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

This week’s pieces help me better visualize how situated learning could take place in a classroom – particularly since the “situatedness” seems to become more abstract, meaning the acceptance that learning can happen in communities that are not discipline specific communities of practice. The readings were also helpful because they provided an accessible comparison/contrast of the two theories and described where more research is needed.

I found the following two quotes particularly informative:

Anderson (1996, p5) comments, “Particularly important has been situated learning’s emphasis on the mismatch between typical school situations and “real world” situations such as the workplace, where one needs to deploy mathematical knowledge.”

And Greeno (1997 p7) comments, “It is important for discussions of education because it shows that if a goal of education is for students to reason successfully in their everyday activities outside of school, school mathematics programs that are limited to teaching algorithmic skills do not reach important aspects of those reasoning activities.”

Later in Greeno (1997), he describes participation in social practice as much broader than how we have discussed communities of practice thus far in the course.  He describes the social contexts that impact a student studying alone, and these are not discipline specific, necessarily but more broadly types of activity that exist in a social context, even if that context is abstract.  By focusing on a “complex, social environment,” which includes a large number of relationships and activities, instead of on concrete/formal communities of practice, I can better see how this theory of learning could be useful in classrooms.

The Anderson and Greeno piece emphasizing the similarities between the two theories is a great springboard for discussion.  Since cognitive theory emphasizes the individual while situated theory emphasizes the social aspects, it seems like the most effective learning would occur somewhere at the intersection of the two.  What an individual learns is only effective if it can be used in the contexts people find themselves in; but similarly, there are many activities that cannot be accomplished with some amount of non-process, pre-requisite knowledge.  This also reminds me of how pendulums swing in educational policy and reform trends.  The answer is probably somewhere in between a focus on the social dynamics/practices and the individual learning/knowledge.

(I also realize this has been a huge debate in business, where hiring for process is preferred over hiring for content knowledge in that particular market; however, in the places that take content knowledge for granted in their employees and then they lose those employees, the company struggles to maintain its competitiveness because the process people know the management activity but not the product.  Interestingly, the content knowledge tends to be undervalued, while the process knowledge is overvalued when looking at employee compensation.)

The readings this week were kind of wild in the sense that I felt like the authors (Anderson et al., and Greeno) did not sugar coat their disagreements about situative vs cognitive theories. Being the competitive person I typically am, I found myself trying to pick a side and root for that person/theory to “win” the argument. For reasons that I am not completely sure why I found myself “rooting” for Greeno and the situative learning theory. Still to this point, if I am being completely honest, I am not sure if I have ironed out exactly how I think people learn. However, my experiences at PFMS and in our classes learning about AST have me leaning towards learning happening more in the situative/sociocultural learning theory realm. As I read through the debate, I tried to hear both sides and really try to analyze their claims but I think sort of unconsciously I was always trying harder to find something wrong with the cognitive points.

After finishing the readings, I was left feeling like maybe I should not have tried to root for a side but maybe I should have been trying to find a way for the theories to work together. The whole time I was reading I felt like I was being jerked around like in my head going, “okay, this is about situative, this is about cognitive, now back to situative, now cognitive” trying to keep everything straight (it was helpful though because there was a lot of explicit comparison between the two theories). So I am not sure if I caught all of the big points but what I took at the end was that both sides basically came together in the “let’s be friends” and determined that “high priority should be giving to research that progresses toward unifying the diverse perspectives within which we currently work.” So, what I take from that statement is that instead of rooting for a side I should be looking for common ground. Maybe? I am not sure but I think back to class when we put the Venn diagram on the board and how we said that cognitive and sociocultural are very different but they also share “the stuff” in the middle. Maybe the stuff in the middle is where Greeno and Anderson et al. suggest we focus?

From previous classes, I do understand the important different between how the cognitive view uses words like knowledge, and how the situative view uses them. However, I think I have to agree with Anderson that oftentimes I also felt that most of Greene’s complaints seemed to be all in the language used to describe the issues and didn’t really seem to give any actual theoretical complaint with the original author’s points and I wish that Greene had dug more into *why* they thought that situative was better than cognitive instead of just constantly agreeing with them.

Anderson also brought up an interesting point that had never really clicked for me which was that at its core, it does seem like the situative view is just behaviorism 2.0. Because they view all knowledge as being in how you interact with the world, and your community of practice it does seem to lean that way. However, the recent addition of identities that we learned about does begin, in my at least, to begin to bridge the gap closer to the cognitive view.

In all honestly, I didn’t find that their argument was productive in any way. They didn’t seem to really hear one another’s complaints and the third “let’s be friends” article just reiterated those views that share which they had already pointed out in their initial response. So really, what was the point if neither side was really listening? The just be friends article didn’t even truly propose a new area of joined research, or how to join forces to request funding which seemed to be their main issue with one another.

As for the last article, I have to admit that I don’t think I really understood the finer points of the “situational” theory of learning that they were suggesting. To me, it seems to be basically identical to the situative theory we had heard in previous weeks. It seems the main difference here is that they’ve shifted more of their focus to the exact relationships and interactions between people/items/etc within a group and how they’re initiated instead of the more vague apprenticeship model we’d dealt with previously.

To me, though, even this analysis is all external actions and didn’t seem to get too much into the individual thought processes and cognitive ecology that the cognitive point of view focuses so heavily on, but perhaps I missed or misunderstood some key point.

This week’s readings brought the theories we have been studying into the classroom.  Reading through Pintrich et al reminded me of many different techniques of teaching that rose and fell in prevalence when I was in the classroom.  At one point, creating cognitive dissonance was considered a very important piece of teaching chemistry.  There were books and guides on activities to promote this and to identify prior knowledge and/or misconceptions.  One of my favorite cognitive dissonance activities was to create a “candle” from string cheese and an almond sliver that students would observe during the early weeks of the course when we were working on observation and description.  After spending time observing the “candle” both lit and unlit, I would bite the top of the candle off right at the end of class.  The purpose of the demo was to create excitement and questioning of assumptions.  One of the things I struggled with was making sure that any of the cognitive dissonance activities that we did tied directly to what we were working on instead of creating dissatisfaction solely for the sake of creating dissatisfaction.

Prior knowledge conversations usually began with clarifying between a scientific use of a word like acceleration or organic and our daily use of the word and explaining how each one was appropriate in particular contexts (much like Driver et al).  Over time, within a particular community, it became easier to predict what prior knowledge might exist, what misconceptions might exist, and how best to tailor instruction to addressing those items.

Other things that stand out to me from the readings include the differing views of what knowledge is and the way that communities of practice must be defined to fit a school setting.  I also appreciated the discussion of the nature of epistemology and ontology in Driver et al, particularly because I have been working to “name” my own theoretical framework (or ontological, epistemological, and axiological) for research, since that is an important part of the research process for mixed methods and qualitative research.  Last week I picked up a book on critical realism by Maxwell because I thought that might be where I land.  The premise of critical realism is that there is real world that exists outside our understandings of the world (ontological realism) but can only be described through our understandings and perspectives (epistemological constructivism, kind of).  While this is not central to this course, for myself, in my process, the theoretical framing of the Driver piece was particularly informative.

While I can, on a given week, look at the assumptions of a particular author and follow their logic to their result, that does not mean that I don’t question their assumptions or wonder about the legitimacy of their arguments.  The main places I am currently questioning are the assumptions about what knowledge is (for instance, I am more likely to say that you can learn through activity, but that knowledge also exists in non-activity) and about the purpose of school (I think my main struggle here is that I think there is a shift in purpose from the more general elementary levels to the high school & college levels in what the purpose of school should be and who the community of practitioners are.  I might also say that I am not sure I actually buy into the apprenticeship/community of practitioners model for general education.  That said, I see why Science for all Americans/NSES needed to shift to NGSS if your underlying theory of learning was based on conceptual change and the communities of practitioners models.)

Finally, and more of an aside, in the Brown et al piece, I appreciated that the students learned to use the filing structure on a computer for their work.  Having grown up with DOS command prompts and having to understand file structure to make a computer work (my mom was a computer programmer during the punch card era), it has been hard to watch my step-children have a black box conception of how devices work because they were treated as digital natives – using technology to consume but not necessarily understanding the basic ideas behind the devices they are using.

Driver et al. support a constructivist view of developing an understanding of science that occurs within a social context. They draw on the learning theories of conceptual change espoused by Posner et al., as well as the cognitive apprenticeship of Brown, Collins, and Duguid. Unlike Brown, Collins, and Duguid, Driver et al. consider the application of cognitive apprenticeship to the classroom. Their thesis is also informed by the work of Lave and Wenger on situated cognition and Vygotsky’s supposition of the role of enculturation in learning. Moreover, the examples they cite of classroom communication that support their theory are very reminiscent of ambitious science teaching. The questions they quote from Duckworth (1987), such as “What do you mean?” “How does that fit in with what she just said?” and “How do you figure that?” are some of AST’s pressing and probing questions. The practices of “negotiating new conceptual tools” and “scaffolding a new way of explaining” are also remarkably similar to AST moves. Driver et al. also presage the science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and nature of science connections in the NGSS. This is evidenced on page 8: “learning science involves young people entering into a different way of thinking about an explaining the natural world; becoming socialized to a greater or lesser extent into the practices of the scientific community with its particular purposes, ways of seeing, and ways of supporting its knowledge claims.” My main concern with this paper is the issue taken with empiricist view of the nature of science, as I do think that some scientific knowledge can be gained empirically, even by children.

Brown et al. draw extensively on Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated cognition and explore how to apply the cognitive apprenticeship of J.S. Brown, et al to a classroom “community of practice”. Brown et al. provides a pathway for bridging J.S. Brown et al.’s authentic activities of practitioners to authentic activities of school by recommending the concept of “thinking apprenticeships”. They also use Vygotsky’s zones of proximal development. It was interesting to read about this early elaboration on the jigsaw method of cooperative learning that many teachers now use as second nature. I think the concept of children “majoring” in particular areas or topics of study is fascinating. In my experience, children have this tendency, but I never thought about explicitly exploiting it for the good of the classroom as a whole. As with Driver et al., I saw many similarities to AST and underpinnings of the NGSS in the Brown et al. article. For example, they recommend that students act as much as possible as “junior scientists” and follow tenets of the nature of science put forth by the NGSS. Their suggestion for guided discovery learning reminds me of AST. The dynamic assessment methods they recommend are very similar to those suggested by AST and in use at our student teaching site. It would be interesting to see what current technology Brown et al. might suggest for introducing “students to the world of working scientists”.

Pintrich et al. build on Posner et al.’s model of conceptual change. One of the things I found most interesting in this paper was their discussion of why students often don’t activate prior knowledge in school situations. It reminded me of the parking lot conversation with Kraig about why students who have experienced natural disasters don’t use these experiences when learning about natural disasters. I think that Pintrich et al.’s paper may hold a key to effecting change in students’ understandings of “controversial” topics like climate change, in that they suggest ways of using a student’s “current conceptions” to “interpret and understand new, potentially conflicting information”.

It was exciting when I was reading this week that most of what I was reading made sense. We now have a solid foundation of the theories so I could apply what I was reading this week to what we have talked about the last few weeks. What I want to do for this blog post is to go back and look at the pictures I took of our whiteboards and try to remember where we got stuck and see if I have more insight now.

Conceptual Change: One of the first theories we discussed was conceptual change. Looking at our board, it looks like we said that students come in with prior knowledge in their heads. Then new information comes in. If this new information does not present conflict then it will assimilate into their already present concept. If the new information causes cognitive conflict and it is plausible, intelligible, and fruitful then accommodation can occur. We drew accommodation as completely reshaping and reorganizing the original concept. I remember two things I had a hard time with 1) really understanding the difference between assimilation and accommodation and 2) whether or not it was good/necessary to make students have a dissatisfaction with their prior knowledge. The Pintrich et al. reading helped clear some of this up for me. Pintrich et al. define assimilation as easily combining new information with prior ideas when you have little previous experience with the topic. They say accommodation occurs when people overcome well-developed concepts about a topic that is resistant to change through a radical transformation. I think this is the same way that Posner et al. defined assimilation and accommodation but it just helped me refresh. However, Pintrich et al. and Posner et al. do not agree on everything. Pintrich et al. critique the conceptual change model by saying “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.” This is just one of their many points about the need to consider adding students’ motivations such as goals, beliefs, and values to Posner’s conceptual change model.

Vygotsky: Next we talked about Vygotsky. Vygotsky brought in the idea that thinking is social. He thought all thinking starts outside the body (socially) and is internalized. However, both Brown et al. and Driver et al. substitute internalization with appropriation. Brown et al. say “internalization implies that individuals are separate from one another and learn by observing and then taking within themselves the results of the observation.” They think that teachers and students “seed the environment with ideas” that can be appropriated by the members of the community. Vygotsky also talked about learning through mediated activity. I am not sure if this is a stretch but Pintrich et al. discuss their motivational constructs as mediators of conceptual change so I am not sure if that is tying Vygotsky’s ideas into conceptual change.

Cognitive Apprenticeship -> Communities of Practice: The other two theories we discussed that I saw in this week’s readings were cognitive apprenticeship and communities of practice. In my head at this point, I’m not sure if this is acceptable, I have kind of replaced cognitive apprenticeship with communities of practice. I feel like communities of practice clarified our issues with had with cognitive apprenticeship. I don’t know. So, anyway, I am just going to focus on communities of practice. One of our big debates with communities of practice was whether or not classrooms are communities of practice. Brown et al. argued that you can make classrooms a community of practice if you get away from the traditional classroom set-up. To do this you need to create a community of learners that work in collaboration with each other to acquire distributed expertise and knowledge. They went into great detail on how to achieve this but you all read the article so I won’t summarize it. They also touched on authentic school activity and apprenticeship. They believe, “the best we can do is to avoid obvious discontinuity with the cultures of practicing scientists” and if students “develop into individuals able to evaluate scientific information critically and to learn about new developments in science, then we would be more than satisfied.” This is basically what we decided with our models of communities of practice last week.

There was a lot to discuss this week so I definitely didn’t cover everything; therefore, I am excited to read everyone’s posts and discuss more on Monday.

Although the readings were quite expansive this week, I did enjoy the breadth of suggestions they gave regarding pedagogy and engaging in either conceptual change or cognitive apprenticeships. My favorite reading out of the three would have to be the Pintrich though, as he added another confounding factor to the conceptual shift framework that seemed implicit when reading about it initially. By suggesting that we need to pay more attention to students’ attitudes toward engaging content and the multitude of factors (social, motivational, historical, etc.) that can alter a student’s ability to persist in the learning process (Pintrich, pg. 170), Pintrich helped situate the learner as a full person that is affected by their outside environment more readily in my opinion. Rather than talking about conceptual change as a cold process that only relies on students engaging empirically with content, I thought it was very enlightening to see work directly devoted to proving that there are other outside factors (which are commonly considered implicitly in my opinion) influencing student’s ability to later their conceptual ecology. I also really enjoyed that Pintrich discussed the paradox of prior knowledge, which is a problem that I had slightly considered when we began talking about prior knowledge and alternative frameworks. The idea of students’ prior knowledge making it harder to incorporate new concepts is a little hard for me to buy into and Pintrich further complicated that view by stating that students’ have to utilize prior knowledge to assess and connect new concepts. I totally get that this is the paradox, but it seems that Pintrichs’ argument is suggesting that ultimately prior knowledge is more useful to integrate new knowledge rather than hinder the process, so he kinda answers the paradox. I agree that students may have alternative frameworks that don’t allow for the the integration of new knowledge, but I believe that is still progressively part of the evaluation process students use to determine if a new concept is worthy of learning. Pintrich suggesting that the idea of “conceptual ecologies” is too narrow also hit home with me, being that I previously understood this concept as the collection of a person’s conceptual knowledge and the relationships therein, but I never realized that motivation and goals definitely plays a large role in forming these understandings.

The Brown reading also held a lot of great info regarding pedagogy as well as refinement of the cognitive apprenticeship framework that I hold an affinity for. Seeing the growth that Brown and his research team had over 4 years was really awesome to see as well. I couldn’t beleive that he confirmed that readers/educators shouldn’t take the “apprenticeship” part of the framework so seriously, but I thought his refined emphasis on “thinking apprenticeships” held a lot more merit within modern schools( Brown, 223) . I beleie we touched on it a bit in class, but being that schools situate students in authentic school activities, it makes sense to suggest that they are taking place in “thinking apprenticeships” within a community of scholars/learners rather than scientists. After all, it seems as though science education has been emphasizing the switch to teaching students how to be scholarly consumers of information much rather than specific content. The classroom setups in this paper actually really reminded me of AST, as they seem loosely scaffolded so students have agency in their own curriculum, meanwhile the teacher works to probe and provide cognitive conflicts for students to struggle with and use as fuel for further inquiry. Overall, I think their suggested idea of distributed expertise would be a great way to enculture students in the “scholarly researcher” community, while also creating great discourse within the classroom.

These three readings I think had an interesting interplay between them and I was happy to see some of my personal concerns addressed in some of them.

In the first article, I saw a lot of my own complaints about motivation in students fleshed out constructively, but they didn’t seem to actually propose any real solutions which was frustrating. However, in the second article, they examined a new classroom set-up which seemed to actually cover a lot of the issues that first article raised even if they didn’t directly say so.

I was honestly really intrigued by the classroom set-up suggested in the second article. It seemed to check a lot of boxes for the little I know about the NGSS standards, while also being engaging for the students. It seems to allow students to hone in on personal interests, while still being constructive and provides many different areas for students to shine with their personal skills whether it be writing, research, presentation, etc.

However, this model in particular relied heavily on the use of computers in day to day activity in the classroom and I’m brought back once again to the unequal access to technology that schools have. At least in my high school, we had about 20 computers in our library that you had to schedule special time with for your class. No other of the classrooms had computers, and there was no “laptop cart” that I’ve seen in other schools.

I think too that it may be at least a little difficult to get students on board with this idea of self-teaching and to motivate them on a day-to-day basis – especially at the high school level. It may be a pessimistic view of mine, but it seems that a lot of love for learning has been stamped out by that stage in students and many may see this teaching style as a cop-out on the teacher’s part and be unwilling to participate in teaching one another.

As for the final article, I think I might disagree with their overall conclusion. They say that “We have presented a perspective on science learning as a process of enculturation rather than discovery”. I may be misunderstanding their overall point, but it seems like even in the examples they provided, discovery (which I’m taking to be learning from one’s environment) plays a key role alongside enculturation. If you take the demonstration with the cardboard box and lamps out of the first example they provide, then the discovery that light seems to travel infinitely until blocked does not happen and the lesson falls apart. In fact, the teacher distinctly mentions light from the sun as one of their first examples – a concept that students learned via their interaction with it. Similarly, without the surrounding structure to the lesson, the learning goal of that demonstration becomes much muddier and students may miss the intended lesson and instead focus on some other aspect of the demo which was not intended. Both facets — enculturation into the language of “ray” and the discovery aspect of the demo + sunlight — were necessary here.

When I started reading the selection by Lave about legitimate peripheral participation, I would have never thought I was going to be adding pieces onto my understanding of cognitive apprenticeships and Vigotsky. I was really interested in making my understanding of cognitive apprenticeships more robust, but as I got further into LPP I started to realize that there are a lot of things that could/should be considered within the cognitive apprenticeship framework to account for the fluidity of learning and where it is situated. I also found myself reflecting on our discussion of how Vigotsky thought that learning could only be accomplished socially, being that this week’s reading confirmed that learning is socially inseparable (Lave, pg.31) and thereby situating ALL learning in some aspect of the social realm. I feel like the author even addressed the root of some of our hangups with Vygotsky last week, as he addressed that one interpretation of situated learning is that it is social only in the respect that other people involved, which is too narrow of a view (Lave, pg.32) Although this definition of “situatedness” isn’t the main point of the reading, I did find that having it thoroughly laid out by the author early on helped me keep an open mind about how LPP is “located in the social world” (Lave, pg. 36). Similarly, having the author explain why participation is crucial to learning, being that it is bringing cerebral and embodied activity together (Lave, Pg. 52) made a great case for why apprenticeship is so much more than just learning by doing.  Overall, I felt pretty good about how I understood LPP and the fact that it hinged upon the accessibility of knowledge within communities of practice, where communities of practice are constantly intersecting and evolving due to exchanges and evolutions of knowledge.

Contrasting cognitive apprenticeships and LPP even further, I felt as though LPP was giving much more definition in terms of why an apprentice would choose to engage in a domain (community of learning in LPP framework), what they could get out of it, and why their activity within the domain/community of learners was critical to all of those involved, not just the apprentices. I particularly enjoyed how the LPP framework works very hard to denounce the master-practitioner dichotomy, as both parties are heavily reliant on the existence of each other to keep a community of practice thriving. Without masters, newcomers wouldn’t necessarily be able to orient their growth trajectories and without newcomers, masters’ wouldn’t be able to fulfill their duty as those who shepard the reproductive cycle of their community. There is a distinction made within LPP though, that not all masters help newcomers partake in the legitimate peripheral practice. I believe this is a big contrast to cognitive apprenticeships, as apprentices can be involved in legitimate practice and thus learning skills of their trade, but not included in the periphery of the community of practitioners where they are to become inculcated with the implicit historical and social significance of their trade. This legitimate peripheral practice is also where newcomers work to form their identities within the community which is another major tenet of the LPP framework.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading about this framework as it seems to create a level playing field for all of those involved in a community of practice. Although newcomers are just beginning to find themselves in a field, their naive ideas and questions hold value in the practitioners’ eyes, but the practitioners, at the same time, have the opportunity to become newcomers again as new problems and knowledge arise in the field.

Of course this article first began to remind me of the cognitive apprenticeship paper. As I began to read further there was talk about differentiating an apprenticeship from situated learning (which I was having a hard time following) this is when I started to see this paper as an extension or maybe even an improvement on the aforementioned article. Then going forward the authors made it very clear that they were taking a passive stance about what learning method is the best or how they feel about learning in school and a number of other points. They simply wanted to theorize why learning happens in situations where we know learning happens.

I am very on board with this idea because if I am correct the goal is much more specific than the collins paper and the research should make more clear the route to finding out why or how learning is happening when there is legitimate peripheral participation.