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

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!

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.

This week’s readings left me a little less than satisfied. Although, I did really like the back and forth between Anderson and Greeno, as I typically side with teachers in the situative camp, I felt like I sympathized with Anderson more in his 1997 publication when he suggested that Greeno’s arguments relied more on semantics and abstractions rather than concrete fact. Even though I still consider myself more of a proponent of situative learning, it was interesting to find myself agreeing with a lot of Anderson’s critiques of the situated framework such as how it is incorrect of the situative camp to claim that learning cannot be transferred between activities. This rang true with me, as it seems common sense to suggest that transfer between activities depends on the connectedness of the activities concepts and cognitive processes (Anderson, 1997). My inclination to join the cognitive camp didn’t last long though, as I started seeing that Anderson and Greeno’s main problems with the other framework were often reflected in their own work. For example, Anderson (1997) stated that the cognitive framework was more of a philosophical position, where the situative held more of an empirical basis. Well, throughout his 1997 article, there are many times in which Anderson refers back to empirical studies to prove his claims that the cognitive framework provides more positive results in students. Thorughout all of the papers, I got the impression that both authors were merely nitpicking at eachother’s work, while only discussing a few key differences between the frameworks.

One of the largest takeaways I got from this back and forth is that these two frameworks may be closer together in their tenets than I had originally thought. Prior to reading these articles, I had assumed, what I understand to be a common assumption of situativists, that cognitivists are focused more on the learning processes that individual students carryout in their minds, where situated researchers focus on the social interaction aspects of learning. This seems to be an ill defined explanation though, as both Anderson and Greeno stated that their respective framework does value both the individual learner and social learning environments, although each framework does specialize in analyzing one or the other. Similarly, in regard to the process of transfer, research in both frameworks have also presented data that refute the generalization cast upon them. The cognitive approach has provided research that confirms information structures in well defined tasks, where situated learning has proven that students with previous experience perform new practices in ways that reflect those prior practices (Anderson,2000). In some ways, this argument and its conclusion did provide some clarification on the primary distinctions between the cognitive and situated frameworks, but in other ways, I feel as if the lines between the two are blurred even further.

The opening:

I like the structure of this critique. It has been a while since I participated in or read an argumentative paper. The critique of situated learning is a great back and forth in itself. I am not sure if I am seeing the authors arguments clearly but it seems that claim 1 essentially comes out as being true for certain areas of learning such as mathematics but entirely not true in other areas such as reading. As the paper goes on it seems that the authors do a great job of showing inconsistent empirical evidence. To Paraphrase, ‘this study says yes but his study says no and this study said nothing at all’. Seemed to be the dominating sequence of arguments for claims 2 3 and 4.

The Pushback:

The opening of the pushback is strong but expected. The authors refute the presentation of their critique of the paper which they rightfully believe puts the opposition in a position to seem correct. They claim that the questions being asked assume certain things and if I am being quite honest I could not quite grasp what the assumptions exactly were. I am hoping to make this more clear in class.

While reading the first article, Anderson, et al., 1996, I found myself nodding in agreement.  I’ve been struggling with the idea that situated learning underpins the development of all learning.  It’s difficult for me to see a parallel between learning how to be a butcher and learning how to understand atomic bonding, for example.  Unlike Lave and Wenger, I think that learning is primarily transferable between tasks, contexts, and situations.  I learned math in school; if I cooked, I feel certain that I could use the math I learned in school in the kitchen.  I do use math learned in a mathematics classroom in sewing, in building, in beekeeping, and in gardening.  From my time as a teacher, I’d also agree that “combining abstract instructions with specific concrete examples is better than either one alone” (Anderson et al., 1996).  I would argue that some concepts and topics are abstract and can most efficiently be first understood through that lens.  I know: the importance of efficiency is a lingering product of capitalism in my brain, and yet: we only have students for so many days.

Their last point of contention, that situated learning claims “instruction needs to be done in complex, social environments,” is the one I find most problematic (pg. 9).  When we discussed the idea that all learning is social via the example of learning about gravity (i.e. gravity as a topic and idea has arisen through a complex amalgam of the work of many people over many years and even if we say we are studying it alone, by dropping something off the parking deck, we aren’t, really, because it doesn’t exist outside its social construction), I agreed in that remote sense that all learning we do is built upon learning that has been done by others.  However, Anderson et al., seem to be using a much less removed example for their counterclaim: that situated learning demands an immediate, complex social setting—as in, surrounded by others who are also working on what you’re working on—as with group- or cooperative-learning.  Why do I loathe cooperative learning and group work?  I could count the ways, but Anderson et al., has already neatly done so.

Then, I read Greeno’s response (1997), “On Claims that Answer the Wrong Questions.”  I’d like to note that I read it before reading Anderson et al.’s rejoinder (1997); nevertheless, I thought while reading it that Greeno went too far in the linguistic weeds to make any substantive critique.  I was a little surprised to see the rejoinder take that same view so dramatically: “For the life of us, we fail to see the difference between these questions although we confess to feeling some attraction to the simpler and more direct cognitive version” (Anderson et al., 1997, pg . 19).  My marginalia on that quote reads “Me, too! (star).”

I support Greeno’s desire to “develop an integrated view of social interaction and the informational contents of activity (pg. 15), but I didn’t find his ideas for this integrated view compelling.  His recommendation seemed to be shoehorning some ideas from the cognitive approach into the situated learning approach, more so that he could say “Look!  I’ve solved the debate!” than to really consider the merits of both approaches:  “As I hope is clear from this discussion, the approach I will take is to try to develop analyses of information structures of socially organized activity, using concepts and methods developed in cognitive science, as well as ecological psychology” (pg. 15).

I was hoping that the last two articles would drive toward more of a consensus view of how cognitive and situated approaches can complement each other, but they felt like more of the same back-and-forth, above.  In many ways, it seemed that the two groups were talking past each other rather than to each other and that they need someone skilled in nonviolent communication to sit down with them and help them make progress.