ROLE: Extending the Understandings of Consequence Project: Investigating Strategic Pedagogical Challenges

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Extending The Understandings of Consequence Project: Investigating Transfer and Persistence Scientifically accepted explanations often require students to structure knowledge in ways that contradict their expectations about the nature of how causes and effects behave. Such explanations can involve: causal mechanisms that are inferred or abstract; causal patterns that extend beyond linear and unidirectional to cyclic, reciprocal, and non-sequential; correspondences between causes and effects that are in various respects probabilistic; and causal agents that are decentralized and involve aspects of emergence. These are ways of thinking and abstractions students typically are not familiar with. "The Understandings of Consequence Project" revealed that students and scientists' explanations tend to have very different types of causal structures at the core. The project demonstrated that impacting students' assumptions about the nature of causality is a promising approach for helping students restructure their knowledge and achieve scientific understandings. However, there are lingering questions to be answered, such as the transferability of learning about causal forms in one topic to another and the persistence of the subsequent restructuring. The current project extends "The Understandings of Consequence Project" to systematically investigate these questions. We will assess the transfer of understanding of causal forms to topics with isomorphic and non-isomorphic causal forms and to science learning more generally. The impact of minimal levels of student-focused and teacher-directed transfer support will be assessed. Persistence of learning will be examined later in the same school year and again two years later. Findings will result in revisions to the Understandings of Consequence curriculum units. This research has the potential to impact how deeply and lastingly all students learn science.