Science Teachers' Learning Enhancing Opportunities, Creating Supportive Contexts (2015) / Chapter Skim
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2 A New Vision of Science Teaching and Learning
2 A New Vision of Science Teaching and Learning
Pages 27-46
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From page 27... ...
(Next Generation Science Standards Lead States, 2013) describe aspirations for students' learning in science that are based on key insights from research: • that science learning involves the integration of knowing and doing (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Latour, 1990; Nersessian, 2012; Pickering, 1992)
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From page 28... ...
The Framework and NGSS articulate three dimensions of science learning: scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. But they also go beyond prior standards by urging the integration of these three dimensions into standards, curricula, instruction, and assessment and emphasizing that no single dimension adequately characterizes what it means to know science; taught alone, each can seem empty or irrelevant.
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From page 29... ...
. The shift toward a tighter coupling of scientific and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts acknowledges that knowledge is used, reinforced, or reshaped in practice, and that the practices by their nature involve learning from and communicating with others.
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From page 30... ...
The Framework and NGSS authors confronted this age-old problem by focusing on disciplinary core ideas in four major areas: physical sciences; life sciences; earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and the applications of science (National Research Council, 2012; Next Generation Science Standards
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The Framework and NGSS also articulate how disciplinary core ideas
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. Here, too, the emphasis in the current vision of science education is on explicitly attending to the integration of these crosscutting concepts with practices and disciplinary core ideas.
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From page 33... ...
An Illustration The Framework offers a concrete illustration of how students might investigate the same core ideas over multiple years through instruction that integrates the three dimensions of scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. The following are examples from this illustration -- focused on developing an understanding of "Structure and Properties of Matter" (a component of the physical sciences core idea "Matter and Its Interactions")
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From page 34... ...
Students' progress in their building efforts advances from free play to solving design problems, and teachers facilitate this progression by asking appropriate questions about the objects that students build, by having them draw diagrams of what they have built, and by directing their attention to built objects outside the classroom. Teacher-guided student experiences and investigations also help students gain awareness of another important concept about matter -- that some materials (not just water but also chocolate, wax, and ice cream, for example)
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From page 35... ...
. Across this grade band, students develop increasingly sophisticated models of matter and become more sophisticated in their ability to relate their models to evidence and inferences drawn from observations of actual phenomena.
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From page 36... ...
. • In the decade from 2001 to 2011, the percentage of white students enrolled in public schools fell from 60 to 52 percent, while the per centage of Hispanic students increased from 17 to 24 percent; the share of black students declined slightly, from 17 to 16 percent.
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It follows, then, that science instruction needs to engage all students with a broad array of natural phenomena, support rigorous intellectual work, and facilitate full immersion in scientific and engineering practices over long periods of time. However, such practices include a broad range of intel
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From page 38... ...
. The first pattern involves carefully framing the students' relationship with the intellectual work at hand, including • teachers having high expectations of students and supporting these expectations in a range of ways; • students engaging in scientific practices; and • teachers giving students increasing responsibility for assessing their own understanding and evaluating progress toward impor tant goals.
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From page 39... ...
. The second pattern involves anchoring teaching and learning activities around specific concepts and topics by:
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From page 40... ...
posit that effective teachers identify clear and reasonable goals for student learning and craft coherent sequences of lessons related to these goals; the authors refer to these sequences as "coherent science content storylines." A science content storyline focuses on integrating and sequencing science ideas and learning activities within a science lesson or unit to help students construct a coherent "story" that makes sense to them. The third pattern involves teachers carefully mediating students' learning activity by • identifying clear learning/participation goals and designing indi vidual activities through which to reach these goals;
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From page 41... ...
pioneered an approach to coupling investigations with other activities so as to cultivate deep content knowledge of targeted science ideas. In their research project with K-8 students in the 1980s and 1990s, the investigators viewed learning and teaching as a social process facilitated by the use of talk, gesture, drawing, computers, and text.
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From page 42... ...
This vision -- one that acknowledges science as fundamental to human understanding and driven by complex, relevant problems -- involves learning about scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas in an integrated manner. This conception of science learning reflects the nature of scientists' work: geologists, physicists, chemists, and biologists explore and extend scientific understanding by calling on their deep knowledge
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From page 43... ...
While some might think such an ambitious view of learning is beyond the reach of all students, careful research has demonstrated that challenging instruction is possible if teachers have a clear vision of their goals, well-designed lessons and materials, and -- most important -- the professional knowledge and skill required to teach to these high standards. But ambitious instruction is not yet standard fare in American classrooms, and the following chapter describes the current conditions that thwart efforts to guarantee that every child learns science in intellectually substantive and exciting ways.
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From page 44... ...
Science Education, 96(4)
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From page 45... ...
. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscut ting Concepts, and Core Ideas.
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From page 46... ...
. Rigor and equity by design: Seeking a core of practices for the science education community.
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