inferences, both sociocultural and cognitive approaches may have a significant impact on the development of self-concept and capital of female students in STEM education.  I was not in the least surprised to earn that early experience with cooking/baking/kitchen science has a negative impact on the development of STEM identity capital in girls.  This type of activity reinforces the idea that, even in science, women belong in the kitchen.

Hughes (2018) states that a key component to LGBTQ+ student retention in undergrad STEM courses and majors hinges on better recruitment and mentoring of this student population by STEM faculty—especially mentoring of the student within the faculty’s lab environments.  This indicates that legitimate peripheral participation within the lab environment is critical to the retention of LGBTQ+ students in STEM fields.  However, faculty need to be trained in offering effective recruitment and mentoring to LGBTQ+ students.  I would go so far as to say that all faculty would benefit from professional development in how to interact with LGBTQ+ students—perhaps especially faculty within STEM fields.

Barton et al. (2020) explores how a sixth-grade science class and their teacher collaborate throughout engineering unit to explore sustainability, justice, and the development of self-concept of students as engineers.  The class constructs the meaning and parameters of the engineering project together alongside the teacher.  They arrive at their understanding of sustainability, for example, through discussion and brainstorming.  The teacher and the researchers are aware that “youth, especially from nondominant communities, experience structural inequities daily in the classroom—not only through expectations for what valued participation in engineering looks like…” and that “legitimized patterns of participation in science are generally tied to who ant what areas of expertise are recognized and valued by the dominant culture.”  I would say that the classroom structure is based in sociocultural theory—i.e. that the learning happens as a result of participation in a social context—and that the classroom teacher and authors believe that the field of engineering is also based in a sociocultural approach, but that the typical sociocultural approach found in engineering excludes people who do not belong to the dominant culture.  They, and their students, are working to change that. Finally,  they have a RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ROOM–like all schools should…

These papers were all incredibly interesting to me although they seemed to confirm many of my personal long-held suspicions.

It wasn’t surprising to me that activities such as star gazing, and taking part in STEM activities at a young age fostered students who were interested in that subject. I believe that something like 90% of the students who I used to be on a robotics team with in elementary school all went on to pursue degrees in STEM while the fraction of students who pursue college after graduation at all is something like 50% for the district in which I grew up.

It was a little surprising to me to learn that activities such as nature walks and baking didn’t seem to connect students to biology/ecology and other related STEM fields. I wonder too how much of that is just about the framing of the activity e.g. the difference between a nature walk to identify plants and a nature walk which discusses keystone species. It seems logical to me that students who have parents in STEM would be more likely to participate in activities that are framed in the STEM context since their parents would likely do that naturally.

On the flip side of that, I think the article about fostering justice brings to light the importance of motivation and engagement in those kinds of activities as well. I feel that sometimes programs that are meant to introduce kids to STEM are neither of those things and are seen as boring by participants. I wonder how this sort of thinking applied to community outreach might change the way we present science to the broader community.

I think this idea also connects closely with the statistics brought up in the out in stem article. We all tend to gravitate to the communities in which we feel the most accepted, safe, represented, etc. so it seems straightforward that students would turn to those majors which support that. It was a little surprising to me to learn that student in the LGBQ community identified in the article tended to have more research interactions with professors. I wonder how much of that is students looking past their peers to find welcoming spaces, or professors purposefully trying to build these safe spaces for those students, or how much is just coincidence.

These studies seemed to be well executed as a whole and were similar in many ways. First of it seemed that all of the readings saw sensemaking as something that is done with a phenomenon. This reminds me a lot of AST. Then each study categorized the progression of thought in fairly similar ways. One article used; initial ideas, building understandings, then consensus. Another article used; (1) Raise epistemic uncertainty through creating ambiguous conditions;(2) Maintain epistemic uncertainty through preventing immature disclosure and discussing alternative explanations or conflicting ideas; and (3) Reduce epistemic uncertainty through making coherent connections among current uncertainty, prior knowledge, and familiar phenomena. And the final study that i read used; Assembling a knowledge of framework, Inconsistency/reconciliation, and resolution.

The first series of sense-making was the most straight forward to me and easiest to understand but all of them seem to lend themselves to conceptual progression or conceptual ecology. Based on what we have learned so far I believe that this style of teaching would find itself directly in the middle between sociocultural/situative and cognitive learning framework. This type of learning is sociocultural because it requires discussion and it is also a cognitive style in its ability to require the recall of facts and ordering of these facts to ultimately sense-make.

This week’s sensemaking articles provide insight into what different learning theories might look like in classrooms and how learning, according to the theories, can be maximized.  Chen & Techawitthayachinda investigated storyline talk which happens in three stages – raising of uncertainty, maintaining the uncertainty while students work through it, and reducing the uncertainty through making connections.  Lowell, Cherbow, and McNeill also look at storylines in units, and focus particularly on the facilitation of stages of the discussion that occur during these units and how that discussion needs to shift as the stages change.

Both of these articles focus on the implementation of sociocultural theory in science classrooms and they look for ways that the interactions between students, teacher, and sometimes student facilitator can be utilized to help students learn.  The focus and implications of the research are more focused on how a teacher can best structure learning opportunities.  Most of these opportunities occur in the group context, and there is little discussion of what is actually happening within students’ minds.  One takeaway is that teachers may need more professional development to successfully implement these group learning techniques.

Odden takes a more individual, cognitive approach to exploring how individual students make sense of voltage, electric potential, and electric potential energy.  Odden’s research involves talking with two students about their understanding of these concepts and pushing for explanation of deeper meaning.  Odden then presents another concept – gravity/hill space – in the interview and observes how the students blend their understanding of voltage/charge with gravity/hill to create a new, linked understanding of the concepts that helps them better understand the original ideas.

I am struck by the different applications of the two theories – particularly the focus on either the individual’s internal meaning making or the group dynamics/leadership that is needed to progress through making connections in a large group.

Overall, I enjoyed the readings this week.  This is partly because I find modern writing easier to read and understand, but also because it was easy for me to see direct connections from the articles to a classroom.

Chen and Techawitthayachinda (2021) seems to fall mostly into the sociocultural camp of theoretical frameworks.  For them, sensemaking is a sociocultural process used to help resolve uncertainty through discussion driven by student questions and teacher/student interactions.  They even cite Vygotsky. However, the model they describe (activate existing knowledge, introduce new information, identify gaps between existing knowledge and new information, and use a sociocultural sensemaking process to integrate the old and new into a “coherent system”) is a cognitive, conceptual change model.  In fact, the authors cite Posner’s influence on their work. Their map of their model is very similar to the maps we produced for conceptual change.  For me, the most interesting part of this paper was the assertion that “use of students’ epistemic uncertainty promotes deep learning in the science classroom”—a sentiment with which I agree.  I’m left wondering how the authors would know a consensus of understanding was achieved (how would they measure consensus, how would they measure understanding); what tools and metrics might they use.

Lowell et al. (2021) also look at the process of sensemaking.  They define sensemaking as “a dynamic process of building or revising an explanation in order to ‘figure something out’” that is achieved through classroom discourse and teacher/talk moves, which is very similar to the definition given by Chen and Techawitthayachinda.  I think Lowell et al. rely even more than Chen and Techawitthayachinda on sociocultural theory as a foundation for their paper.  Lowell et al. sees three types of discourse as the way that understanding of new information (an event or phenomenon) is achieved.  The talk pattern they name, propose-probe-clarify-restate (PPCR), is used to “honor the ideas students bring to a discussion and to restate them to ensure they are accepted into a public record.”  This process assigns social capital to students’ ideas, perhaps especially to ideas voiced by students who are typically unheard.  I would like to know more about how Lowell et al. believe sensemaking occurs within an individual as based on the group process they describe.  I wonder if, at the individual level, they would see sensemaking as an issue of cognitive, conceptual change, similar to Chen and Techawitthayachinda.

The final paper, Odden (2021), seems to fit more with a cognitive theoretical framework than either of the other two papers.  Odden even notes that one of the frameworks they consider, Knowledge, in Pieces, is an “individual, cognitivistic” framework.  Odden talks about the transition from “novice to expert” science student, but doesn’t seem to mean it in the same context as legitimate peripheral participation.  For Odden, learning doesn’t have to occur in a social context at all; rather, they suggest that old ideas and information can be blended together to create understanding of new topics—akin to conceptual change.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading the selections by our class this week. Being that they were published pretty recently, it felt as though they were painting the most up-to-date image of education I have read about in this class thus far. Each paper provided some really nice suggestions for how practitioners can support their students in sense-making, social learning through discursive practices, and the utilization of uncertainty as a pedagogical resource as well. I don’t know about my peers, but I feel as though the suggestions from these readings seemed to be pretty user-friendly as well. The authors did a really nice job describing the benefits of each and the tacit components each method required to be successful. I believe the articles by Chen and their partner and Lowell et al. were more aligned with situated learning, where Odden was admittedly using a model founded on cognitivist theory.

The article by Chen and Techawitthayachinda was admittedly structured with social constructivist theories as well as Vygotsky in mind, which led to a very useful discussion of how students’ uncertainty should be utilized in a classroom that allows for students to “think and act like a scientist” (pg.1). To me, this rang true with situated cognition, as this statement is indirectly referencing “authentic” science classrooms. The authors even discuss how uncertainty is a key feature in science and will lead students to practice more like scientists. The focus of the article on storyline-curriculum, also makes me think that the authors’ research coincides more with situative learning, being that storyline-curriculum is regarded as a method of teaching that emphasizes students’ creating and communally agreeing on knowledge. However, I did notice that the authors do mention some cognitivist ideas such as “deep learning”, “cognitive structure”, and “conceptual development”, but I feel as though they were just employing terminology that comes from cognitive theory.

The second article by Lowell et al. was very similar, in my mind, to the first article by Chen and Techawitthayachinda. This was due to Lowell et al.’s focus on students’ collective sense-making and the discourse practices that they suggested could help guide students through the discursive sense-making process. I felt that Lowell’s article was really trying to push the authenticity of the discussion and critique practices that they were researching, which was an obvious nod to situated learning theory. They also drove home the point that student sense-making can only occur when discourse is dialogic, interactive, and highly interanimated (pg.5),  which situates sense-making as a process as a strictly social learning activity. This article seemed the easiest for me to place in the situated learning camp, as their research was heavily focused on talk moves, stages of sense-making discourse, and how we can amplify students’ participation in collaborative learning. Out of all the articles, I think this one was my favorite as the authors made their suggested use of talk moves and discursive learning processes easy to enact.

Lastly, the Odden article seemed very easy to place in the cognitive camp. Not only did he come out and say that he was using cognitive theory, but he was also focusing on the utilization of conceptual blends to create new conceptual connections between scientific knowledge fragments that can then be carried across contexts (pg. 991). I don’t know if you could find a better definition of cognitive research haha! It was interesting though, that Odden was very interested in individual cognitive theory and how conceptual blends worked into students’ learning processes, but he then chose to use a pair of students as his primary case study. I understand that this may have been a choice that was intended to help make the students’ cognitive processes more observable, but I thought it was a little offputting. It probably doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it did make me reminisce on how cognitivism is typically seen as focusing on students individually.

I had fun with the readings this week. It was kind of like playing detective, trying to piece together phrases and focus areas to determine which model these studies fell under. At some point, the papers made it pretty clear, if not explicitly stated, which theory their study was rooted in. So, I guess I did not need to be a great detective but I think my close examination of the studies still helped me piece together what made the studies line up with the theory they claim to fall into. It also helped me see that even though they seemed to claim to be in a theory I still felt like they did not necessarily fit neatly in that theory based on our conversations in class.

I will start with Odden’s conceptual blends study because I think it falls the most on the cognitive side of things. The theoretical framework of this paper was knowledge in pieces, sensemaking, and conceptual blends. I was not very familiar with knowledge in pieces or concept blends prior to reading this paper but both ideas seem pretty cognitive to me. Odden specifically says that knowledge in pieces is a cognitivist theoretical framework. This makes sense to me because it seemed clear last week when we picked through the difference between Anderson and Greeno it seemed that Greeno made a distinction between knowledge being cognitive (I am pretty sure about this?) and maybe more of a process of knowing (I am not sure about this?) being sociocultural. Therefore, the focus on students’ concepts and knowledge seemed to situate this in the cognitive realm. Conceptual blends seem to be making connections between disconnected ideas which I’m not sure if we discussed completely but I feel like it could be an extension of the conceptual change theory. I have some familiarity with sensemaking and I feel like this could in some situations be social but the trajectory of the boys’ sense-making in figure 8 really looks similar to our model we drew of conceptual change with the different shapes and the connections between the concepts.

Next, I’ll move on to Chen and Techawitthayachinda’s article about epistemic uncertainty because I think it kind of bridges conceptual change with sociocultural theory. They claimed to be rooted in sociocultural theory but in their theoretical background, they talk about deep learning and uncertainty which seemed to fall more on the cognitive side of things. They say, “deep learning is generative because students actively reshape their own knowledge by linking new information to existing schema.” This seemed to be describing conceptual changes and the cognitive ideas of assimilation and accommodation to me. The idea of raising and maintaining students’ uncertainty reminded me of the cognitive ideas of disequilibrium and cognitive conflict (both were eventually mentioned in the theoretical background). Therefore, I was thinking they are focusing on these cognitive frameworks but they are claiming to be sociocultural. However, they framed these ideas in the whole class discussion to bridge the individual conceptual change with sociocultural levels. When students raise uncertainty the storyline of the classroom follows accordingly with learning activities that are driven by the students’ uncertainty and subsequent interactions with teachers and peers. This reminds me a lot of AST and what we do at PFMS. Prior to this, I was not really familiar with the term storyline talk/ story-line based curriculum but I believe an AST curriculum would be a storyline-based curriculum?

Finally, I’ll discuss the Lowell et al. article about supporting collective sensemaking through discussion which right off the bat from reading the title felt like it fell in the realm of sociocultural theory. This article also talked about ideas being connected with each other like the previous two articles but in this case, the students’ initial ideas were built on through interactive discussion that leads to interanimated ideas. Therefore, opposed to the conceptual blends article where ideas seemed to be connected more in the head, ideas here are connected through discussion and critique of other ideas that lead to collective sensemaking. I thought it was interesting when the authors stated that simply probing and pressing is not enough to reach an interanimated consensus that it is important to create a space where students critique and work with each other’s ideas.

I look forward to making more connections this week in class!