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We began the unit by presenting a multistep problem about the feeding behavior of different fish. The problem involved several different per quantities. Students were directed to draw models which accurately portrayed the information in the "givens" in order to clarify their ideas and devise solutions. Thus, students experienced how model building was a useful tool to help integrate information, clarify ideas, and solve problems. While discussing and comparing their different models, students also had the opportunity to talk explicitly about some metaconceptual notions about models. These points included that there can be more than one way to model the same problem, that a good model should be faithful to the known facts and should use codes in a consistent way, that models can vary in terms of how picture-like they are, and that it is often not important for the model to look like what it is modeling, as long as it conveys information about key relationships (in this case, the key per relationships). Students then created pencil and paper models for population density and sweetness, and worked with our computer-based dots-per-box models for these same phenomena. The purpose of these activities was to give students further experience in creating and working with models of per quantities and to make sure they clearly differentiated between "total number of dots" and "dots per box" in our models. In introducing the concept of density of materials, we presented a puzzle. Students were asked the following about three different-sized objects of different materials that were painted the same color: Could these objects be made of the same material? How can you tell? What do you think the distinguishing properties of different materials are? These were the same three objects used in the standard IPS lab on finding the density of solids. However, in the standard lab, students are given the procedure for finding density (i.e., D=M/V) and were simply asked to apply it to finding the density of the objects. In reasoning about this puzzle, students in the modified IPS curriculum mentioned that they thought that some objects were made of heavier kinds of materials than others. The teacher then asked them to create models to help clarify their ideas. Same-sized cubes of aluminum and brass (27 cm3) were then brought out and measured, and students were encouraged to draw a model which connected their data about mass and volume and showed how the mass is distributed in each object. In their models, students generally used one large box to depict the entire 27-cm3 cube, which they filled with different numbers of dots. They also developed a key to indicate how many grams a given dot stood for. The teacher asked: Does your model give you any clues about what might be a distinguishing or characteristic property of materials? Students then discussed and compared their models as a lead-in to working with the "mass icons per box" model, the kingpin of the computer software we designed to help students construct an understanding of mass, volume, and density (Snir et al., 1993). At this point the word density was introduced and defined vis-a-vis these models as mass per unit volume. Students spent about three lessons working with a series of computer-based conceptual models and simulations that we had designed to help them distinguish mass (or weight) and density, and to explore the related real-world phenomenon of flotation. We believe that using computer software had manifold advantages. In particular, our computer software allows different representations to be presented simultaneously (e.g., pictorial, conceptual, data table, graphic). These linked representations provide a means of enriching understanding of less familiar representations by working with more meaningful representations. They also provide visual representations for unseen conceptual relations, and allow students to perform experiments using these conceptually enhanced representations as a tool for guiding discovery. Our computer simulations allow students to do informative experiments easily that would be much harder to do in the real world. For example, students find it extremely difficult to measure the mass and volume of different samples of the same kind of material with enough accuracy to determine that different sample sizes do, in fact, have the same density. Doing simulations on the computer, however, allows them to see that increasing the volume proportionately increases the mass, explaining why the density must remain a constant. Such an ideal simulation prepares students for dealing with the experimental error that occurs in the lab. Finally, our software offers students personal control over the nature of the representations used and the time spent reflecting on a phenomenon of interest or difficulty. Students used these computer simulations to enhance their understanding and reflection about real-world phenomena and not as a substitute for doing lab experiments. For example, working with these simulations helped students to see what happens to an object's mass and density when its size was increased and how varying material kind for equal-sized objects affected the object's mass and density. Once such an understanding was firmly in place, students returned to the lab to see if they could verify that different-sized objects of the same material have the same density. In this context, students were more prepared to interpret observed variations as experimental error rather than true density differences because they had the firm expectation that the mass and volume relation should be the same for all sample sizes of the same material. To establish the fruitfulness of the concept of density, students also briefly investigated two other phenomena where the concept of density was useful: (a) sinking and floating and (b) thermal expansion. First, they investigated sinking and floating of real objects in the lab. They used qualitative observations of an object's material kind, relative mass, and relative volume to predict how it would behave in water, test their predictions, and make up a general rule to predict sinking or floating of any object in water. Students then continued their explorations of sinking and floating by using computer simulations. These simulations allowed them to test more easily the effects of different variables on sinking and floating (e.g., mass, volume, density of material) and to experiment with liquids of different densities. This allowed them to formulate a rule for sinking and floating that focused on the relation between the density of the object and the density of the liquid, rather than simply on the density of the object. Finally, students explored the phenomenon of thermal expansion, using a "ball and ring" demonstration (a heated ball does not pass through a ring) and an "expanding oil" demonstration. In both cases, students saw that the volume increased and the mass stayed the same. (For the ball and ring, the observations about mass and volume were qualitative, whereas for oil quantitative data was presented). Students modeled the situation for themselves so they could work out what happened to the density of the brass ball and oil. These models helped students to see that although density is a characteristic property of materials (at a given temperature), the density of a material changes with heating. Finally, students were invited to reflect on whether or not heat was matter, given that we found that a heated and unheated ball had the same mass. II. Developing Students' Epistemological Ideas about ScienceExcerpts from: A. Abstract (p. 349): Previous studies have documented that middle school students have a limited "knowledge unproblematic" epistemology of science (i.e., scientists steadily amass more facts about the world by doing experiments) with no appreciation of the role played by scientists' ideas in guiding inquiry. An important question concerns to what extent students this age and younger are ready to restructure their epistemological views to focus on more "constructivist" issues: the conjectural, explanatory, testable, and revisable nature of theories. This study tests the claim that even elementary school students can make significant progress in developing a more sophisticated, constructivist epistemology of science, given a sustained elementary school science curriculum that is designed to support students' thinking about epistemological issues. To assess the impact of elementary science experiences on students' epistemological views, 2 demographically similar groups of 6th-grade students were individually interviewed using the Nature of Science Interview developed by Carey and colleagues (Carey, 1991; Carey, Evans, Honda, Jay, & Unger, 1989). Both groups had experienced sustained elementary science instruction: 1 taught from a constructivist perspective and 1 taught from a more traditional perspective. We found that students in the more traditional science classroom had developed a "knowledge unproblematic" epistemology of the type previously reported by Carey et al. (1989). In contrast, students in the constructivist classroom had developed an epistemological stance toward science that focused on the central role of ideas in the knowledge acquisition process and on the kinds of mental, social and experimental work involved in understanding, developing, testing and revising these ideas. We conclude that elementary schoolchildren are more ready to formulate sophisticated epistemological views than many have thought. We discuss how these findings relate to the broader epistemological literature, and the features of the constructivist classroom environment that may have supported the development of these sophisticated understandings. B. Excerpt that contrasts three qualitatively different epistemologies of science (note: elementary and middle school students who have experienced traditional science instruction typically hold Level 1 views) (pp. 356-358) Carey and Smith (1993) distinguished three qualitatively different epistemologies of science each of which involves a set of different concepts for describing both the structure of scientific knowledge and the processes of knowledge acquisition in science. Movement from one epistemology to another thus involves making fundamental conceptual changes. At Level 1, scientific knowledge is assumed to consist of a collection of true beliefs about concrete procedures (e.g., how to do something correctly) or basic facts (e.g., what happens). Hence, students at this level make no clear distinction between scientists' ideas and activities or between their ideas and experimental results. They view scientific knowledge as accumulating in piecemeal fashion through simple telling or first-hand observation. They also view it as certain and true. Because they view scientific knowledge as about what to do and what happens, they view experiments as providing certain information about what happens or whether one's procedure works. At Level 2, scientific knowledge is assumed to consist of a collection of tested ideas. The two new notions that emerge at this level are notions of explanation and hypothesis testing. Students at this level view scientists as concerned with understanding how things work or why things happen. They also view scientists as doing experiments in order to test their ideas to see if they are right and as abandoning or revising their ideas when they find out they are wrong. Both notions of explanation and hypothesis testing require that students make a differentiation among scientists' ideas, activities and experimental results (e.g. the purpose of an experiment is to test a scientist's idea; the purpose of an explanation is to account for an experimental result). Although students appreciate that prior knowledge influences the hypothesis-testing process, they still think absolute knowledge is obtainable with enough diligence and effort. They make no distinction between scientists' overarching theories and specific hypotheses. At Level 3, scientific knowledge is believed to consist of well-tested theories about the world, which are useful in explaining events and in predicting the outcomes of new events. A theory is understood as a coherent, explanatory framework that consists of a network of hypothetical theoretical entities that are used to explain patterns of data. Students at this level make an explicit distinction between the scientist's guiding theories and more specific hypotheses. They view theories as guiding all aspects of inquiry: the generation of hypotheses, the selection of methods and the interpretation of data. They understand experimental results not only as providing evidence for and against hypotheses, but also as providing support (more indirectly) for and against theories. They also understand that theories, although revisable in principle, are resistant to change and slow to evolve. Ultimately, they judge canons of justification as framework relative and theories as more or less useful rather than strictly right or wrong. Thus, although students at Level 3 view scientific theories as providing rigorous standards for knowing and understanding, they also understand that knowledge of reality is fundamentally elusive and uncertain. Carey and Smith (1993) note that Level 1 ideas are consistent with what they have dubbed a knowledge unproblematic epistemology (i.e., an epistemology in which knowledge is regarded as true and certain) whereas Level 3 ideas clearly reflect a knowledge problematic epistemology (i.e., an epistemology in which one understands the tentative, framework-relative nature of knowledge). These two contrasting epistemologies are very similar to the starting (absolutist) and ending (constructivist) epistemologies described in the general epistemological literature, although a Level 3 epistemology includes specific reference to the conjectural nature of explanatory theories and the role of indirect argument, evidence, and cycles of hypothesis testing in their evaluation. Level 2 heralds the first emergence of some important domain-specific ideas (science as concerned with explanatory mechanism; experiments as a means for hypothesis testing) and represents one set of ideas that are transitional between these two epistemologies. On the one hand, a concern with explanation and testing does not immediately undermine one's belief in the true and certain nature of knowledge (e.g., one can believe that explanations are simple inductions from data, and that experiments can definitely prove one's hypothesis to be true). On the other, an acknowledgment that scientists are concerned with explanation and testing can sow seeds for appreciating the constructed, tentative nature of knowledge, especially as students begin to realize the conjectural nature of scientific explanations. C. Excerpt that describes key features of elementary science curricula that support epistemological development (i.e., movement toward more constructivist epistemologies) (pp. 402-409). Implications for the Teaching of Elementary School ScienceOur work demonstrates that school science experiences can dramatically affect the development of epistemological thinking about science during the elementary school years. More specifically, the sixth-grade students in the constructivist classroom had clearly developed a more constructivist epistemology of science than students in the comparison classroom (or, for that matter, the students in previous studies). We would argue that the main factor responsible for the two groups' different epistemological stances towards science was the difference in their elementary school science experiences. Both groups were the same age (to control for maturationally based developmental factors) and demographically quite similar (to control for the influence of parents and outside of school experiences with science). Furthermore, other school subjects (for students in the constructivist science classroom) were taught from more traditional epistemological perspectives, making it unlikely that the students developed their constructivist insights from these other elementary school experiences. Both groups even had similar amounts of elementary classroom time spent on science. The main difference between the two groups was the target epistemology of science that the teachers (implicitly or explicitly) aimed to help their students develop and applied when designing their science curricula. Other researchers (e.g., Brown & Campione, 1994; Lehrer et al., in press; Metz, in press; White, 1993) have already demonstrated that elementary school children are more "ready" to engage with issues of theory building and data gathering than has been assumed by those operating from a Piagetian-based developmental constraints perspective. What the present research adds is evidence that they also are able to build more sophisticated epistemological understandings about science than has been assumed or demonstrated in the prior literature. We attribute these developments to the innovative educational environments which provide intensive teacher scaffolding and support for student inquiry. Taken together, both kinds of research not only challenge the prior conventional wisdom about the kinds of intellectual demands a developmentally appropriate elementary science curriculum can and should make, but also begin to provide valuable alternative models of what truly empowering and effective elementary school science curriculum can and should be like. Design Features of an Elementary Science Curriculum that Appear to Support the Development of a Constructivist Epistemology But what was it about Hennessey, her teaching, and her "constructivist" classroom environment that contributed to the tremendous growth in her students' epistemological views? We believe that many coordinated aspects of her teaching approach were essential. Although our study was not designed to address this issue directly, we conclude by discussing what some of these coordinated features may have been and the ways they may have supported epistemological development. Our discussion is informed by what we know about Hennessey's classroom from the work of those who have studied her classroom directly (Beeth, 1998; Beeth & Hewson, 1999a, 1999b,Hennessey, 1994b, in press; Hennessey & Beeth, 1993) and from our own informal observations. They also are informed by prior research and theoretical writings on features of classroom environments that may be particularly important in promoting epistemological understanding and conceptual change 8. Authentic inquiry. First, Hennessey gives her students responsibility for managing most aspects of their own inquiry. Although she generally begins units by giving students a set of phenomena to explore, it is then the students' task to record the questions they have about these phenomena, to select questions they want to pursue further, and to plan ways to pursue their investigations. In these respects, Hennessey routinely involves her students in what Roth & Roychoudhury (1993) have called authentic contexts for scientific inquiry: contexts in which students have responsibility for posing questions, generating methods and analyzing data. This form of more "open" inquiry starkly contrasts with the more "closed" laboratory exercises used in traditional science classrooms, in which the problems, methods, and often even expected answers are given to students ahead of time. Some advantages of more authentic inquiry are that it ensures that the questions investigated make sense to the students (as they are grounded in what they know and think) and it elevates student motivation, interest, and involvement. In addition, as Chinn and Malhotra (in press) point out, there is an even deeper reason that involving students in more authentic inquiry may be particularly important in promoting epistemological development. By leaving open both the question of problem and method, students must confront a number of thorny issues about the interplay between theory and evidence that never get raised in more standard exercises. These authors analyze the detailed ways in which more authentic experimentation and inquiry supports the development of a more constructivist epistemology and traditional laboratory exercises support a more inductivist or positivist view. Significantly, many of the innovative curriculum units developed for elementary school students in the last decade have all involved students in authentic inquiry (Brown & Campione, 1994; Lehrer et al., in press; Metz, in press; Roth, 1996; White, 1993). Generative problems. Second, Hennessey selects initial problems that invite her students to consider issues of deep disciplinary significance. Gardner, Perkins, Wiske, and colleagues call these "generative topics" (Gardner, 1999; Wiske, 1997): topics that open up rich veins of inquiry within a discipline, such as science, mathematics, history, or the arts. For example, in one curricular unit, Hennessey's students explore their ideas about the day/night cycle and the causes of the seasons in ways that encourage them both to think about the relations between the earth, sun, and other elements of the solar system, and to build models of these relations. In another unit, students explore the motions of everyday objects and work with each other to develop ways of describing these motions. They wrestle with the difficult problem of how to describe the motions in a clear and consistent manner and ultimately raise deeper questions (explored in a later grade and unit) about how to explain these motions. In other units, students explore phenomena that involve them in theorizing about nature of heat, matter, gravity, living things, heredity, and the origins of the universe. These topics all involve areas where students' starting conceptions can be quite fuzzy and different from the ideas of science experts. Thus, in pursuing their investigations, students must work to clarify and understand their own initial ideas. They also encounter both anomalies that challenge their thinking, and new ideas (from their teacher and others) that contribute to the process of conceptual change. Most of the reform curricula showcased in the literature also stress the importance of picking problems that reveal important principles. However, these curricula vary in whether they focus on important design and engineering principles (Roth, 1996), on important methodologies for investigating a domain (Metz, in press), or on underlying domain-specific theories that involve students in conceptual changes (Brown & Campione, 1994; Hennessey, in press; White, 1993). We believe that Hennessey's deliberate choice of problems which are on the frontiers of student understanding provides her students with a particularly rich opportunity to learn that ideas are multi-faceted and involve explanatory conjectures that go beyond the information given. These problems also allow students to experience the difficulties in coming to understand their ideas and to learn about the kinds of mental work that go into understanding and clarifying ideas. Representing ideas in multiple ways. A third feature of Hennessey's approach is her emphasis on having students take responsibility for representing their ideas in multiple ways. Clearly, if the focus of the curriculum is on the development and elaboration of student ideas, it is important to find ways to make those ideas public and open to inspection and debate. Not only do explicit representations help students concretize and systematize inherently abstract and complex ideas, they also help students clarify ideas or discover aspects of their ideas that are not clear to them. Finally, as has been well documented in the conceptual change literature, making ideas public facilitates the process of conceptual change itself (e.g., Hewson & Hewson, 1983; Minstrell, 1982; Smith et al., 1997). Hennessey encourages students to use a variety of means to make their ideas public, including poster production, concept maps, physical models, drawings of conceptual models, word processing to write out ideas, audio-tapes to dictate ideas, and small and whole group discussion to present ideas orally. Poster production, audio recordings, and written statements not only serve to make ideas public, but also preserve a record of those ideas so that students can explicitly compare earlier and later ideas. Significantly, Hennessey encourages her elementary school students to represent, share, and analyze their ideas about domain-specific science concepts as well as their metaconceptual ideas about thinking, learning, and science. For example, students were asked to create concept maps of their notion of ideas and of the terms intelligible, plausible, fruitful, and to write word-processed essays in which they expressed their beliefs about the nature of learning and science. Collegial learning communities and metacognitive discourse. The fourth and fifth features of Hennessey's teaching approach that we believe are central to enhancing the development of a constructivist epistemology among her students are the kinds of social and discourse structures that characterize her classroom. She has created what Brown & Campione (1994) call a community of learners, where social dialogue and collaboration is an essential aspect of the learning process, yet where each student's voice is heard, respected, and valued. Students work together in a variety of ways—planning and conducting investigations; negotiating the meaning of words; learning to listen, share, and raise questions about each other's views—much in the way a community of scientists works together in developing and considering the viability of each other's ideas. In such an environment, the teacher's role is complex: Often she serves as a facilitator and scaffolder of student inquiry. At other times, she introduces the views of members of the professional "science community" for her students to consider. This kind of social environment facilitates students' awareness of the diversity of viewpoints and the ways in which they may (or may not) fully understand the ideas of self and others. It also widens the range of ideas students consider, which often leads them to develop more complex views. Given this kind of social environment, it is not surprising that students view these social interactions as vitally important to the learning and knowledge acquisition processes. The collegial social environment in Hennessey's classroom calls for and is supported by an explicit "metacognitive" discourse among students about their ideas. In her own research, Hennessey (in press) has extensively described the nature of this discourse and the variety of ways that the elementary students in her classroom are encouraged to develop metacognitive abilities. These include explicitly stating or identifying their own conceptions, considering the reasoning used to support a conception, considering the implications of a conception, temporarily bracketing or setting aside one's own conceptions in order to consider the competing views of others, reflecting on the status of conceptions of self and others (i.e., their intelligibility, plausibility, and fruitfulness), and evaluating the consistency and generalizability of a set of conceptions. She does not, of course, expect students to have all these metaconceptual skills initially. Rather, it is an explicit goal of her curriculum to help students build increasingly sophisticated metaconceptual skills and understandings over a 6-year period. (See Table 1 for a description of metaconceptual goals for students at each grade level and the way she ups the ante for students in grades 4-6). In a recent observational study, Beeth and Hewson (1999a) described the complex kind of discourse that occurred in Hennessey's sixth-grade classroom during a 37-day unit on force and motion. They believed a crucial part of the artistry of her pedagogy is the way she and her students weave among three kinds of discourse throughout the unit: discourse about specific science concepts, metacognitive discourse concerning the status of their ideas, and discourse about epistemological standards. They also believed the depth of understanding her students achieve is significantly influenced by three sources of authority at play in this learning community: curricular authority, authority of epistemological standards, and personal authority. Curricular authority is in the hands of the teacher as she chooses concepts for study and the depth of target understandings. The authority of the scientific community's epistemological standards is introduced by the teacher when students are ready to apply them, by teacher-initiated questions such as: Do you have evidence for your ideas? Are your ideas consistent with other ideas? Can you use your ideas to make predictions about new situations? Students also negotiate and apply their own epistemological standards. This personal authority is exercised by the students as they determine what to understand and ways to apply their ideas to new contexts. Hennessey respects and nurtures this personal authority by providing ample time for students to work with ideas, to negotiate standards for judging ideas, and to explore the status of ideas. We believe that the discourse in Hennessey's classroom has all the elements of what van Zee and Minstrell (1997) called reflective discourse, a kind of discourse that they argued is crucial to supporting the process of conceptual change. In contrast to the teacher- controlled discourse of more traditional classrooms which follows the rapid-fire IRE format (teacher initiates question, student responds, teacher evaluates correctness of student response and then moves on to the next question and student), reflective discourse is more student-centered, slower paced, and open ended. In particular, the questions and comments raised by the teacher or other students occur in reaction to student initiated comments and often have the structure of a reflective toss (student utterance, teacher or student question or comment, student utterance). Such questions and comments may probe for clarification and elaboration of meanings, draw out a variety of views in a neutral manner, and encourage students to monitor the discussion and their own thinking. Both students and teacher take the important roles of questioners and commentators, and vigorous student-student-student reflective dialogues ensue. Although reflective discourse with these features has been described for a variety of reform curricula both at the elementary and high school levels (Brown & Campione, 1994; Hennessey, in press; Lampert, 1990; Lehrer et al., in press; Metz, in press; Minstrell, 1982), there may be distinctive differences in the ways this type of discourse is orchestrated and the relative importance placed on its different components. For example, some teachers seem to focus on scaffolding discourse about evaluating an idea in relation to its fit with evidence (Brown & Campione, 1994; Lehrer et al., in press;Metz, in press). Other teachers, such as Hennessey (in press), seem to put greater emphasis on scaffolding discourse about evaluating an idea in light of a variety of criteria: its intelligibility, its fit with their prior ideas, and its fit with evidence. The way these differences manifest in a given reflective discourse not only interacts with how the acts of inquiry occur in the classroom, but also may have implications for the epistemological lessons students learn from the curriculum in which the discourse evolves. Perhaps one reason that the students in Hennessey's classroom were so aware of the guiding role ideas play in scientific inquiry was the great emphasis she placed on having them evaluate their ideas not only in terms of fit with evidence, but also in terms of intelligibility and fit with their prior ideas. Other features. A variety of additional factors may have contributed to the effectiveness of Hennessey's curriculum in bringing about change in student epistemological understandings. Hennessey is a knowledgeable scientist, with graduate study in the biological sciences. Her depth of scientific knowledge, as well as her willingness to research topics or contact experts, allows her to respond flexibly and intelligently to the questions and issues her students raise. She is knowledgeable of research on student conceptual frameworks and of reform efforts to teach science from a constructivist perspective, having completed doctoral work in science education. She, herself, has sophisticated epistemological views toward science. In addition, she is highly experienced at teaching elementary science from a constructivist perspective, having worked from this perspective with students over the last 20 years. Finally, by teaching science in a school which allows her to work with the same students over a 6-year period (and by having a student body that is relatively stable), she has an extended time scale which makes it more likely that deep conceptual change can occur. She has unique opportunities to get to know her students and their thinking, to invite them to revisit and deepen their understanding of topics at varying points throughout the curriculum, and to remind them of their earlier views (e.g., she pulls out posters saved from prior years and discusses with students how their ideas have changed). In all of these respects, her classroom may represent a best case scenario for bringing about change in students' epistemological understandings. However, we believe that we can learn a great deal from careful analysis of best case scenarios. They inform us of what is educationally possible given the prior concepts and developmental limits of elementary schoolchildren. What we learn is that elementary school children are much more capable of engaging with theory building and epistemological issues than many have assumed. Best case scenarios also can contribute to our understanding of exemplary educational practice and to our developing a more adequate vision of what the central goals of an elementary science curriculum can and should be. Like a number of other researchers in the field, we believe it may be particularly important to develop students' epistemological understandings early, as these views can provide an exciting and empowering framework to build upon in their subsequent science educational experiences. ReferencesBeeth, M.E. (1998). Teaching science in 5th grade: Instructional goals that support conceptual change. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35 (10), 1091-1101. Beeth, M.E. & Hewson, P.W. (1999a, March). Facilitating learning of science content and scientific epistemology: Key elements in teaching for conceptual change. Paper presented at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Boston. Beeth, M.E. & Hewson, P.W. (1999b). 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Teaching for understanding: A study of students' preinstruction theories of matter and a comparison of the effectiveness of two approaches to teaching about matter and density. Cognition and Instruction, 15, 317-394. Snir, J., Smith, C., & Grosslight, L. (1993). Conceptually enhanced simulations: A computer tool for science teaching. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 11, 373-388. Van Zee, E. & Minstrell, J. (1997). Using questioning to guide student thinking. The Journal of The Learning Sciences, 6, 227-269. White, B. (1993). ThinkerTools: Causal models, conceptual change, and science education. Cognition and Instruction, 10 (1), 1-100. White, R. & Gunstone, R. (1989). Metalearning and conceptual change. International Journal of Science Education, 11, 577-586. Wiske, M.S. (1997). Teaching for understanding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers. 8 See Lederman (1992) for a review of classroom environment features (at the high school and college level) that are associated with growth in student understanding of the nature of science. The findings from those studies are consistent with the arguments made here about critical features of an elementary school science classroom. Smith, C., Maclin, D., Grosslight, L., & Davis, H. (1997) Teaching for Understanding: A Study of Students' Preinstruction Theories of Matter and a Comparison of the Effectiveness of Two Approaches to Teaching about Matter and Density". Cognition and Instruction, 15 (3), 317-393. Smith, C., Maclin, D., Houghton, C. and Hennessey, M. (2000) Sixth-Grade Students' Epistemologies of Science: The Impact of School Science Experiences on Epistemological Development. Cognition and Instruction, 18 (3), 349-422. |
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