Taking Science to School Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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7 Participation in Scientific Practices and Discourse
7 Participation in Scientific Practices and Discourse
Pages 186-210
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From page 186... ...
• Motivation and attitudes toward science play a critical role in science learning, fostering students' use of effective learning strategies that result in deeper understanding of science. Classroom instruction and the classroom context can be designed in ways that enhance motiva tion and support productive participation in science.
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From page 187... ...
In spite of its centrality in science, genuine scientific argumentation is rarely observed in classrooms. Instead, most of the talk comes from teachers, and it seems oriented primarily toward persuading students of the validity of the scientific worldview (Ogborn et al., 1996)
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From page 188... ...
Such language activities are cen tral to doing and learning science. Thus, developing an understanding of science and appropriating the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic compo nents of its language require students to engage in practicing and using its discourse" (Duschl and Osborne, 2002, p.
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From page 189... ...
examined the effectiveness of directly teaching specific audience roles for encouraging productive scientific argumentation in the elementary grades. As small teams of fourth graders reported the results of their investigations to the whole class, the audience members were asked to assume responsibility for checking on the presenters by taking one of the following roles: (1)
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From page 190... ...
1This section draws on the commissioned paper by Ellice Forman and Wendy Sink, "Socio cultural Approaches to Learning Science in Classrooms."
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From page 191... ...
propose that one conceives of individuals as developing a wide range of repertoires of practice -- ways of behaving, thinking, and interpreting -- for engaging with the varieties of communities and institutions that they encounter in their everyday lives. From this perspective, each person is continually developing an evergrowing multicultural repertoire, fashioned by participating in their everyday rounds of practical activity, which involve historically evolving cultural practices and tools (Cole, 1996; Erickson, 2004)
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From page 192... ...
For the most part, research on student diversity and research on science learning have been separate literatures that do not frequently contact each other. Similarly, instruction for English language learners typically focuses primarily on English language and literacy development and does not give as much attention to instruction in content domains, such as science (Na tional Research Council, 1997)
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From page 193... ...
Such shifts in their criteria for questions and evidence accompanied the shift from conceiving of investigation as an activity conducted independently to advance one's own knowledge toward understanding that a larger community can share responsibility for building and evaluating a publicly shared base of related knowledge. If clarifying the norms and thinking patterns characteristic of science is the first important principle for supporting learning for all students, the second is the value of capitalizing on the continuities between students' everyday thinking, knowledge, and resources and those of practicing scientists.
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From page 194... ...
. PRODUCTIVE PARTICIPATION Engagement with science begins with willingness to participate in the science classroom, but it must go beyond simply participating to participat ing in ways that advance science learning.
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From page 195... ...
Motivation, Attitudes, and Identity Students' motivation, their beliefs about science, and their identities as learners affect their participation in the science classroom and have consequences for the quality of their learning. More specifically, results of both experimental and classroom-based studies suggest that students' own goals for science learning, their beliefs about their own ability in science, and the value they assign to science learning are likely to influence their cognitive engagement in science tasks (Lee and Anderson, 1993; Pintrich, Marx, and Boyle, 1993)
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From page 196... ...
In a study of sixth and seventh grade science class rooms, students who reported feeling highly efficacious in science and who had a strong sense of competence in science tended to use deep learning strategies and were more focused on learning (Anderman and Young, 1994)
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From page 197... ...
A key mediator of experiencing stereotype threat appears to be beliefs about the nature of intelligence. In a recent experimental intervention with college students, researchers found that by encouraging black students to adopt a mind set in which they viewed their own intelligence as malleable, they were able to increase their enjoyment and engagement in academics as well as their grades compared with controls (Aronson, Fried, and Good, 2002)
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From page 198... ...
means that the student focuses on maximizing favorable evaluations of his competence and minimizing negative evaluations. Both goals have been observed among students in elementary and middle school science classrooms (Anderman and Young, 1994; Lee and Brophy, 1996; Meece, Blumenfeld, and Hoyle, 1988)
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From page 199... ...
In additional research on the program, students in CORI classrooms also showed improved comprehension of science texts and higher scores on standardized tests of science content (Guthrie et al., 2004)
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From page 200... ...
found evidence that students' interest and motivation to learn were both domain general and situational. For example, students' interest varied from task to task even within a single unit on matter and molecules.
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However, such experiences that could serve as intellectual resources for new learning in science classrooms may not be easily recognized. The challenge for these students in learning science is "to study a Western scientific way of knowing and at the same time respect and access the ideas, beliefs, and values of non-Western cultures" (Snively and Corsiglia, 2001, p.
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From page 202... ...
explicitly employed the notion of productive disciplinary engagement and connected it to analyses of participant structures and discourse. In their study of a pair of sixth grade girls investigating sinking and floating, the researchers found evidence that the students took an active role in generating ideas, engaging in scientific argumentation with their peers, and learning how to use persuasive dis course to convince others of the validity of those ideas.
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From page 203... ...
Students often need support or explicit guidance to learn scientific norms for interacting with peers as they argue about evidence and clarify their own emerging understanding of science and scientific ideas. Genuine scientific argumentation with peer-to-peer interaction is rarely observed in science classrooms.
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From page 204... ...
. Scientific literacy and discursive identity: A theoretical framework for understanding science learning.
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From page 205... ...
. Guiding principles for fostering productive disciplinary engagement: Explaining an emergent argument in a community of learners classroom.
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Educational Researcher, 32(5)
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. Task engagement and conceptual change in middle school science classrooms.
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American Educational Research Journal, 41(3)
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Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, April, New Orleans, LA. Pintrich, P.R., Marx, R.W., and Boyle, R.A.
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From page 210... ...
. Rethinking diversity in learning science: The logic of everyday sense making.
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