Abstract
This paper addresses the question of how students’ scientific practices evolve over time across two modeling-foregrounded units to better understand how to support students’ engagement in meaningful scientific practice. We present analysis of data from 5th grade students who participated in two curricular units across the 2011-2012 year. One unit developed students’ understanding of evaporation/condensation and the other the nature of light. In both units, students constructed, evaluated, and revised diagrammatic models of the phenomena with respect to empirical data and science/theoretical ideas.
To determine how students’ practices evolved, we analyzed student interview and written pre-post assessment data. Our data include interviews with 18 focus students in three 5th grade classes across two science units. They also include focus students’ written assessments given before and after each unit. We used rubrics based on our prior work, (Schwarz et al., 2012) to code students’ responses with respect to the nature and levels of the epistemic commitments. We characterized the EC patterns among students over time.
Analysis of data indicates that some individual students attended to particular aspects of ECs early in the pre-tests or interviews. This attention played an important role in how students engaged in practices and how their practices evolved throughout the year. For example, LS began the evap/cond unit highly focused on doing experiments to show how things really are because “the teacher doesn’t always know the answer.” Her understanding continued to evolve until the end of the year when she used evidence to convince others of her model/explanation.
We also found a general improvement in students’ ECs over time, particularly with respect to audience and generality. We also found a slight decrease in performance across the second light unit with respect to evidence and mechanism for some students. This may be due to the first time enactment of the unit and the unclear patterns in the empirical data. Furthermore, the nature of mechanism is different across topics. As a result, some students had difficulties elaborating the sequence and causal mechanisms involved in explaining light phenomena. On the other hand, students like LS improved their ability to identify and describe mechanism across topics by developing an overall stance aimed at answering ‘why and how’ phenomena occur. This is reflected in her final interview stating “…when we did evaporation and condensation with [models], I didn't really know how to make models …. [Now] I sort of have a goal … that I would make better explanations for how and why things happen so I tried to add that into my model as much as I could.”
In sum, the data suggest that students’ ECs performances improved over time across both content areas – and the nature of those changes were influenced by the nature of the content area, the curricular/learning opportunities (such as data from the empirical investigations, simulations, teacher and scientific information), and feedback from the teacher and peers. Knowing the nature of these changes is important for better supporting students’ meaningful engagement in scientific practices.
Original language | American English |
---|---|
State | Published - Apr 2013 |
Event | Paper presented at meeting American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting - Duration: Apr 1 2015 → … |
Conference
Conference | Paper presented at meeting American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting |
---|---|
Period | 04/1/15 → … |
Keywords
- 5th grade students
- Student engagement
- Students' scientific practices
DC Disciplines
- Educational Administration and Supervision
- Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
- Educational Leadership