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

How much of science is about making tools?  For example, the pH scale simplifies the determination of the acidity of a sample.  The index of refraction is the same idea with taking the ratio of the speed of light in various media.  Humans do not quickly understand large exponentially noted numbers, but we quickly understand that 2.3 is smaller than 3.4.  Would it benefit our students to be explicitly told which of the things we teacher are merely tools?  Is this what Pea was talking about when he wrote that “the principle aim of education ought to be that of teaching for the design of distributed intelligence” on page 81?

Along those same lines, Brown’s description of schools as being a community of learners learning to learn resonated with me.  It satisfies the social component of apprenticeships while preserving the differences between adult training and children developing.

As a practicing teacher, I knew about jigsawing as described by Brown, but the explanation as to why in the context of knowledge as social was new.  I have been taught jigsawing as a way of engaging students, as a way to increasing literacy, but not with the deeper philosophical, and dare I say, epistemological, underpinnings.

Finally, I enjoyed the scholarly arguments because the proponents gave clear examples in attempts to persuade the other side(s) and they also gave descriptions of the other views, often in parallel terms.  Brown’s description of why sje was using the word appropriation is an example of this.

I will concentrate my blog to discussing the Beyond Cold Conceptual Change article, as that made the most sense to me and my experiences in the classroom, both as a teacher and as a student. It seems that many educational, learning, and teaching theories fail to take into account one very important factor: does the student have motivation to participate in the learning process? Pintrich et al, take into account many factors relating to student motivation, as well as classroom contextual factors, when considering conceptual change. They attempt to “develop an argument for the importance of examining motivational beliefs as mediators and classroom contexts as moderators of conceptual change”. Many terms that were encountered in Posner, et al. surface again in this article: assimilation, accommodation, conceptual ecology. The authors present the Posner idea of conceptual change as being “cold” whereas they posit a “hot” idea of conceptual change. Since we are not allowed to use the word “like”, I will state that I identify and agree with “hot” conceptual change. Important in this idea are concepts as motivational beliefs, students’ self-efficacy beliefs, goals for learning, etc.

In looking at goals, it is clear that not all students have the same goals for each class. One would assume that “to pass the class” is the most commonly heard goal encountered in the school system. Students may have other goals completely unrelated to learning goals: making friends, impressing others, finding a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. Combined with these goals are more specific goals for the course: goals related to mastery or learning and ego or performance goals (p. 173) determine what a student is really looking to gain from a course. Is knowledge more important or is earning an “A” more important? Sometimes these goals do not complement each other, and, according to the authors, may determine the level of cognitive skills employed to achieve these goals.

Also mentioned in the article were individual beliefs and how these affect learning. Reasons for choosing to do a task and beliefs about their capability to perform a task (p. 176) also play important roles. Why would a student choose to do a task which they know they are going to fail? Do students intentionally choose easy tasks as to guarantee success? What happens to students when they are “forced” to engage in tasks that conflict with their beliefs about their capability to perform said tasks?

Classroom climate is also entered into the equation regarding conceptual change. Lack of opportunity to work on authentic tasks, authority structures, and evaluation procedures that focus on competition, social comparison, and external rewards are all mentioned as contextual attributes that also affect students and their performance (or perhaps opting not to participate). I am sure that we are all familiar with “that classroom” that seemed to be unfriendly and cold and what effects it had on us.

I was interested in the ideas of freezing and unfreezing of cognition and how this related to conceptual change. Similarly, seeking and avoiding closure presented some ideas to me that I had not previously considered.  Freezing of cognition refers to the process where the individual does not attempt to develop or test new ideas or entertain new hypotheses (p. 179). Unfreezing regers to actively seeking new information… and are related to the idea of accommodation.  Many reasons are listed for both freezing and unfreezing of cognition, but I will not elaborate for fear of this blog crashing the network due to size.

I am glad that an article has addressed the concept of the “costs of being wrong” (p 180). This idea combined with time constraints also point to anxiety in a classroom that may also affect student performance.

Wow! I could spend hours writing about this article, as it resonated most with me. Oh, interesting and “coincidental” (wink, wink) that Lev Vygotsky is mentioned in all the articles.

According to Lave & Wenger, Communities of Practice involves a set of relations among persons, activity, and world over time.  They include the idea of apprenticeship in learning and the idea of Legitimate Peripheral Participation.  LPP attempts to describe how newcomers take on the role of an apprenticeship and learn the ways of the community.  Through these various stages, newcomers eventually become the masters and thus support the incoming newcomers.  As I understand it, LPP is only a part to Lave & Wengers whole of their Communities of Practice idea.  

These ideas correspond with the ideas behind Cognitive Apprenticeship, as discussed in our previous readings from TSS and others.   In fact, it’s interesting to see how many of the ideas/comments in the Lave & Wenger readings correspond with the chapters in TSS.  For example, the comments in both regarding the need to “make visible” the learning. For example in TSS, discussing the “need to make visible and inspectable the norms and patterns of thinking that constitute the rules of the game in the science classroom” (pg. 192) and in Lave & Wenger, the “way of organizing activities that makes their meaning visible” (pg. 105).  Lave & Wenger’s comment about the [black box can be opened, it can become a “glass box” ] (pg. 102).  So they were apparently challenging Skinner’s behaviorist ideas and the fact that we need to figure out how to “see” learning?  

I also was struck by the statement on page 29; “It was evident that no one was certain what the term meant”.  I feel this way in some of the readings to date.  Everyone wants to coin their own phrase, or slightly modify existing ones to mean something different.  Another example is the term Inquiry.  There are some many varies of inquiry that it causes much confusion in the field.  However, I’m beginning to wonder if these issues of confusion over terms will ever be clarified?  Is learning theory so complex what we are unable to create terminology consistent with research which both the newcomer and master can speak under a common understanding?

Lave & Wegner’s  idea is that LPP is a way of understanding learning. They are challenging the ideas that learning is “absorbing the given, as a matter of transmission and assimilation” (pg. 47).   They also refer to  Vygotsky and his work on with the Zone of Proximal Development.  Rather than focusing on the “processes of social transformation” as so many others due, their emphasis is on “connecting issues of socioculture transformation with the changing relations between newcomers and old-timer in the context of a changing shared practice” (pg. 49).  They state that others concentrate on the processes of social transformation, yet their work does talk about social transformation in the sense that there can be conflict during the apprenticeship process and the apprentice challenges the master, and thus changes in the practice can occur as new ideas are developed.  Is this not socioculture transformation?

So, I guess after all these random comments,  I can agree on the ideas of a community of learners and how newcomers can learn from the master and the importance of setting up an environment in which this can happen effectively.  However, this is only a part to a much larger whole! 

Personally, it’s exciting for me to begin seeing the connections and similarities between various works, and beginning to learn how to question their ideas.  Of course, I’m still a newcomer and have much to learn from the masters!

I was on the verge of asking Scott for some book thatwould go more in depth on the cognitive vs. situative theories of learning because I felt I had quite a tenuous hold on the ideas.  This reading, with its in-depth description of apprenticeships and its contrasts with the cognitive theory, gave me more to think about and sift through.

   Throughout the reading, I kept thinking about my own nascent status as an ed. grad student.  This is because this world seems new and still a little strange to me.  I definitely feel on the periphery, but have made little contributions with some research and class participation.  I guess when I do my residency I will feel a little more of the centripetal action.

One of the most new and powerful parts on this article was on page 110 in the discussion of motivation – “apprentice learners know that there is a field for the mature practice of what they are learning to do.”  This makes sense for post secondary students – I knew I may have had to apply the stuff I learned in my nuclear engineering courses at some point in my career so I was motivated to learn it ( internalize it, participate in that community in some meaningful way).  But K-12 education is about preparing students for many outcomes because it is not known what communities they will belong to.  How does that work? Also, some students are motivated in the comminuty of practice of “school”.  They become the old timers by the end of high school, being full participants.  Although the authors probably disagree, school can be a legitimate community of practice  where the master practitioners are involved in social activties, producing representations of their ideas and their connections, welcoming novices.

I also was intrigued by the ideas of developing an identity in the community of practice as the purpose of learning.  The  example of a recovering alcoholic assuming the identity of a recovering alcoholic rather than that of a practicing alcoholic was powerful.  After over 15 years,  I have taken on the identitiy of a teacher, but I did not start out with that identity.  I have built relationships with people and with ativties and with ideas.  Do I want my students to assume the identity of a physicist?  Probably not, but I want them to have a taste for what a scientist does and how one uses evidence.  Also, we all have many different identities.  I am a teacher, a student, a mother, a wife, a committee member…All people are members of many differnt communities of practice.  Where am I going with this?  I do not really know, but the idea resonates with me… I learned how to be these things by worknig with others. 

Enough rambling

While proceeding through the reading, I found myself underlining key phrases or ideas that struck a chord with me. The following is not exhaustive of my underlining!

..”learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the master or knowledge and sill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.” (p. 29)

I think this is a good place to start and tie in our previous reading on Lev Vygotsky and situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship. Interesting to note is that the authors “initial intention…was to rescue the idea of apprenticeship.” (p. 29) Apparently, critics were less than receptive of ideas of apprenticeship.

One example is: “It is an analytical viewpoint on learning, a way of understanding learning.” It points to the idea that makes a fundamental distinction between learning and intentional instruction. (p. 40) In doing so, it is drawing attention to key aspects of learning experiences that may be overlooked. It is here that the idea of participation in a community of practice is where the authors point to where the bulk of learning is achieved. While reading this, and other parts of the selection, I was imagining the legitimate peripheral participation and how it relates to the field of education, particularly in the training that teachers-to-be receive. Students (throughout their formal education), by default, are exposed to the field of education just by virtue of being in a classroom. Teachers-to-be gradually increase their participation in the field of education by continuing to study education, teach a few lessons, student teach, and then obtain a position in a school. I can agree with the author’s ideas regarding this method of learning. In my training, this is how I progressed.

I am once again drawn to the idea of community and the social aspects inherent in a community. The idea of learning based on a community seems to point to the idea that life itself is legitimate peripheral participation. It would seem that life and “graduating” into adult life (whatever that may mean) is based on the apprenticeship model: old-timers, newcomers, social relations, increasing participation, etc. It would seem to me that it would prove beneficial to model our educational system based on the real world, as a community. Perhaps this would end the age old question of, “why do we have to know this?” I doubt that a student who is engaged in a community would ask that question. This idea also reminded me of the idea of job shadowing. This seems to be supported by the authors’ ideas.

I was not too impressed with the examples that were given, but I understood them: midwives, tailors, butchers, and especially mediums. I would have preferred doctors, scientists, lawyers, or teachers but the point was made. I did understand the A.A idea, although I would suppose that one does not train to be a non-drinking alcoholic (sure that was not the authors’ point).

One point that struck me was, the disconnect between what a high school or university physics student is doing and what physicists in the field are doing. We discussed this in class. The same can hold true for biologists, chemists, and other scientists. How do we have them engage in legitimate peripheral participation in a science class and have this model the work in a scientific discipline? Legitimate peripheral participation in a science classroom would have value in a student training to be a science teacher.

I was looking forward to reading Vygotsky as this was one educational psychologist I had never really studied during my years of higher education, which I think is quite interesting considering his ideas regarding cognitive development.  However, I had no idea how challenging this piece would be.  I’m not sure if was because my vacation caused me to read it in bits and pieces or the fact that my vacation kept my mind in bits and pieces.  However, once I was able to try and look at the big picture, this helped tremendously.  

Thinking….what does this really mean and how are we different than animals? Animals have ways to communicate with one another and they learn, as demonstrated by my dog learning to sit and stay.  So do they hear my voice and then think it in their heads or is it just a command they hear and they obey; natural memory.  I like how Vygotsky really brought out the fact that learning is complex and can’t be broken into simple pieces.  It’s much like teaching and learning.  I also think it’s interesting to consider the impact of his environment on his research.  Living in Russia during Marxism, how much of this socialist environment influenced his work and his research indicating that learning can’t be separated from it’s social context.  I think this is an interesting parallel with Vygostdky’s work; environment influencing the individual and environment influencing learning.

The RadioLab podcast “Voices in your Head”, brought so many questions to mind.  This idea behind hearing voices in head was fascinating.  I couldn’t help but think about adults and brain washing.  How was Hitler able to take an entire society to think and accept his twisted ideas… and then implement them?  Religious cults are another example.  It is all based on Vygotsky’s idea that if you hear other voices for so long, then do you start internalizing these voices and they start to become your voice?   So then this becomes learning?  And when does learning lead to individual thought and decision making?  Did Hitler study Vygotsky and use this idea on the German people? Of course one can’t simplify the entire phenomena surrounding Hitler to one part of many elements, but it is interesting to “think” about.

Had Vygotsky lived, I can’t help but wonder how he would have impacted the educational scene even more.  Every education student learns Piaget and knows all about his ideas regarding child development and learning, but not so for Vygotsky…at least in the late 80’s.  However, like all ground breaking research, and research in general, continues into the future based upon findings of the past and present.

Well it was not as bad as I thought it would be, probably thanks to the podcast which filled me in on the big ideas. 

One of the thoughts by the end of chapter 5 on the methodology was how much his methods and his interests are what I look for in teaching.  For example, his focus on process instead of fossilized behavior in analogous to the whole constructivist approach to teaching  – let the students go through the process of the science and make their own connections rather than presenting the final results of science as inert knowledge.  I am interested in helping the students learn how to learn and in seeing  ( or dare I say inderstand) the connectivity in the world.  In the age of Google, facts are cheap, but using them is, to quote a commercial, priceless.  OK I feel myself rambling now…

Another connection of focusing on process  to teaching was summative versus formative assessment.  This came to me afte reading on pages 70-71 about pressing buttons in a stimulus response experiment with the horse sleigh bread butter auxillary stimuli.   If I am teaching the concept of acceleration ( which is a very difficult concept for students to see as being different from velocity),  I am not going to wait until the end of the unit to check for understanding.  I want to know their processes for linking and delineating acceleration and velocity. 

Something else that is swirling around in my brain, but has not coalesced yet is that more mature processes or behaviors tend to look like less mature behaviors in the end, but the processes are very different.   How can we tell the difference in a classroom?  Hmm – can’t get away from that application idea and stick only to the theory!

One more random nugget that I want to ponder is from page 51: For a young child, to think means to recall, but for the adolescent, to recall means to think.  This will be my mantra for my 9th grade class  or maybe for all of them because while this may be true on an overall developmental level, in the school environmental, my adolescents are more like the young child!

While reading Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning by Brown et. al., I was curious by the various comparisons they made throughout their paper:   vocabulary and the way situations structure cognition; tool usage and conceptual knowledge; comparing Just Plain Folk to student learning and practitioners actions are just a few examples.  Curious in regards to how they were going to weave the two together and impressed by how they effectively did so. I felt they made a strong case for the importance of situated cognition and authentic activity.  Upon reflection,  I recall a time in education when “authentic instruction” and “authentic experiences” were the big buzz words.  It always made me wonder what that really meant.  Weren’t all the science activities I was providing for my students authentic?  What exactly did that mean?  I know am beginning to understand what the “community” meant by authentic activities…and I wonder how many of my colleagues really understood this concept?  And did this buzz word start with this work? 

However, what was really interesting was reading other researchers responses to this “new” idea of situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship. The discourse provided by Palincsar was fascinating.  It really drove home many points.  The first is how scientific argumentation is important in science education research as in science research.  I loved how she took to task their lack of previous researchers work which influenced their work: John Dewey, Vygotski, and Bruner.  I also thought it interesting how she took apart some of the claims and countered them with other work, in addition to questioning some of their claims.  However, she tried to soften her “criticisms” with the ending statement of “However, with each such foray, we, as a discipline, are better situated to improve the educational process” (pg. 7).  Another point for me was how important it is to be thorough in your writing.  While you can’t anticipate every criticism other academics might find with your research, it is important to site your philosophical and theoretical frameworks so readers are clear about your beliefs and foundation for your research. This was an area Wineburg was questioning.    Is it really new or a new twist on an old idea.  While I felt Palincsar was too critical of their work, she attempted to back up her concerns with research and practical points.  Of course Brown et al.’s rebuttal was also interesting to read, as they could back up or clarify Palincsar’s comments.  I felt like I was witnessing the scientific practices and discourse discussed in TSTS and one which teachers and students often don’t realize are an important aspect of science education!     

I am trying to analyze the cognitive apprenticeship as a theory, and not as a practioner, but that is very difficult.  So let me get the “what would this look like in an actual classroom” thoughts out of the way.  The Vanderbilt group paper attempted to do this, but I am not convinced that there was an apprenticeship going on there.  The videodisc problems (remember videodiscs?) seem more like great problems, but I did not see any culture of mathematicians in there.  Instead, it seems like the students were JPFs applying their ideas to a real life problem.  Also, the examples given both in the Brown,Collins and Duguid paper as well as the Vanderbilt were at the extremes of elemetary school and then college students.  What about the high school?  That is where an more sophisticated apprenticeship could occur.  Also, most teachers are not practioners of their subject, esp. in lower grades.  Can we accurately present the culture?

OK – onto theory…

The idea of immersing students in the culture of a subject makes sense if we are interested in teaching more than useless facts.  It could show students the differences and similarities of the diffierent disciplines if they are handled explicitly.  But the entire idea seems like an overcomplication of the idea that all knowledge is contextual, like those indexical words. I have had students not use their mathematical knowledge from a previous class in physics until  explicitly told to do so.  But maybe this is a prior knowledge problem more than context.  I think students are not used to the idea that their previous knowledge is still needed – they have the idea of tabula rasa maybe more than teachers.   But maybe that could also be a problem of school culture not reflecting real world culture.

I am not convinced that a cultural apprenticeshop theory will increase transfer of learning to other contexts.  As Wineburg points out there are studies that transfer increases both with and without strong contexts.

Another passage that bothered me was in the final rejoinder by Brown,Collins and Duguid.  On page 11, they address Wineburg;s concern about keeping up with the lstest fad by saying  that there is no need since “At best Ss will only be able to assimilate partial understandings of any disciplinary cultures, but that may be adequate for the acquisition of many insights and skills.”  That seemed like such a weak argument – Ss won’t get the whole picture, but they may get something out of it.  i am not convonced that there is an improvement here.

Looking at this from a nature of science  (NOS) perspective, is the cultural apprentice idea related to teaching about NOS?  It seems so, but what about content?  The magic square example in the original paper left me with the question of what was the content ot be taught?  Personally, I can teach physics content and still teach NOS, but is that a cultural apprenticeship?

On the culture of science ed. scholarship – I enjoyed reading the Brown,Collins and Duguid paper  and then the replies.  Seeing how scholars in the field read the paper gave me insight to how I should read papers.

It was very interesting to get a chronological picture of the conceptual change evolution, which is still continuing.  Posner et al. became the pivotal research idea behind conceptual change, looking at Piaget, Driver & Easly’s, and Erickson’s works and suggesting the next step in student learning.  Their basic question was “how student’s conceptions change under the impact of new ideas and new evidence” (pg 212).  According to Tyson et al., Posner et al.’s conceptual change model has dominated the field of science education because their work explicitly takes into consideration students’ epistemological commitments to their conceptions, providing many more tools for researchers in their work.  However, since then, other researchers have added their findings and ideas about conceptual change to the landscape.  

I found Tyson et al.’s paper interesting as it did an excellent job summarizing the research and describing the similarities and differences of other.  Yet under closer review, it became apparent that there were more similarities than differences.  As several author’s pointed out, many ideas are the same, but with different terminology.  Tyson’s attempt to try and package the ideas into one framework reminded me of other researchers doing the same thing.  Pellegrino et al.’s Assessment Triangle, combining the importance of cognition, observations,  and interpretations in student assessment.  There is the Hewitt’s Learning Triangle, and the triangular idea of considering curriculum, teaching, and assessment in student achievement.  Teaching and learning is difficult, and I think these  types of frameworks can only assist in the understanding of these complexities while helping to implement change in the classroom.

Duit et al.’s paper, coming six years later, discusses the limitations of the conceptual change approaches of the 80’s and 90’s. For example, he states more elaboration in the affective domain area Tyson et al. discussed is necessary (p. 679).  In addition to more work necessary in this area, he also is emphasising multi-perspective frameworks.  I personally think more work needs to occur in translating this research into classroom implementation.  What does this all mean and how can teachers use this knowledge when teaching students?

When I read these papers and TSTS, my personal lens is teacher training and how can we help teachers become more effective at their trade.   As stated in TSTS, Teachers and curriculum developers are often not aware of these different levels of difficulty and hence don’t appropriately modify their methods of teaching when confronting different types of cases (p. 107).  So how do we do this?  Is this the principals responsibility, as the instructional leader?  Is it the teacher’s responsibility to find time to read current research and implementation strategies?  Can teachers even find professional development which includes this type of research and implementation?  According  to the research, understanding conceptual change is vital in understanding student misconceptions and helping them move from one level of understanding to another.  I think the challenge is providing teachers with the classroom applications to incorporate this conceptual change knowledge into their teaching.