Taking Science to School Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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9 Teaching Science as Practice
9 Teaching Science as Practice
Pages 251-295
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Children come to school with powerful resources on which science instruction can build. Even young children can learn to explain natural phenomena, design and conduct empirical investigations, and engage in mean
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In the third section we look more closely at the common forms of scientific practice that students engage in across different types of instruc tional design, pointing to the challenges students encounter as they do so. Fourth, we characterize strategies that teachers and curriculum developers can use to promote student learning of science through practice.
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They help us explore what K-8 science teaching and learning could become. CURRENT INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE Typical science instruction in the United States does not support learning across the four strands of proficiency of our framework (see Box 2-1)
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. The recurring activities in science classrooms offer entrée to a narrow slice of scientific practice, leaving students with a limited sense of science and what it means to understand and use science.
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Researchers have designed and studied several instructional programs in which students develop scientific explanations and models, participate in scientific argumentation, and design and conduct scientific investigations. Although different programs may emphasize one aspect or another of the strands, they all reflect an approach to science in which students own and engage in aspects of scientific practice modeled on expert practice.
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Testing ideas by gathering empirical evi dence is a mainstay of science education. Researchers have found that, with appropriate instruction, K-8 students can engage in making hypotheses, gath ering evidence, designing investigations, evaluating hypotheses in light of evidence, and in the process they can build their understanding of the phe nomena they are investigating (Crawford, Krajcik, and Marx, 1999; Geier et al., in press; Kuhn, Schauble, and Garcia-Mila, 1992; Lehrer and Schauble, 2002; Metz, 2000, 2004; Schneider et al., 2002)
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The emerging evidence suggests that learning how to design, set up, and carry out experiments and other kinds of scientific investigations can help students understand key scientific concepts, provide a context for understanding why science needs empirical evidence, and how tests can distinguish between explanations.
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. For example, Linn and col leagues used a documented cases of frog mutation in particular ecosystems and an overall pattern of increased mutations nationwide to frame a middle school environmental science unit.
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To focus and support student learning teachers and instructional materials narrowed the focus and provided students with a handful of factors to investigate and a method or structured choice of methods to choose from in order to explore the problem. Interacting with Texts in the K-8 Classroom Reading and texts are important parts of scientific practice and play an important role in science classrooms.
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Likewise, teachers needed to be supported in developing instruc tional practices that supported the use of text as inquiry. Evidence of Student Learning Thus far we have briefly described science as practice as an instruc tional approach that presents scientific skills as integrated -- the skills of data collection and analysis are encountered in places where they can be useful for learning about a phenomena.
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The focus on the meaning of the data representation and its use to communicate among the community of students seemed to help learners develop more sophisticated understandings of distribution as a mathematical idea, and the biological variation in their samples it represents. Middle Grades: Problem-Based and Conceptual Change Approaches In the middle grades, one common approach to engage students in the practices of science is problem-based or project-based science (Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Edelson, Gordin, and Pea, 1999; Edelson and Reiser, 2006; Kolodner et al., 2003; Krajcik et al., 1998; Reiser et al., 2001; Singer et al., 2000)
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Research on these varied approaches to teaching science as practice reveals promising results. First, there is much evidence that, with appropri ate support, students engage in the inquiry, use the tools of science, and succeed in complex scientific practices.
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. There is also some evidence that these project-based experiences can help students learn scientific practices.
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The challenges students have with episte mology and coordinating theory and evidence shown in some studies do not arise in the same way in these very supportive classrooms. An important aspect of these designs is that they contain very carefully crafted support for the scientific practices.
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These are features that are central to scientific practice and require that teachers and instructional materials provide clear guidance and support for learners as they acquire these practices. Science in Social Interactions Social interaction is a central feature of both scientific practice and productive learning generally, and accordingly it plays an important, specialized role in K-8 science learning.
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. The benefits of rich social interactions apply to the range of students that populate K-8 classrooms.
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Thus, while scientific language skills can be considered important learning goals in their own right, specialized language can also help students perform the activities of scientific practice (Lemke, 1990; Moje et al., 2001; Rosebery, Warren, and Conant, 1992)
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Curriculum materials, specific instructional approaches (project-based science, coherent instruction focused on conceptual change) , and software tools, such as scaffolded simulations and visualization tools, offer useful structure to student learning experiences, but they cannot dictate learning.
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While students are always working in the context of a large, complex problem, throughout the unit instruction emphasizes smaller, manageable pieces in their daily classroom experiences. Let us consider how sequencing works by briefly examining the BGuILE middle school Struggle for Survival unit, a 6- to 7-week classroom examination of core evolutionary concepts through an investigation (Table 9-1)
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Activities include a video introduction to the Galapagos and the methods scientists use to study the ecosystem, brain storming about hypotheses, and a mini paper based investigation in which students work with a small data set from the software and make a graph that backs up a claim about the data. Phase C: Software Students investigate data using the Galapagos Investigations (10 Classes)
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Their prior exposure to science, including science instruction, may leave them with a distorted impression of the scientific enterprise. Explicit support is required to help students learn the practices, the concepts, and the very nature of science.
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They found that middle school students in a 2-month project-based unit performed better on posttests requiring explanations if the scaffolding was gradually faded during the instructional unit, rather than if the scaffolding was continued throughout the entire unit. More re search is needed to explore the time frame and approaches for fading scaffolds.
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In this section, we describe three ways in which scaffolds can support students' learning. Scaffolding can structure experiences to draw attention to the elements of scientific practice, provide guidance in students' efforts to engage in social processes around scientific problems, and help them track the important conceptual aspects of the problems they are working on.
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. Scaffolding Social Interaction We have discussed the promise and the complexity of social interactions in doing science.
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The task is essentially distributed among students, who share responsibility for its completion. In elementary science classrooms, researchers have attempted to establish classroom versions of scientific communities (e.g., "community of learners" or "learning community" approaches)
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" Students use question prompts appropriate for their role, tailoring them to the current experiment and findings. In this way, the design attended to multiple ele ments of the scientific practice of investigation and argumentation, by asso ciating the cognitive task of arguing for or critiquing an experimental result with particular types of social interactions and particular uses of language.
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Scaffolding can help students examine, scrutinize, and critically appraise their understanding of key scientific concepts. Visualizations can help learners connect patterns in data to a better understanding of the scientific phenomenon.
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Supporting Articulation and Reflection Articulation and reflection are mutually supportive processes that are at the core of the scientific enterprise, and they are critical to the four strands of scientific thinking. In scientific practice, constructing and testing knowledge claims require a focus on articulating those claims, that is, developing clear statements of how and why phenomena occur.
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Formative Assessment2 Formative assessment practices present an additional set of strategies that are at a teacher's disposal. As we have argued throughout this volume and underscored in this chapter, students' ideas and experience in science are essential to science teaching that will help them make sense of scientific phenomena.
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Teachers have the most direct access to information about student learning and are thus in a position to interpret and use it to provide them with timely feedback (Shepard, 2003; Wilson, 2005)
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. This point is especially relevant in the context of science education, in which teachers of scientific inquiry need to continuously elicit student thinking and help students consider their developing conceptions on the basis of scientific evidence.
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explored the on-the-fly formative assessment practices of three middle school science teachers and compared them with student per formance. These practices were labeled as ESRU cycles, based on Bell and Cowie's (2001)
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conducted research on planned assessment conversations in the Science Education through Portfolio Instruction and Assessment (SEPIA) project.
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used questions to find out what students were thinking, to consider with his students how their thinking fits with what physicists think, and to place responsibility for thinking back on the students. While the study took place in the high school classroom of only one teacher, it raises the important point for all levels of science instruction that a simple, planned-for questioning strategy can be an effective tool for formative assessment.
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The four strands of scientific proficiency come together in instructional approaches that involve learners in scientific practice. Rather than treating scientific content, scientific processes, epistemology, and participation independently in instruction, these proficiencies can be brought together as complementary aspects of science by engaging learners in such practices as investigation, argumentation, explanation, and model building.
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. Instructional interventions can profitably go beyond a focus on scientific content and reasoning processes and can help learners understand the epis temological underpinnings of scientific knowledge building by involving learners in the types of social interactions and discourse through which they can create and evaluate knowledge in their own scientific community.
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International Journal of Science Education, 22, 797-817. Black, P
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International Journal of Science Education, 11, 514-529. Carey, S., and Smith, C
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. Restructuring science education: The importance of theories and their development.
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. Inquiry in project-based science classrooms: Initial attempts by middle school students.
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International Journal of Science Education, 22(8)
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, Committee on Classroom Assessment and the National Science Education Standards. Center for Education.
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Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2, 61-94.
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. Constructing extended inquiry projects: Curriculum materials for science education reform.
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. Looking inside the classroom: A study of K-12 mathematics and science education in the United States.
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