Making Thinking Visible: Promoting Model-Building and Collaborative Discourse in W.I.S.E.

Concord Consortium, Concord MA

Investigators

Abstract

Order to design, test, and refine rich tasks for middle and high school students in the domain of plate tectonics. The notion of making thinking visible is used in two ways. First, students will engage in drawing tasks, making their models of plate tectonic phenomena explicit and then use their models as artifacts for reiterative cycles of collaborative discourse and model-revision. Second, students will be provided with a set of prototypes of dynamic, runnable models of plate tectonic phenomena so that they can visualize dynamic, causal, and temporal processes and use this "experiential" knowledge to test, critique, and revise their models. The goal here is to promote knowledge integration and promote meta-knowledge of model-revision. Next, we will foster students' knowledge integration by helping students learn from one another in two ways. First they will engage students in collaborative discourse about the evolution of the theory of plate tectonics. Second, they will engage east and West Coast students in discourse about plate tectonic-related phenomena using intriguing questions about the geological phenomena in each geographical area. The goal is to promote students' inquiry and knowledge integration using discourse to address intriguing questions that are personally relevant. With respect to model-based learning, outcomes of this project will include: findings about students' model-based learning and reasoning, the affordances made by "visualizing" the runnable prototypes, and insight into how these processes may be different from conventional pencil and paper model-based tasks. Regarding collaborative discourse tasks, outcomes will include: the types of explanations students construct for each other and how meaning is co-constructed in collaborative discourse. Outcomes will also include findings regarding the nature of students' epistemologies of science and of scientific models, and differences between 6th and 9th grade students in terms of their epistemologies. Further outcomes will be flexible WISE units for 6th and 9th grade students who utilize model-based tasks, visualization, and collaborative discourse to promote students' understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying plate tectonics and the development of the theory of plate tectonics.