Papers by William Sandoval
Journal of The Learning Sciences, 2009
The first international conference on Computer support for collaborative learning - CSCL '95, 1995
We describe a learning environment for high school biology called BGuILE that engages students in... more We describe a learning environment for high school biology called BGuILE that engages students in scientific investigations in which they can explore interesting problems in evolution and ecology. The environment supports productive inquiry by two interrelated means. First, the system structures students' investigations, encouraging them to compare competing hypotheses, articulate predictions, and record interpretations according to specific task models of biological inquiry. Second, the system provides a context for collaboration in which the biological task model is used to drive the content of students' discussions.
Science Education, 2007
Few would disagree with such laudable aims. The next chapter, however, brings us down to earth by... more Few would disagree with such laudable aims. The next chapter, however, brings us down to earth by providing an overview of current laboratory experiences in the United States-it uses terms such as "poor" and "dismal" to describe the present state of play. The two main problems, according to the authors, are that access to practical experiences is uneven and practical work is isolated from the main "flow of science instruction." The lack of connection between practical work and other teaching and the problem of patchy access to resources and facilities will be familiar to teachers across the globe.
Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research …, 2001
Page 1. Students' uses of data as evidence in scientific explanations William A. Sandoval Gr... more Page 1. Students' uses of data as evidence in scientific explanations William A. Sandoval Graduate School of Education & Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles [email protected] Acknowledgements This ...
Recent standards for science education have called for students to engage in inquiry, defined as ... more Recent standards for science education have called for students to engage in inquiry, defined as a set of interrelated processes used to ask questions about the natural world and investigate them. An important issue for educators and researchers who would implement inquiry-based instruction is to understand what the product of such inquiry processes should be. I argue that framing scientific inquiry as investigation for the purpose of developing explanations, especially causal explanations, provides a meaningful context for the development of inquiry process skills and represents a fundamental goal for scientific inquiry. To provide students with support for such inquiry requires extending prior research into scientific thinking skills. I have developed a model of inquiry as the coordination of argumentive and investigative knowledge, and used this model as the basis for the design of an inquiry-based curriculum for evolutionary biology. This design situates software supports for investigation and explanation construction within a curricular framework that exploits students' explanations as objects of reflection and discussion. An empirical study of this design showed how the curricular framework and software worked together to foster students' attention to argumentive goals leading to planful investigation in this domain, but exposed shortcomings in students' performances such as a lack of evidence cited for explanations and ineffective evaluation of explanations. These shortcomings motivated revisions to the design. A subsequent study of the revised design showed improvement in students' use of data in their explanations, and that students learned to make fewer unwarranted causal claims as a result of the curriculum. Together these studies suggest that structuring inquiry around specific goals for explanations, that they articulate causal mechanisms and are supported by data, fosters students' planful investigation of complex phenomena and supports their construction and evaluation of explanations as artifacts of scientific knowledge.
annual meeting of the American …, 2002
Position paper for an interactive symposium of the same name, presented at the annual meeting ...... more Position paper for an interactive symposium of the same name, presented at the annual meeting ... We thank the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) for a seed grant to enable us ... Science Foundation, and the Spencer foundation. The views expressed here are ...
The primary objective of this session is to highlight ways in which identity can be construed and... more The primary objective of this session is to highlight ways in which identity can be construed and studied within science education, and to advance a discussion about how science education can embrace its civic responsibility toward students to help them appropriate science as a meaningful tool in their lives beyond school. The four papers reflect a range of perspectives on the construct of identity and approaches to its study and development. Each presentation will focus on the authors' conceptualization of identity and identity development and their approaches to characterizing expressions of identity or identity change through student talk and/or participation in particular contexts of science learning. Presenters will discuss their own goals for identity development within science education, and the implications from their work for approaches to supporting positive identity development through science learning.
Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 1999
Inquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different from typical d... more Inquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different from typical didactic science instruction. Two of the central challenges in teaching science through inquiry are that a) students' inquiry must productively engage them in exploration and reasoning about central issues in the domain; and b) students need to be able to generalize such specific inquiry experiences to broader, formal domain theories. These challenges reflect a tension in inquiry-based science learning between students' ...
Abstract Following their participation in a guided-inquiry unit, 129 seventh-graders from five di... more Abstract Following their participation in a guided-inquiry unit, 129 seventh-graders from five diverse urban middle schools were asked about their perceptions of specific inquiry tasks, from an expectancy-value framework. Students were asked to rate the interest value, utility value, and task difficulty of (a) data collection design;(b) explanation;(c) data analysis; and (d) citing evidence for claims. The utility of all tasks was rated highly, while interest ratings were moderate.
Laboratories have been a feature of science education for more than a century, yet their value ha... more Laboratories have been a feature of science education for more than a century, yet their value has been debated many times over. What do students really get out of laboratory activities in their science classes? Are they necessary components of good science instruction? How can labs be improved? In 2004, the National Science Foundation asked the National Research Council to provide a definitive answer to these questions.
Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should bew... more Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should beware insistence on a narrow definition of epistemology to guide this work. His argument is a response to suggestions (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Sandoval, 2005) that the study of personal epistemology should focus on people's views about knowledge and knowing and not conflate those with views about learning.
Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should bew... more Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should beware insistence on a narrow definition of epistemology to guide this work. His argument is a response to suggestions (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Sandoval, 2005) that the study of personal epistemology should focus on people's views about knowledge and knowing and not conflate those with views about learning.
Journal of the Learning Sciences
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The future of learning: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences
The aim of this study was to assess whether and how a sustained instructional focus on argumentat... more The aim of this study was to assess whether and how a sustained instructional focus on argumentation might improve children's understanding and application of key epistemic criteria for scientific arguments. These criteria include the articulation of clear, coherent causal claims, and the explicit justification of such claims with appropriate evidence. We show a mixed-age class of 8-10-year-old children improved in their ability to both construct and evaluate arguments, especially in the ways they met evidentiary criteria. We locate these improvements in their classroom's development of a number of norms for "good arguments" that focused on evidentiary standards. We summarize how students' appropriation of specific norms around showing evidence and justifying evidentiary relations produced these outcomes. We frame these findings in terms of their implications for promoting argumentation in classrooms, children's capacities for engaging in such argumentation, and in relation to the development of informed views about the nature of professional science.
Argumentation in science education: perspectives from classroom-based research
Science Education, Jan 1, 2005
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Papers by William Sandoval