Science and Engineering for Grades 6-12 Investigation and Design at the Center (2019) / Chapter Skim
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5 How Teachers Support Investigation and Design
5 How Teachers Support Investigation and Design
Pages 109-152
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Chapter 6 discusses how instructional resources can help by providing materials and guidance for carrying out the instruction. 1 This chapter includes content drawn from five papers commissioned by the committee: Designing NGSS-Aligned Curriculum Materials by Brian Reiser and Bill Penuel; Data Use by Middle and Secondary Students in the Digital Age: A Status Report and Future Prospects by Victor Lee and Michelle Wilkerson; The Nature of the Teacher's Role in Supporting Student Investigations in Middle and High School Science Classrooms: Creating and Participating in a Community of Practice by Matthew Kloser; Engineering Approaches to Problem Solving and Design in Secondary School Science: Teachers as Design Coaches by Senay Purzer; and A Summary of Inclusive Pedagogies for Science Education by Felicia Mensah and Kristen Larson.
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A key role of the teacher is in assessing student learning. This does not mean just giving tests; it includes helping students to reflect on their learning and the learning process and to productively share their ideas with each other in various formats.
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When contextualized and situated, investigations can help students learn and use prior knowledge to explain or model novel phenomena. This way of focusing on investigation and design is a fundamental shift from the America's Lab Report (National Research Council, 2006)
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Phenomena and design challenges provide a context and purpose for students' science learning. In order to prepare for these types of instructional experiences, teachers need to be able to collaborate with students, colleagues, and community members to identify contextualized phenomena to drive investigations.
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. Another important instructional consideration is related to the progression of core ideas across the grade levels: that is, an explanation for a phenomenon can change as student learning becomes increasingly sophisticated across grade levels (see Box 5-2)
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Students observe that a person does not move much sand with each step on wet sand but moves a lot of sand with each step on dry sand. Since it takes energy to move sand, it will take more energy to walk in dry sand than it will on wet sand. Middle School: The explanation centers on core ideas about adhesion and co hesion and Newton's laws of motion. When a person pushes down on the sand, an equal and opposite force causes him or her to move forward.
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Huff and Duschl (2018) suggest that before middle school teachers begin instruction, they should first contemplate how the instruction builds on students' prior learning and how instruction will lead to coherence in learning and a more sophisticated understanding of core ideas and crosscutting concepts.
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. Some have examined the ways in which learning progressions, as representations of student ideas, concepts, and practices, can support teachers in understanding the complex landscape of student learning and can support them as they navigate less-structured learning environments (Alonzo and Elby, 2014; Furtak, Morrison, and Kroog, 2014)
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. Teachers help students find and bring in the connections to their prior knowledge and how an investigation links to crosscutting concepts or disciplinary core ideas they have encountered in previous courses.
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And we can present our findings to the local community." The students conduct Internet searches to find out how water quality is measured, and then learn that they can make these Early work in mathematics and science education has documented common difficulties students have with reading canonical representations that often show data (Leinhardt, Zaslavsky, and Stein, 1990)
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At the end of the semester, the students develop a formal presentation that includes an argument for how their data supports their explanation for the causes of changes in water quality, both in class and to the residents of a retirement com munity located alongside the stream. SOURCE: Adapted from Novak and Krajcik (2018)
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One consequence of this shift is that students are expected to construct understandings of content through engaging in a suite of scientific and engineering practices, including not only data analysis, but also developing models, asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, constructing explanations and designing solutions, and developing arguments for how the evidence supports an explanation. It is fortunate that these practices are well-aligned with what the literature shows about how students' reasoning with data can be further developed -- collecting data in service of understanding real-world phenomena, using data as evidence, engaging in argument from evidence, and communicating the reasoning about the meaning of data as it relates to causal explanations.
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Discussions in which teacher's elicit student ideas and lead discussions to explore the ideas are central to learning via investigation and design. Student-generated artifacts help students organize and share their thinking.
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" This is the hook that prompts students to seek a deeper understanding of flight dynamics and how they can be modeled. Over the course of the next week, students learn that drag and lift on a plane are dependent on the area of the wings, whereas weight is proportional to the total volume of the craft.
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A dis cussion organically ensues about the relationships between engineering design and the scientific method and how to use scientific test procedure during the prototyping phase of design. The planes are finally ready for testing, and they exhibit a level of diversity that reflects the students in the class -- fighter jets, a Wright Flyer, a fanciful plane of the future, and a condom-covered plane for aerodynamic effect.
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and other task scaffolds can make student thinking explicit (Kang, Thompson, and Windschitl, 2014) as a foundation for conversations about student ideas (Kang et al., 2016)
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. Furthermore, discourse serves a key function from the perspective of formative assessment: namely, that it provides ongoing, informal spaces in which the teacher may listen and attend to the nature and status of student ideas as they develop (Bennett, 2011; Ruiz-Primo and Furtak, 2006, 2007)
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? " Linking Contributions: Helping students link their "Who disagrees with Arjun?
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Questions such as these are essential tools for teachers to draw out and support students in expanding upon and making their ideas clear throughout science investigation and engineering design. Embedded Assessment The term embedded assessment refers to formative assessment for learning and processes that have been thoughtfully integrated into an instructional sequence (Penuel and Shepard, 2016)
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To build deep, usable knowledge, students should engage in making sense of multiple similar phenomena using the same core ideas with variety of practices and crosscutting concepts within and across curriculum units. Formative assessment tasks also need to integrate specific types of scaffolds to draw out student thinking so that students have support on how to share their thinking beyond a blank outcome space.
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When teachers circulate and monitor student work during an investigation, they need to be prepared with questions to extend student thinking. These questions are closely aligned with the materials themselves, focus on the core ideas and crosscutting concepts, and are intended to expose specific student reasoning about their thinking.
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However, merely helping students recognize the primary features of scientific discourse patterns may not help students from "nondominant" populations fully participate if their native discourse patterns are totally neglected or if they cannot use scientific language in meaningful contexts (Michaels and O'Connor, 2017)
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" 3 Adapted from Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten (2018) and Ambitious Science Teaching at https://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/ [October 2018]
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" "How'd that happen? " For more of the student questions, see Box 5-5 on eliciting student ideas via discourse.
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In the conversation about crushing (see Box 5-6) , Bethany explicitly helped students weave their findings from the can-crushing experiment to the oil tanker crushing, she drew out student ideas about multiple possible variables that might be involved, including temperature, size, air pressure, and whether the system was opened or closed.
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Over the course of the unit, the students constructed a thorough explanation for the reason that the oil tanker had collapsed, and also extended this explanation to other, related phenomena. Bethany also helped the students to extend their ideas to less similar phenomena from
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This example helps to illustrate not only the way that talk moves can help teachers to draw out and refine student ideas, but also the ways in which students' written models can serve as artifacts for making student ideas explicit and which can support conversations about student ideas. Throughout these 2 days of instruction, Bethany asked students to first write down their ideas in journals, then to share their ideas with each other and then draw those ideas into models.
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She then drew out additional ideas to identify additional variables that might be involved: she interacted with students around the models, encouraging students to make micro-level processes more explicit, and to connect those processes back to the phenomenon at hand. She used talk moves to pick up on particular student ideas, revoicing student comments to be sure she understood what had been said (and, in some cases, students corrected her to be sure she had correctly understood them)
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and Ambitious Science Teaching at https://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/video-series/ [October 2018] moves in a whole-class format to highlight similarities across group models and to help the students assemble a whole-class model that they later refined after performing investigations in which they interacted with the same variables at play in the crushing of the oil tanker.
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. CONNECT LEARNING THROUGH MULTIPLE CONTEXTS Teachers can consider thinking about core ideas and crosscutting concepts as the intellectual resources students use to make sense of phenomena in their daily life beyond the classroom.
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There are many efforts to broaden the populations who have access to science investigation and engineering design, such as the work on culturally relevant engineering design curriculum for the Navajo Nation (Jordan et al., 2017)
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Though the pedagogies are distinctive, they share a similar framing in their potential to make science teaching and learning more inclusive to all students, and especially for students who have been traditionally BOX 5-7 Inclusive Pedagogies Culturally relevant pedagogy focuses on the teacher. The concept includes three important elements: how teachers view themselves and others, how they view knowledge, and how they structure social relations within the classroom (Ladson-Billings, 2006)
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In order to teach in these ways, preservice teachers and in-service teachers, with assistance and support from committed stakeholders, will need time and resources to work in collaborative partnerships to address equity, diversity, and social justice in science teaching. Professional learning about inclusive pedagogies is addressed further in household knowledge, and drawing upon this knowledge to develop a participa tory pedagogy" (Moll et al., 1992)
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Such bioengineering design challenges could be motivating for learners.
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Taking coherence from the student point of view seriously demands careful consideration of inter-unit coherence as well. The Framework emphasizes the need to organize learning of core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts around developmental progressions that students explore across multiple years, beginning with the elementary grades.
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SUMMARY Teachers provide guidance in many ways as student learn via science investigation and engineering design. They select and present interesting phenomena and challenges; facilitate connections between relevant core ideas and crosscutting concepts; communicate clear expectations for student use of data and evidence; provide opportunities for students to communicate their reasoning and learn from formative assessment; set the tone for respectful, welcoming, and inclusive classrooms; and provide coherence and linkages between topics, units, and courses.
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engaging students in science performances and engineering design challenges during which they use each of the three dimensions to make sense of phenomena; (2) teachers valuing and cultivating students' curiosity about science phenomena and interest in addressing unmet needs; (3)
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. A metasynthesis of the complementarity of culturally responsive and inquiry based science education in K-12 settings: Implications for advancing equitable science teaching and learning.
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Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 53(9)
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Paper commissioned for the Committee on Science Investigations and Engineering Design Experiences in Grades 6–12. Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
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. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas.
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Paper commissioned for the Committee on Science Investigations and Engineering Design Experiences in Grades 6–12. Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
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. Informal formative assessment and scientific inquiry: Exploring teachers' practices and student learning.
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. Ambitious Science Teaching.
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