Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K... more Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates a risk of perfunctory and simplified implementation of evidence-based practices that misses the intent of the standards and does little to prepare students for reasoning with the complex, varied, and contentious evidence encountered in popular media or in advanced education. To address these challenges, we propose a theoretical framework, which we call Grasp of Evidence, that complexifies the concept of evidence in ways that facilitate introducing more authentic forms of evidence and more sophisticated ways of engaging with evidence in science classrooms. Our approach focuses on promoting a lay grasp of evidence needed by competent outsiders as they engage with science in their everyday lives. The framework posits five dimensions. The first four dimensions capture what students should understand about how experts work with evidence: evidence analysis, evidence evaluation, evidence interpretation, and evidence integration. The fifth dimension focuses on how laypeople can use evidence reports themselves. Each of these dimensions of practice involves specific epistemic aims, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes for reasoning with and about evidence. We discuss these dimensions and their contribution to the conceptualization of evidence as well as provide some initial instructional implications and potential directions for future research.
Abstract. This learning progression describes progressive levels of understanding for core concep... more Abstract. This learning progression describes progressive levels of understanding for core concepts in modern genetics. The progression extends from 5th to 10th grade. We have organized the core ideas in this learning progression around two questions in the discipline: (a) how do genes influence how we, and other organisms, look and function? And (b) Why do we vary in how we, and other organisms, look and function? We identified eight big ideas that are needed to successfully reason about these questions. The target performances of this progression thus involve generating several types of mechanistic explanations: explanations that link our genotype to our phenotype; explanations of the processes by which our genes are passed on from generation to generation and how they contribute to genetic variation; and explanations of the sources of variation in phenotype (including environmental interactions with our genes). The learning progression describes three levels of understandings tha...
The Next Generation Science Standards’ three dimensions—disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science a... more The Next Generation Science Standards’ three dimensions—disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCs)—were headliners at NSTA’s national conference in Chicago and featured in many of the organization’s other professional-development efforts this year (NGSS Lead States 2013). To some, the idea of DCIs, SEPs, and CCs may seem obvious and not all that new (Figure 1, p. 68). Haven’t we been doing science inquiry since the release of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) in 1996? What is new and different about the NGSS, and what do these three dimensions mean for curriculum, instruction, and assessment? There are, in fact, several major differences in how the new standards portray science education. These differences call for substantial shifts in terms of our learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessment. In the next sections, we highlight what is new and different about each dimension. We do not address e...
Noticing is the ability of teachers to attend and interpret student thinking to guide instruction... more Noticing is the ability of teachers to attend and interpret student thinking to guide instructional design (van Es & Sherin, 2002). The skills involved in noticing can be challenging to develop in teacher education programs because of the cognitive load involved in attending to the context of the real classroom environment. Teacher education programs can thereby study a precursor to noticing, such as framing. Framing instruction involves developing a range of “seeing” events in the classroom. Thus, preservice teachers must frame their teaching experience in ways that privilege student thinking. In our investigation, we characterized the frames preservice teachers employed in their reflection paper. We found that preservice teachers who used frames that were more attentive to student ideas were more capable at analyzing student understanding in written student artifacts.
Inquiry environments in science classes have increasingly incorporated more features of authentic... more Inquiry environments in science classes have increasingly incorporated more features of authentic scientific practice. However, relatively few environments have incorporated a critical feature of scientific practice: evaluation of evidence quality. This paper reports results from two studies in middle-school life science classes that investigate seventh graders’ competence in evaluating evidence. Overall, we found evidence that students have strong evaluative capabilities that can be built upon in instruction. Introduction: Integrating Evidence Evaluation into Inquiry Environments Chinn and Malhotra (2002) argued that, for inquiry-oriented instruction to be effective in improving students’ reasoning, it is important that these environments be as authentic as possible. Oversimplified inquiry environments can promote oversimplified student epistemologies that are counterproductive in the complexity of real-life settings. For example, when students learn to control variables in oversim...
Educational games are common in classrooms and have been extensively studied in multiple domains.... more Educational games are common in classrooms and have been extensively studied in multiple domains. The Geniventure game was developed to support student learning of core concepts in genetics via challenges that engage students with genetic phenomena at the molecular level. A core feature of the game is that it simulates behavior of molecular entities (genes, proteins, organelles) with high disciplinary fidelity to how these mechanisms really operate in the cell. In this sense, it is deeply disciplinary. The commitment to disciplinary fidelity presents design challenges regarding the ways in which entities, activities, and mechanisms are represented and manipulated in the game across the biological organization levels. We discuss five distinct types of design challenges that we identified based on data from focus groups with students who played the game and provide design heuristics for addressing these challenges.
The Framework for Science Education (National Research Council, 2011) and the subsequent Next Gen... more The Framework for Science Education (National Research Council, 2011) and the subsequent Next Generation Science Standards feature modeling as an integral component of inquiry driven classrooms. Evaluating such models entails careful consideration of fit with evidence. In this poster we discuss student use of computer animations, simulations, blogs and emails as sources of evidence in a collaborative model-based inquiry middle school science curriculum. In this poster we present a method of using computer animations and other digitally generated and presented material in the context of a model-based inquiry curriculum used in a middle school science classroom. Modelbased inquiry entails a shift away from narrower conceptions of science as hypothesis generation and testing to a view of science as a set of practices for generating scientific explanations and theories in a setting of critical discourse (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2008). Recent developments in national science sta...
In the so-called “post-truth” world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what... more In the so-called “post-truth” world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what is known, how to know, and who to trust. Current education has largely failed to meet the challenges of this world. Grounded in a new analysis of the goals of epistemic education, we argue for new directions in instruction. Our analysis specifies three components of epistemic cognition that education should address: epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes. Apt epistemic performance of these components has five interwoven aspects: cognitive engagement in epistemic performance, adapting performance to diverse contexts, metacognitive regulation and understanding of performance, caring and enjoyment, and participation in performance with others. Using this framework, we show how three emblematic “post-truth” problems stem from specific breakdowns in these five aspects. We then use this analysis to argue for new directions in curriculum, instruction, and research that are needed to pr...
Abstract Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students ... more Abstract Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students for a “post-truth” world. A core “post-truth” challenge is the prevalence of deep epistemic disagreements: people fundamentally disagree about appropriate ways of knowing. We provide a new analysis of deep epistemic disagreements and propose an educational response based on the Apt-AIR framework of the goals of epistemic education. An apt response to deep epistemic disagreements requires that people develop individual and collective abilities to make epistemic assumptions visible, to justify and negotiate these assumptions, and to develop shared commitments to appropriate standards and processes of reasoning. To develop these meta-epistemic abilities, we propose a cluster of instructional practices and principles called explorations into knowing. We discuss empirical research showing that teachers and students can meaningfully engage in explorations into knowing and productively discuss their deep epistemic disagreements. These proposals lead to new research directions.
This research investigates how students reason about the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity. An ... more This research investigates how students reason about the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity. An analysis of student interviews reviled two types of mechanistic explanations, one of which seems to be less intuitive but is critical for reasoning about core biological ideas such as homeostasis and development.
Argumentative practices have been shown to deepen understanding and improve academic performance.... more Argumentative practices have been shown to deepen understanding and improve academic performance. After 10 years of work with science curricula designed to develop reasoning, we present a framework grounded in data from our projects for identifying different forms of metacognitive engagement in science inquiry classes. We focus on four categories of discourse from our data: object of thought or discourse; expressions of what someone is thinking; degree of specificity; and discourse applying and tailoring understanding of epistemic cognition to particular topics. We present multiple examples in each of these categories. Our goal is to provide analytic tools along with examples to better identify and code argumentative discourse that advances students' apt epistemic performance.
Learning progressions (LPs) are hypothetical models of how learning in a domain develops over tim... more Learning progressions (LPs) are hypothetical models of how learning in a domain develops over time with appropriate instruction. In the domain of genetics, there are two independently developed alternative LPs. The main difference between the two progressions hinges on their assumptions regarding the accessibility of classical (Mendelian) versus molecular genetics and the order in which they should be taught. In order to determine the relative difficulty of the different genetic ideas included in the two progressions, and to test which one is a better fit with students' actual learning, we developed two modules in classical and molecular genetics and alternated their sequence in an implementation study with 11th grade students studying biology. We developed a set of 56 ordered multiple-choice items that collectively assessed both molecular and classical genetic ideas. We found significant gains in students' learning in both molecular and classical genetics, with the largest gain relating to understanding the informational content of genes and the smallest gain in understanding modes of inheritance. Using multidimensional item response modeling, we found no statistically significant differences between the two instructional sequences. However, there was a trend of slightly higher gains for the molecular-first sequence for all genetic ideas.
Neue Wege für Forschung über das Argumentieren: Einblicke aus dem AIR-Framework for Epistemic Cog... more Neue Wege für Forschung über das Argumentieren: Einblicke aus dem AIR-Framework for Epistemic Cognition Zusammenfassung. Dieser Kommentar befasst sich mit den vielen unterschiedlichen und interessanten Artikeln des Themenhefts. Zuerst wird überblicksartig eine Zusammenschau der Befunde mit Blick auf neue Erkenntnisse gegeben. Dabei werden Aspekte von Argumentation und Lernen kritisiert, um die Wichtigkeit dieser Erkenntnisse für die weiterführende Forschung in diesem Bereich herauszustellen. Anschließend wird kurz ein neues Bezugssystem für epistemische Kognition beschrieben und als Linse verwendet, um einige Themen der Artikel genauer zu beleuchten. Dies hat das Ziel, neue Denkweisen in Bezug auf Argumentation und das Erlernen und Vermitteln dieser zentralen Praxis zu eröffnen.
The Next Generation Science Standards' three dimensions--disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), scie... more The Next Generation Science Standards' three dimensions--disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCs)--were headliners at NSTA's national conference in Chicago and featured in many of the organization's other professional-development efforts this year (NGSS Lead States 2013). To some, the idea of DCIs, SEPs, and CCs may seem obvious and not all that new (Figure 1, p. 68). Haven't we been doing science inquiry since the release of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) in 1996? What is new and different about the NGSS, and what do these three dimensions mean for curriculum, instruction, and assessment? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are, in fact, several major differences in how the new standards portray science education. These differences call for substantial shifts in terms of our learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessment. In the next sections, we highlight what is new and different about each dimension. We do not address explicitly intertwining the three dimensions; a forthcoming article will discuss their integration. Much of what we discuss below draws directly from A Framework for K--12 Science Education (NRC 2012), which guided the development of the NGSS and is the foundation for the new standards. While the NGSS do provide some information from the Framework (in the blue, orange, and green boxes; see Figure 1) to elaborate on the performance expectations, these are only snippets of the more elaborate descriptions found in the Framework. We therefore urge readers to turn to the Framework when trying to understand the three dimensions and the standards. DCIs There are DCIs for each of the four major disciplines: physical sciences, life sciences, Earth and space sciences, and engineering (engineering, technology, and applications of science). Each of these disciplines includes no more than four DCIs, reflecting a concerted effort to cull the numerous ideas that all students are expected to know. While there are somewhat fewer ideas to teach, each is complex, with ample depth to delve into over the course of schooling. To rise to the level of a DCI, an idea must meet four criteria. First, it must be a key organizing principle within the discipline or across several disciplines; that is, it should be a core idea in the eyes of scientists. Second, it must have broad explanatory power: It should help learners understand and be able to reason about an array of phenomena and problems in the discipline. In this sense, it needs to be a useful thinking tool that is generative for students, and it should help them think about phenomena and problems they may encounter in and out of the classroom, both now and in their future. Third, a DCI needs to be relevant and meaningful for students. It should relate to phenomena and problems that students find intriguing. Fourth, the idea needs to have depth that allows for continued learning over the course of schooling. There are two complementary implications of this last point. First, the DCI, in some basic form, must be accessible to young learners, and, second, it must have enough complexity that it can be unpacked and deepened in higher grades. Many of the concepts (e.g., ionic bonds, mitochondria) and even topics (e.g., volcanoes, taxonomy) currently taught in school do not meet these criteria. As educators, it is incumbent upon us to closely evaluate what we are teaching and to dramatically prune the unwieldy tree of concepts we try to cover. Taken together, the DCIs create a conceptual toolkit that students can use to reason about and explain phenomena. The focus on explaining phenomena represents an important shift in the goals of instruction. Rather than teaching ideas in the abstract or in isolation, the new aim is to engage students in using these ideas to explain interesting phenomena. For example, instead of having students describe the water cycle and its components, students should be explaining cloud formation or precipitation patterns by using understandings about the water cycle and thermal-energy transfer to describe how weather events come about. …
Current reforms in science education place increasing demands on teachers and students to engage ... more Current reforms in science education place increasing demands on teachers and students to engage not only with scientific content but also to develop an understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry (AAAS, 1993; NRC, 1996). Teachers are expected to engage students with authentic scientific practices including posing questions, conducting observations, analyzing data, developing explanations and arguing about them using evidence.
Craver and Darden's new book, In Search of Mechanisms, is for the curious-those engaged in the di... more Craver and Darden's new book, In Search of Mechanisms, is for the curious-those engaged in the discovery of mechanisms and those who want to know more about the process of discovering them. As the authors argue, knowledge of mechanisms is power as it allows us to explain, predict, and control natural phenomena. Given human propensity to alter nature to meet our needs, knowledge of mechanism comes in handy. While the search for a mechanism is prevalent in science writ large, the authors restrict themselves to the domain of biology, their area of expertise within the philosophy of science. Craver and Darden use a three-pronged approach in conceptualizing the goals of the book. First, they provide illustrative accounts, both historical and contemporary, of the discovery of mechanisms. These accounts shed light on the kinds of questions, reasoning strategies, and experiments that scientists engage with in their search for mechanisms. Second, they offer an instructive framework for reasoning about and uncovering mechanisms. However, this framework is not meant as a road map; it does not offer fail-proof strategies for mechanism discovery. Rather, it provides a toolkit of potential moves, factors to consider, and heuristics to deploy. Third, the authors promote the search for mechanisms as an integrative ideal since elucidating biology's complex mechanisms entails working across subfields, each offering a unique contribution to the puzzle. Carver and Darden offer a view of mechanism that is grounded in "the embodied nature of mechanism: that they are not mere correlations among variables but entities and activities with spatial and temporal properties organized to produce, underlie, or maintain a phenomenon" (p. 11). They argue that scientists draw on their domain knowledge and "reason about function on the basis of structure; they reason to likely causes from facts about effects; they restrict the space of possible mechanisms to just those with components known or likely to be found in the system in question" (p. 11). The authors organize the book around four stages of discovery, each discussed in one or more chapters. The first stage involves careful characterization of the phenomenon for which a mechanism is sought. The second is the construction of a plausible mechanism schema that is often chosen from a set of possible mechanisms. The third stage involves obtaining evidence to evaluate plausible schemas and further narrowing of the playing field. The fourth, and last, stage is the revision of the best-supported mechanistic explanation. These stages represent a piecemeal and iterative process of moving from a "how-possibly" conjecture about a mechanism to a "how-actually" account of it. The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes detailing the clever ways in which biologists, past and present, have
Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K... more Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates a risk of perfunctory and simplified implementation of evidence-based practices that misses the intent of the standards and does little to prepare students for reasoning with the complex, varied, and contentious evidence encountered in popular media or in advanced education. To address these challenges, we propose a theoretical framework, which we call Grasp of Evidence, that complexifies the concept of evidence in ways that facilitate introducing more authentic forms of evidence and more sophisticated ways of engaging with evidence in science classrooms. Our approach focuses on promoting a lay grasp of evidence needed by competent outsiders as they engage with science in their everyday lives. The framework posits five dimensions. The first four dimensions capture what students should understand about how experts work with evidence: evidence analysis, evidence evaluation, evidence interpretation, and evidence integration. The fifth dimension focuses on how laypeople can use evidence reports themselves. Each of these dimensions of practice involves specific epistemic aims, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes for reasoning with and about evidence. We discuss these dimensions and their contribution to the conceptualization of evidence as well as provide some initial instructional implications and potential directions for future research.
Abstract. This learning progression describes progressive levels of understanding for core concep... more Abstract. This learning progression describes progressive levels of understanding for core concepts in modern genetics. The progression extends from 5th to 10th grade. We have organized the core ideas in this learning progression around two questions in the discipline: (a) how do genes influence how we, and other organisms, look and function? And (b) Why do we vary in how we, and other organisms, look and function? We identified eight big ideas that are needed to successfully reason about these questions. The target performances of this progression thus involve generating several types of mechanistic explanations: explanations that link our genotype to our phenotype; explanations of the processes by which our genes are passed on from generation to generation and how they contribute to genetic variation; and explanations of the sources of variation in phenotype (including environmental interactions with our genes). The learning progression describes three levels of understandings tha...
The Next Generation Science Standards’ three dimensions—disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science a... more The Next Generation Science Standards’ three dimensions—disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCs)—were headliners at NSTA’s national conference in Chicago and featured in many of the organization’s other professional-development efforts this year (NGSS Lead States 2013). To some, the idea of DCIs, SEPs, and CCs may seem obvious and not all that new (Figure 1, p. 68). Haven’t we been doing science inquiry since the release of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) in 1996? What is new and different about the NGSS, and what do these three dimensions mean for curriculum, instruction, and assessment? There are, in fact, several major differences in how the new standards portray science education. These differences call for substantial shifts in terms of our learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessment. In the next sections, we highlight what is new and different about each dimension. We do not address e...
Noticing is the ability of teachers to attend and interpret student thinking to guide instruction... more Noticing is the ability of teachers to attend and interpret student thinking to guide instructional design (van Es & Sherin, 2002). The skills involved in noticing can be challenging to develop in teacher education programs because of the cognitive load involved in attending to the context of the real classroom environment. Teacher education programs can thereby study a precursor to noticing, such as framing. Framing instruction involves developing a range of “seeing” events in the classroom. Thus, preservice teachers must frame their teaching experience in ways that privilege student thinking. In our investigation, we characterized the frames preservice teachers employed in their reflection paper. We found that preservice teachers who used frames that were more attentive to student ideas were more capable at analyzing student understanding in written student artifacts.
Inquiry environments in science classes have increasingly incorporated more features of authentic... more Inquiry environments in science classes have increasingly incorporated more features of authentic scientific practice. However, relatively few environments have incorporated a critical feature of scientific practice: evaluation of evidence quality. This paper reports results from two studies in middle-school life science classes that investigate seventh graders’ competence in evaluating evidence. Overall, we found evidence that students have strong evaluative capabilities that can be built upon in instruction. Introduction: Integrating Evidence Evaluation into Inquiry Environments Chinn and Malhotra (2002) argued that, for inquiry-oriented instruction to be effective in improving students’ reasoning, it is important that these environments be as authentic as possible. Oversimplified inquiry environments can promote oversimplified student epistemologies that are counterproductive in the complexity of real-life settings. For example, when students learn to control variables in oversim...
Educational games are common in classrooms and have been extensively studied in multiple domains.... more Educational games are common in classrooms and have been extensively studied in multiple domains. The Geniventure game was developed to support student learning of core concepts in genetics via challenges that engage students with genetic phenomena at the molecular level. A core feature of the game is that it simulates behavior of molecular entities (genes, proteins, organelles) with high disciplinary fidelity to how these mechanisms really operate in the cell. In this sense, it is deeply disciplinary. The commitment to disciplinary fidelity presents design challenges regarding the ways in which entities, activities, and mechanisms are represented and manipulated in the game across the biological organization levels. We discuss five distinct types of design challenges that we identified based on data from focus groups with students who played the game and provide design heuristics for addressing these challenges.
The Framework for Science Education (National Research Council, 2011) and the subsequent Next Gen... more The Framework for Science Education (National Research Council, 2011) and the subsequent Next Generation Science Standards feature modeling as an integral component of inquiry driven classrooms. Evaluating such models entails careful consideration of fit with evidence. In this poster we discuss student use of computer animations, simulations, blogs and emails as sources of evidence in a collaborative model-based inquiry middle school science curriculum. In this poster we present a method of using computer animations and other digitally generated and presented material in the context of a model-based inquiry curriculum used in a middle school science classroom. Modelbased inquiry entails a shift away from narrower conceptions of science as hypothesis generation and testing to a view of science as a set of practices for generating scientific explanations and theories in a setting of critical discourse (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2008). Recent developments in national science sta...
In the so-called “post-truth” world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what... more In the so-called “post-truth” world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what is known, how to know, and who to trust. Current education has largely failed to meet the challenges of this world. Grounded in a new analysis of the goals of epistemic education, we argue for new directions in instruction. Our analysis specifies three components of epistemic cognition that education should address: epistemic aims, ideals, and reliable processes. Apt epistemic performance of these components has five interwoven aspects: cognitive engagement in epistemic performance, adapting performance to diverse contexts, metacognitive regulation and understanding of performance, caring and enjoyment, and participation in performance with others. Using this framework, we show how three emblematic “post-truth” problems stem from specific breakdowns in these five aspects. We then use this analysis to argue for new directions in curriculum, instruction, and research that are needed to pr...
Abstract Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students ... more Abstract Events worldwide have heightened concerns that education is failing to prepare students for a “post-truth” world. A core “post-truth” challenge is the prevalence of deep epistemic disagreements: people fundamentally disagree about appropriate ways of knowing. We provide a new analysis of deep epistemic disagreements and propose an educational response based on the Apt-AIR framework of the goals of epistemic education. An apt response to deep epistemic disagreements requires that people develop individual and collective abilities to make epistemic assumptions visible, to justify and negotiate these assumptions, and to develop shared commitments to appropriate standards and processes of reasoning. To develop these meta-epistemic abilities, we propose a cluster of instructional practices and principles called explorations into knowing. We discuss empirical research showing that teachers and students can meaningfully engage in explorations into knowing and productively discuss their deep epistemic disagreements. These proposals lead to new research directions.
This research investigates how students reason about the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity. An ... more This research investigates how students reason about the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity. An analysis of student interviews reviled two types of mechanistic explanations, one of which seems to be less intuitive but is critical for reasoning about core biological ideas such as homeostasis and development.
Argumentative practices have been shown to deepen understanding and improve academic performance.... more Argumentative practices have been shown to deepen understanding and improve academic performance. After 10 years of work with science curricula designed to develop reasoning, we present a framework grounded in data from our projects for identifying different forms of metacognitive engagement in science inquiry classes. We focus on four categories of discourse from our data: object of thought or discourse; expressions of what someone is thinking; degree of specificity; and discourse applying and tailoring understanding of epistemic cognition to particular topics. We present multiple examples in each of these categories. Our goal is to provide analytic tools along with examples to better identify and code argumentative discourse that advances students' apt epistemic performance.
Learning progressions (LPs) are hypothetical models of how learning in a domain develops over tim... more Learning progressions (LPs) are hypothetical models of how learning in a domain develops over time with appropriate instruction. In the domain of genetics, there are two independently developed alternative LPs. The main difference between the two progressions hinges on their assumptions regarding the accessibility of classical (Mendelian) versus molecular genetics and the order in which they should be taught. In order to determine the relative difficulty of the different genetic ideas included in the two progressions, and to test which one is a better fit with students' actual learning, we developed two modules in classical and molecular genetics and alternated their sequence in an implementation study with 11th grade students studying biology. We developed a set of 56 ordered multiple-choice items that collectively assessed both molecular and classical genetic ideas. We found significant gains in students' learning in both molecular and classical genetics, with the largest gain relating to understanding the informational content of genes and the smallest gain in understanding modes of inheritance. Using multidimensional item response modeling, we found no statistically significant differences between the two instructional sequences. However, there was a trend of slightly higher gains for the molecular-first sequence for all genetic ideas.
Neue Wege für Forschung über das Argumentieren: Einblicke aus dem AIR-Framework for Epistemic Cog... more Neue Wege für Forschung über das Argumentieren: Einblicke aus dem AIR-Framework for Epistemic Cognition Zusammenfassung. Dieser Kommentar befasst sich mit den vielen unterschiedlichen und interessanten Artikeln des Themenhefts. Zuerst wird überblicksartig eine Zusammenschau der Befunde mit Blick auf neue Erkenntnisse gegeben. Dabei werden Aspekte von Argumentation und Lernen kritisiert, um die Wichtigkeit dieser Erkenntnisse für die weiterführende Forschung in diesem Bereich herauszustellen. Anschließend wird kurz ein neues Bezugssystem für epistemische Kognition beschrieben und als Linse verwendet, um einige Themen der Artikel genauer zu beleuchten. Dies hat das Ziel, neue Denkweisen in Bezug auf Argumentation und das Erlernen und Vermitteln dieser zentralen Praxis zu eröffnen.
The Next Generation Science Standards' three dimensions--disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), scie... more The Next Generation Science Standards' three dimensions--disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCs)--were headliners at NSTA's national conference in Chicago and featured in many of the organization's other professional-development efforts this year (NGSS Lead States 2013). To some, the idea of DCIs, SEPs, and CCs may seem obvious and not all that new (Figure 1, p. 68). Haven't we been doing science inquiry since the release of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) in 1996? What is new and different about the NGSS, and what do these three dimensions mean for curriculum, instruction, and assessment? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are, in fact, several major differences in how the new standards portray science education. These differences call for substantial shifts in terms of our learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessment. In the next sections, we highlight what is new and different about each dimension. We do not address explicitly intertwining the three dimensions; a forthcoming article will discuss their integration. Much of what we discuss below draws directly from A Framework for K--12 Science Education (NRC 2012), which guided the development of the NGSS and is the foundation for the new standards. While the NGSS do provide some information from the Framework (in the blue, orange, and green boxes; see Figure 1) to elaborate on the performance expectations, these are only snippets of the more elaborate descriptions found in the Framework. We therefore urge readers to turn to the Framework when trying to understand the three dimensions and the standards. DCIs There are DCIs for each of the four major disciplines: physical sciences, life sciences, Earth and space sciences, and engineering (engineering, technology, and applications of science). Each of these disciplines includes no more than four DCIs, reflecting a concerted effort to cull the numerous ideas that all students are expected to know. While there are somewhat fewer ideas to teach, each is complex, with ample depth to delve into over the course of schooling. To rise to the level of a DCI, an idea must meet four criteria. First, it must be a key organizing principle within the discipline or across several disciplines; that is, it should be a core idea in the eyes of scientists. Second, it must have broad explanatory power: It should help learners understand and be able to reason about an array of phenomena and problems in the discipline. In this sense, it needs to be a useful thinking tool that is generative for students, and it should help them think about phenomena and problems they may encounter in and out of the classroom, both now and in their future. Third, a DCI needs to be relevant and meaningful for students. It should relate to phenomena and problems that students find intriguing. Fourth, the idea needs to have depth that allows for continued learning over the course of schooling. There are two complementary implications of this last point. First, the DCI, in some basic form, must be accessible to young learners, and, second, it must have enough complexity that it can be unpacked and deepened in higher grades. Many of the concepts (e.g., ionic bonds, mitochondria) and even topics (e.g., volcanoes, taxonomy) currently taught in school do not meet these criteria. As educators, it is incumbent upon us to closely evaluate what we are teaching and to dramatically prune the unwieldy tree of concepts we try to cover. Taken together, the DCIs create a conceptual toolkit that students can use to reason about and explain phenomena. The focus on explaining phenomena represents an important shift in the goals of instruction. Rather than teaching ideas in the abstract or in isolation, the new aim is to engage students in using these ideas to explain interesting phenomena. For example, instead of having students describe the water cycle and its components, students should be explaining cloud formation or precipitation patterns by using understandings about the water cycle and thermal-energy transfer to describe how weather events come about. …
Current reforms in science education place increasing demands on teachers and students to engage ... more Current reforms in science education place increasing demands on teachers and students to engage not only with scientific content but also to develop an understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry (AAAS, 1993; NRC, 1996). Teachers are expected to engage students with authentic scientific practices including posing questions, conducting observations, analyzing data, developing explanations and arguing about them using evidence.
Craver and Darden's new book, In Search of Mechanisms, is for the curious-those engaged in the di... more Craver and Darden's new book, In Search of Mechanisms, is for the curious-those engaged in the discovery of mechanisms and those who want to know more about the process of discovering them. As the authors argue, knowledge of mechanisms is power as it allows us to explain, predict, and control natural phenomena. Given human propensity to alter nature to meet our needs, knowledge of mechanism comes in handy. While the search for a mechanism is prevalent in science writ large, the authors restrict themselves to the domain of biology, their area of expertise within the philosophy of science. Craver and Darden use a three-pronged approach in conceptualizing the goals of the book. First, they provide illustrative accounts, both historical and contemporary, of the discovery of mechanisms. These accounts shed light on the kinds of questions, reasoning strategies, and experiments that scientists engage with in their search for mechanisms. Second, they offer an instructive framework for reasoning about and uncovering mechanisms. However, this framework is not meant as a road map; it does not offer fail-proof strategies for mechanism discovery. Rather, it provides a toolkit of potential moves, factors to consider, and heuristics to deploy. Third, the authors promote the search for mechanisms as an integrative ideal since elucidating biology's complex mechanisms entails working across subfields, each offering a unique contribution to the puzzle. Carver and Darden offer a view of mechanism that is grounded in "the embodied nature of mechanism: that they are not mere correlations among variables but entities and activities with spatial and temporal properties organized to produce, underlie, or maintain a phenomenon" (p. 11). They argue that scientists draw on their domain knowledge and "reason about function on the basis of structure; they reason to likely causes from facts about effects; they restrict the space of possible mechanisms to just those with components known or likely to be found in the system in question" (p. 11). The authors organize the book around four stages of discovery, each discussed in one or more chapters. The first stage involves careful characterization of the phenomenon for which a mechanism is sought. The second is the construction of a plausible mechanism schema that is often chosen from a set of possible mechanisms. The third stage involves obtaining evidence to evaluate plausible schemas and further narrowing of the playing field. The fourth, and last, stage is the revision of the best-supported mechanistic explanation. These stages represent a piecemeal and iterative process of moving from a "how-possibly" conjecture about a mechanism to a "how-actually" account of it. The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes detailing the clever ways in which biologists, past and present, have
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