First off, I’m apologize for picking such a long article! I should have checked the length before suggesting them 🤦‍♀️
But I actually found this set of articles pretty interesting actually. Particularly the one about sense-making in the storyline unit. I’d never heard of the program that they mention is this article, but the framing sounds like a really fun way to drive in class experiments. I’d never heard of the types of discussion that they bring up here by name, but was taught many of the skills that they mention during my brief sci-ed training as an undergrad.
I found it odd that in this article and the others, student-teacher dyad discussion was actually seen as a really helpful and necessary tool in the classroom. In my mind, I would have assumed that researchers would want mainly class discussion, so it’s interesting to me that they basically assign a time and a place to these sorts of interactions as being particularly helpful/useful.
Overall, though, I’m having a difficult time trying to figure out which sort of learning theory camp these sorts of studies fall under. They talked a lot in the introductions of 2/3 of these articles about identifying the failings of your knowledge and working toward fixing that which sounds a lot like the cognitive side of things. However, they also discuss how uncertainty plays a major role in real-life science situations and the whole idea of storyline lessons sounds like it leans solidly into the situational camp. I actually appreciate that it so hard to disentangle because I think it just shows that in many in-classroom instances, the tools that teachers employ don’t fit nicely in a little box and often draw upon many fields of learning theory to fit their particular style.
However, one point that does bug me a bit is that all of the articles talk about generating, and sustaining uncertainty, but none of the models we’ve learned about thus far give me any reason to believe that this process is helpful and/or generates better learning? Intuitively, I understand it as helpful by both allowing the students to gain some ownership over their learning and by engaging them in a “discovery”/ “hands-on” process which I’ve personally found effective. The closest thing in our theories I think is the assimilation/accomodation idea, but even that doesn’t really explain why being consistently uncertain is helpful. Can’t I identify a shortfalling in my knowledge, be told he correct answer, and still go through the assimilation/accomodation process? Or does participating in this uncertainty play into the motivation factors that we talked about last week maybe? I’m not really sure.
“I found it odd that in this article and the others, student-teacher dyad discussion was actually seen as a really helpful and necessary tool in the classroom. In my mind, I would have assumed that researchers would want mainly class discussion, so it’s interesting to me that they basically assign a time and a place to these sorts of interactions as being particularly helpful/useful.“
I agree with this. I tend to think of the importance of a larger, whole class dynamic. But, in the teaching some of us are seeing at a local middle school, the student-teacher dyad often does drive “progress” in the discussion and provides scaffolding for students to apply logic to their thinking. So far, though, the students were observing are fairly new to the AST/CER process. It will be interesting to see if the dyad remains central as students become more adept at the process.
“I actually appreciate that it so hard to disentangle because I think it just shows that in many in-classroom instances, the tools that teachers employ don’t fit nicely in a little box and often draw upon many fields of learning theory to fit their particular style.”
I agree – I think one of the things I appreciate about these articles is that they give good examples of real world practice and student experience, which can be messy. It seems like we are still working with the need for the theories to overlap because they each examine a different, particular aspect of learning.