CCMS Conference Participation, 2005
CCMS Poster: Innovative Research and Methods
View the poster in PDF format (4,684 KB)
The following provides more detail on the research and methods highlighted on the CCMS poster. Researchers are identified as graduate students (G), postdoctoral fellows (P), or faculty (F).
Curriculum Materials for All Children
This aspect of CCMS research focuses on the nature of the curriculum materials and how they can encourage and support learning. Research questions include how curriculum materials can scaffold learners in complex practices and motivate all students to engage in and learn from activities. Research also seeks to identify attributes of curriculum materials that support local adaptation and attend to the learning needs of all students.
Supporting Students in Constructing Scientific Explanations
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Middle School Students' Use of Evidence and Reasoning in Writing Scientific Explanations. Results from the classroom enactment of a 7th grade chemistry unit showed significant learning gains for students for all components of scientific explanation (i.e., claim, evidence, and reasoning). Although students’ explanations were stronger at the end of the unit, the research team found that students continued to have difficulty differentiating between inappropriate and appropriate evidence for some assessment tasks. Researchers conjecture that students’ ability to use appropriate data as evidence depends on their content knowledge, their understanding of what counts as evidence, and the wording of the assessment task.
University of Michigan: K. McNeill (G) & J. Krajcik (F)
Related Presentation: 33rd Carnegie Symposium on Cognition 2004 -
Teacher Practices That Support Students’ Construction of Scientific Explanations in Middle School Classrooms. Six teachers enacted a middle school chemistry unit with a total of 21 classes in urban public schools. Teachers’ practices were coded during a focal lesson in which they introduced their students to scientific explanation. Regression analyses showed that teachers’ scores for the two practices helped to predict their students’ posttest scores for the reasoning component of the explanation framework (i.e. providing justification for why evidence supports a claim). Furthermore, charting students’ explanations across the unit and comparing them to the pretest results showed that the two practices had an immediate impact on students’ reasoning in the focal lesson that carried through the entire unit.
University of Michigan: D. Lizotte (G), K. McNeill (G), & J. Krajcik (F)
Related Presentation: International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2004 -
Supporting Students’ Construction of Scientific Explanations by Fading Scaffolds in Instructional Materials. Working with more than 300 7th grade students, the research team studied two different treatments of the scaffolds used to help students understand the unit’s explanation component. Students used investigation sheets with either continuous scaffolding, which provided detailed support for every investigation, or faded scaffolding, which provided less and less support over time. The research team found that fading written scaffolds better equipped students to write explanations when they were not provided with support.
University of Michigan: K. McNeill (G), D. Lizotte (G), J. Krajcik (F), & R. Marx (F)
Related Presentation/Publication: AERA 2004 -
Students Constructing and Defending Evidence-Based Scientific Explanations. By analyzing students’ work—along with their explicit definitions of scientific explanations and components of the units’ framework that address claim, evidence, and reasoning—this study revealed that students and designers have different understandings about how to fulfill both the evidence and reasoning components of a scientific explanation. These findings are having an effect on the design of the IQWST curriculum, as developers attempt to build into the units the kinds of supports that can help students be more successful in their efforts to construct and defend evidence-based scientific explanations.
Northwestern University: L. Kuhn (G) & B. Reiser (F)
Related Presentation: NARST 2005 -
Integrating the Nature of Science into Inquiry Teaching. To investigate how reflective discussions can be incorporated into IQWST units to help students learn about the nature of science, researchers conducted classroom trials designed to help materials developers to place the discussion opportunities within the context of the students’ own inquiry experiences. Ongoing research is now exploring how to foster students’ debate and discussion of issues related to the nature of science—e.g., the need for evidence, the characteristics of scientific evidence, and the tentative nature of scientific theories—within the context of their evaluations of their own inquiry projects and planning for the next phases of their work.
Northwestern University: L. Kenyon (P) & B. Reiser (F)
Related Presentation: NARST 2005 -
Students’ Developing Understanding of Data: Affordances and Constraints of First and Second Hand Experiences. This study examined how students discuss and interpret data and whether these actions vary depending on the type of data they are using. More specifically, it explored whether students perform differently when analyzing firsthand and secondhand data during the enactment of two IQWST curriculum units, chemistry in grade 7 and biology in grade 8. The study looked to see whether the data source affected students’ discussions, considered how students interpreted and dealt with a range of data types, and offered possible reasons for differential findings.
University of Michigan: B. Hug (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Early Career Research Associate) & K. McNeill (G)
Related Presentation: NARST 2005 -
Scaffolding Systemic Understanding in Genetics. This is a pilot study of high school biology students’ use of an inquiry-based unit on genetics that draws on a conceptual model of domain-specific knowledge forms that are critical for reasoning about the genetic system. The study found that students improved in their understanding of key genetics concepts as well as acquiring a more systemic understanding of genetic phenomena.
Northwestern University: R. G. Duncan (G)
Related Presentation: AERA 2005 -
A Multidimensional Perspective on Engagement in Inquiry Practices. In a study using the IQWST biology unit, researchers found that teachers attend to multiple dimensions of inquiry (cognitive, social, and linguistic) simultaneously as they attempt to support students in inquiry practices. The researchers have developed an analytical framework to describe the strategies that teachers use within each dimension and how they support the students’ inquiry practices such as analyzing data and forming conclusions from data.
Northwestern University: C. Tzou (G) & B. Reiser
Related Presentation: NARST 2004 -
Restructuring School Physics Around Real-World Problems—A Cognitive Justification. Interviews with a range of people, from experts to novices, demonstrate that solving ill-defined problems require additional cognitive skills beyond those required to solve well-defined problems. Since most real-world problems are ill-defined to some degree, traditional curriculum that are structured around well-defined problems do not prepare students for life outside of school.
Michigan State University: D. Fortus (F)
Related Presentation: AERA 2005 -
Collaboration of High School Students, Teachers, and Center Staff in Developing Science Curriculum Materials. The design team for a high school unit on Ground and Surface Water gives significant voice to an experienced classroom teacher from an urban school who is centrally involved in defining the problems that the materials address, developing the instructional approach and assessment, and testing the activities. This project also uses student co-generative dialogue to gather student feedback on activities and materials. These interactions are highly beneficial to center staff in design decisions.
Michigan State University: K. Gunckel (G), J. Gallagher (F), D. Vandenbelt (teacher), R. Forthoffer (G), D. Grosshandler (P), C. Wilson (G) & F. Moore (P)
Related Presentation: NARST 2005
Teacher Learning and Educative Materials
This aspect of CCMS research deals with teacher learning as it relates to science curriculum materials and focuses on the best ways to provide teachers with the support they need to implement high-quality curriculum materials. Research projects are designed to answer questions like these:
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Preservice Elementary Teachers' Critique and Adaptation of Science Curriculum Materials. Preservice elementary teachers who engaged in activities involving the critique and adaptation of existing science curriculum materials in their elementary science methods course increased their attention to how the curriculum materials promoted inquiry-oriented science teaching.
University of Michigan: B. Davis (F)
Related Presentation: NARST 2003
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Educative Curriculum Materials. Combining work done across multiple research groups, the researchers have developed a set of design heuristics for educative science curriculum materials that promote teacher learning, with the goal of moving the field toward principled design of these materials. These design heuristics provide a context for a theoretically-oriented discussion of how features in educative curriculum materials may promote teacher learning, through serving as cognitive tools that are situated in teachers' practice.
University of Michigan: B. Davis (F) & J. Krajcik (F)
Related Presentation: AERA 2004 -
Exploration of the Role of Curriculum Materials in Teaching Science and Learning to Teach Science. Exploratory studies—using newly developed instructional modules for elementary and secondary science teaching methods courses as a context—suggest that there is a wide range of perspectives among teacher-educators about the role of curriculum materials and how teachers use them. While some teacher educators introduce their pre-service teachers to a variety of materials from which to choose activities to develop a planned curriculum, others prepare their pre-service teachers to take a more critical approach to materials and their use, providing them with evaluative tools to apply to materials and to their own classroom practice. These perspectives have implications for materials design as well as teacher education.
Michigan State University: E. Smith (F), K. Gunckel (G), D. Fortus (F), C. Schwarz (F), M. Enfield (P) & D. Grosshandler (P)
Related Presentation: ASTE (formerly AETS) 2005 -
Practice-Based Professional Development. A fundamental challenge of professional development is to bridge the disconnect between the content or pedagogical approaches teachers learn and the realities of their own daily practice. Studies exploring two different strategies for situating teachers’ learning in the context of their own experiences are now underway. One takes place within the context of teachers’ planning, enactment, and analysis of project-based inquiry science curricula, and the other uses the context of teachers’ selecting, adapting, and using curriculum materials.
Northwestern University: B. Reiser (F) & D. Kanter (F)
Michigan State University: D. Fortus (F)
Related Presentation: AETS 2005
Methods
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A Framework for Characterizing Participation and Engagement in Project-Based Learning Environments. Researchers developed a theoretical framework for examining the ways in which classroom contexts, in conjunction with individual student knowledge and beliefs, influence students’ participation and engagement in project-based learning environments. The framework has been specifically designed for the analysis of project-based learning environments in that it explicitly considers the influence of students’ role- and goal-adoption on participation and engagement in project-based activities over time. As the framework continues to be refined, it should prove useful for identifying and designing future lines of research, facilitating comparison across diverse settings for science learning, and providing a starting point for the integration of research results.
Northwestern University: V. Pitts (G) & D. Edelson (F)
Related Presentation: International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2004 -
Assessment Analysis Procedure. Science education reform efforts have prompted curriculum developers to align their materials closely with national content standards. Now, high quality assessment items are needed in curriculum materials to probe student understanding of the ideas in the content standards. Well-aligned assessments are also needed to determine the overall effectiveness of innovative curriculum materials and to conduct fine grained research on those materials. CCMS researchers have refined a Project 2061 procedure for analyzing more precisely the alignment of individual assessment items to content standards and for making judgments about what students do and do not know. The procedure is currently being used in a variety of curriculum development and research projects throughout CCMS.
AAAS Project 2061: G. DeBoer (F)
University of Michigan: L. Scott (P)
Related Presentation: NARST 2004 - Categories and Criteria for Video-Analysis of Classroom
Practice. To improve the usefulness of
video-analysis tools for classroom observation, CCMS
researchers are attempting to develop criteria that
accurately characterize dimensions of teaching that
may contribute to student learning of specific ideas
and skills. In addition to providing methods for
analyzing the quality of the science content in videotaped
lessons, CCMS researchers are also identifying elements of instruction
that are important for student learning. These include
providing opportunities and support for students’ sense
making (e.g., by asking students to explain phenomena,
interpret and evaluate representations, reflect on
what they know, and make connections to other ideas),
for students to practice using benchmark ideas, for
finding out what students know and are thinking about
benchmark ideas, for establishing and maintaining a sense of
purpose for activities, for providing multiple ways to approach
the learning goals, and for creating a classroom climate where
all students are involved in learning.
AAAS Project 2061: J. Roseman (F), G. DeBoer (F)
University of Michigan: J. Krajcik (F), P. Blumenfeld (F), C. Harris (G) & T. Kempler (G)
Related Presentation: CCMS Knowledge Sharing Institute 2005
