On Being Explicit: Toward a New Pedagogical Synthesis in Science

Terc Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

How do children, especially children who traditionally have been unsuccessful in science, learn to see the relationships between their own and scientific accounts of phenomena and to work with these productively in support of understanding? Would all children benefit academically from close attention to the relationships between "everyday" and "scientific" meanings and ways of representing those meanings? What is the nature of these relationships, and how can they be built upon pedagogically in science? The overarching goal of this three-year project is to develop an understanding of how all children, as they develop understanding of scientific ideas, also learn to see "inside" the ways in which "everyday" and "scientific" accounts represent knowledge about the physical and biological world. It is motivated by our concern with the persistent achievement gap in science separating low-income ethnic, racial and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. To address our questions, we will engage in a series of design experiments, to be undertaken in close collaboration with practitioner researchers in heterogeneous and bilingual classrooms, grades 1-4. These will entail two main research activities. (1) We will iteratively develop a pedagogical approach that integrates "progressive" emphases on the centrality of students' ideas and questions in inquiry-based learning with "post-progressive" concerns on the importance of explicit teaching about the forms and functions of language and symbol use in organizing meaning-making in science. This new pedagogical synthesis will harness the diversity in children's ideas and ways of talking and knowing as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching and make this diversity into an explicit object of discussion and inquiry in the classroom. In this approach, students and teachers will engage in active inquiry into the ways in which core ideas in physics (e.g., motion and force) and biology (e.g., organismal growth and development) are represented in "everyday" and "scientific" accounts (e.g. spoken and written descriptions, explanations, theories, arguments; graphs; drawings; models; tables; etc.). The focus of these inquiries will be on meaning and form as well as perspective and purpose. (2) Our main conjecture is that through participation in this approach to inquiry students will develop robust scientific understanding, begin to develop command over multiple discourses and their uses, and demonstrate high achievement. Toward this end, we will study what children learn as a result of their participation in such inquiry practices. We will examine children's learning as reflected in multiple kinds of performances, including classroom benchmark discussions, performance assessments, and achievement tests.