Brain U Learning & Scientific Reasoning Keisha Varma. Summer 2011

Transcription

1 Brain U Learning & Scientific Reasoning Keisha Varma Summer 2011

2 21st Century Skills What are the intellectual skills that will enable young people to function effectively in the 21st century?

3 Wagner (2008) Collaboration and leadership Agility and adaptability Initiative and Entrepreneurialism Effective Oral and Written Communication Curiosity and Imagination

4 Wagner (2008) Collaboration and leadership Agility and adaptability Initiative and Entrepreneurialism Effective Oral and Written Communication Curiosity and Imagination Accessing and analyzing information Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

5 What is scientific reasoning?

6 Some general definitions The process of drawing conclusions from evidence Hypothesis Testing

7 What is the right tool for the times? Bill Gates (2005) Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today s computers on a 50-year old mainframe. It s the wrong tool for the times.

8 Only one in five Americans are scientifically literate (Miller, 2004) despite mandatory instruction (what about now? standardized testing?) Inquiry activities fail to engender scientific habits of mind (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002)

9 STEM Teaching Goals Fostering content knowledge Developing general scientific abilities (i.e. scientific reasoning) Related to critical thinking and reasoning May have a long-term impact on student academic achievement Transferable general abilities are at least as important as STEM content knowledge

10 The Question Is Does STEM content knowledge have an impact on the development of scientific reasoning ability? Scientific Reasoning Ability Hypothesis testing Controlling variables Data evaluation

11 Research Design China Strong STEM content learning vs. US Weak STEM content learning Scientific reasoning is not taught in schools in either country China All Chinese schools adhere to a strict national standard 5 years of physics instruction US Varied. Only one in three high school students enrolls in a two-semester physics course

12 Chinese students go through rigorous problem-solving instruction in all STEM subject areas throughout most of the K-12 school years and become skillful at solving contentbased problems. It remains unclear, however, whether this training is transferable beyond the specific content areas and problem types taught.

13 Measures Quantitative Assessments Conceptual understanding in Physics Force Concept Inventory (FCI) Mechanics Brief Electricity & Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) Electricity & magnetism General Scientific Reasoning Ability Lawson s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning Proportional reasoning Deductive reasoning Inductive reasoning CVS Probability reasoning Correlation reasoning Hypothesis evaluation

14 Participants Chinese and US freshman college students before college-level physics instruction. N=5760

15 Performance Comparison: USA vs. China

16 Tradeoffs Devoting more time to teaching the process of science may come at the expense of teaching content is this tradeoff acceptable?

17 What do University Faculty think?

18 What else is important?

19 What is least important?

20 Time devoted to teaching process instead of content

21 Explanations

22 References Bao, et al. (2009). Learning and scientific reasoning. Science, 323 (5914), Coil, et al., (2010). Teaching the Process of Science: Faculty perceptions and an effective methodology. Life Sciences Education, 9,

23 So what do we do?

24 So what do we do? Understand children and how they learn Developmental Psychology Cognitive Development

25 What are Children?

26 What are Children? Children are inherently bad (original sin Middle Ages)

27 What are Children? Children are inherently bad (original sin Middle Ages) Children are blank slates (Locke)

28 What are Children? Children are inherently bad (original sin) Children are blank slates (Locke) Children are inherently good (Rousseau)

29 What are Children? Children are inherently bad (original sin) Children are blank slates (Locke) Children are inherently good (Rousseau) Children are little scientists (Piaget)

30 Greenhouse Visualization

31 Highleverage practices for teachers

32 Purpose of this discourse strategy? It s to make adaptations to instruction based on kids initial ideas and ways of talking

33 Questions Janet chose to spend 1and a half days eliciting what students know about decomposition, digestion and respiration. What are students initial understandings? How does she uncover these ideas? What kinds of questions does she ask when students give incomplete responses or reveal an alternative conception? What does she do when she first enters a group?

34 When do you use this tool? When you are engaging students in meaningful activity in order to build content knowledge and understand a phenomenon. Used after you have worked with the first discourse tool to elicit hypotheses from kids about how and why a relatively complex phenomenon happens the way it does. The discourse can help students build understandings of key parts of the big idea (not the whole big idea).

35 Purpose of this discourse strategy? 1) Ensure students understand why the activity makes sense to do at this point in the unit (answers students questions Why are we doing this? What gaps does this help me fill? ) 2) Help students bridge the activity with a larger scientific idea (answers the question What in the natural world does this activity help me understand, and how? ) Students should be able to explain this activity in terms of some scientific idea. 3) To support the development of students academic language, using the activity as a context (AL can be conventions or symbolism used to represent the phenomena (typically in written or drawn form), as well as vocabulary and science-specific rhetoric (i.e. ways of talking about evidence, referring to models as tentative ideas, hypothesizing).

36 Questions Examine the questions Janet asked in this lesson. What was she aiming to do? What alternative conceptions surface? How does she address these? What was the purpose of linking students observations and inferences to their initial model? What function does an initial model serve?

37 A Model of Learning (Lawson)

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39 Generating Evidence-Based Explanations This conversation usually comes after you ve allowed students to create some initial models of the key phenomenon, Given them some data collection experience, and Exposed them to important written resources to aid their conceptual understanding.