CCMS Knowledge Sharing Institute
2005 KNOWLEDGE SHARING INSTITUTE
Poster Abstracts
CCMS Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows Poster Abstracts
Exploring Pre-Service Elementary
Teachers’ Critique and Adaptation of Science Curriculum Materials in
Respect to Socioscientific Issues
Cory T. Forbes, University of Michigan
In recent years, an increasingly robust body of research has emerged addressing socioscientific issues in science education. While this work has yielded valuable insight into students’ reasoning about complex issues with inherent social implications, it is essential that we also seek to understand the teacher’s role in this process. The work presented here represents preliminary work undertaken to address this specific dimension of the literature regarding socioscientific issues in the field and builds upon ongoing work from within the CCMS community. The two primary objectives of this pilot study were to investigate the ways in which pre-service elementary teachers critique and adapt science curriculum materials dealing with socioscientific issues and to identify factors that serve to mediate this process. Four pre-service elementary teachers in the science methods course from the University of Michigan teacher education program were studied over the course of one semester. Results from the study are based on interview data, coursework, journals, and online discussions. A number of themes are apparent. First, pre-service teachers critiqued and adapted curriculum materials dealing with socioscientific issues in ways that were both consistent and inconsistent with their previous work in the science methods course. Secondly, the teachers’ content knowledge, informal reasoning about socioscientific issues, and their role identity (especially in regard to value-neutral practice) emerged as mediating factors in their efforts. Implications for science teacher education and the design of curriculum materials, particularly those intended to be educative for teachers, are discussed.
Enactments of Materials Helping
Elementary Children Learn Science Ideas and Practices
David Grueber and Mark Enfield, Michigan State University
Elementary teachers need support with helping children learn science ideas and about the nature and practice of science. In comparing two different materials and their enactments, we see how certain aspects of teacher support lead to outcomes in classroom enactments. One material was designed in order to support learning particular practices of science as well as about how forces affect the motion of objects. In the enactment we saw the teacher struggle to retain focus on helping children learn about the effects of forces on the motion of objects. In another material, not designed by researchers, the materials focus heavily on content and concurrently less on the nature of science. In observed lessons enacted, the teacher focused more on ideas about the structure and function of plant parts. However, each material provided opportunities for learning both science ideas and about the nature and practice of science. But particular aspects of the materials made one of these collateral goals more or less salient. This poster reports findings from comparisons of two materials and enactments of selected lessons.
Water for People and the Planet:
Overview of Development and Research 2004–2005
Kristin Gunckel and Rebecca Forthoffer, Michigan State University
Water for People and the Planet is a high school unit developed to help students understand where our water comes from and where it goes. This unit specifically focuses on the connections between groundwater and watershed systems. During the 2004–2005 year, we accomplished a major revision of all of the lessons and materials and enacted the materials in two different high schools. This poster shares the work accomplished on developing the Water for People and the Planet unit. We share the goals for the unit, sample lessons, and special features included in the materials. We also share our current research questions and methods, and provide an overview of the enactments completed this spring.
Teaching Elementary Pre-Service
Teachers to Use Curriculum Materials Critically
Kristin Gunckel and Blakely Tsurusaki, Michigan State University
Elementary teachers are often required either to follow mandated curriculum materials when teaching science or to develop their own materials. Research suggests that most science curriculum materials are of poor quality. Teachers are left either to teach from poor materials or to develop their own teaching materials and lessons, often drawing on poor materials for ideas. Furthermore, elementary teachers often lack the experience and knowledge to build quality materials and lesson sequences on their own. To address this situation, teacher educators in the Elementary Teachers and Curriculum Materials project (ETCM) incorporated teaching elementary pre-service teachers how to select, evaluate, modify, and use curriculum materials effectively into their science methods courses. This poster presents some of the activities designed to help pre-service teachers use materials well and examines some of the challenges involved in teaching elementary pre-service teachers how to critically and thoughtfully use curriculum materials in planning and teaching.
Comprehending Text and Reading
to Learn: How Middle School Students Integrate Pure Verbal Text Sections with
Visuo-Spatial Text Adjuncts When Reading Three Genres of Scientific Text
Mary Heitzman, University of Michigan
This poster is a literature review and possible research plan for studying how students integrate verbal text sections with visuo-spatial representations, depending on students’ reading comprehension levels and the type of scientific text. Current science reform initiatives support students’ learning and use of scientific practices in order to become “scientifically literate”—that is, to be knowledgeable and critical participants in society (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1990, 1993; National Research Council [NRC], 1996). The National Research Council, in its description of what scientific literacy means, states that “Scientific literacy entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press and to engage in social conversation about the validity of the conclusions” (NRC, 1996, p.22) [emphasis added]. What do students do when asked to “read with understanding” and “engage in social conversation” about scientific text that contains both pure verbal text sections and visuo-spatial representations such as diagrams and graphs? And how different are these processes when the individuals differ by comprehension levels and genres of scientific text?
Many analyses have focused on visuo-spatial representations, their relationships with verbal text sections, and how students engage with the two when learning content through comprehension of scientific texts. However, most studies have studied these relationships with reading comprehension as the predictor in identifying representations that “help” students’ recall of main ideas and details in the texts. Literacy researchers also agree that as elementary students move on to middle school and high school, the demands of comprehending scientific texts increase—both by the complexity of content and by the shifting away from narrative texts and towards expository and real-world text structures. This study focuses on comprehension as a factor in students’ processing and integration of the verbal and visuo-spatial components of the scientific texts. This study also looks at what students do with the components from three different text types: real-world (such as newspaper articles), narrative, and expository texts. This study will inform the literacy, science education, visuo-spatial cognition, and curriculum design communities, as we try to understand how to help students learn to read scientific texts with understanding and to engage in social conversation about the subject matter.
Students' Discussions of Data:
Affordances and Constraints of First and Secondhand Experiences
Barbara Hug, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kate McNeill,
University of Michigan
Students develop scientific knowledge by actively engaging in scientific ways of knowing, such as asking questions, designing experiments, and analyzing data. Recent research literature and national standards call for students to engage in scientific inquiry practices, such as designing investigations and analyzing data. Yet scientific inquiry practices have been shown to be challenging for students.
We present initial findings regarding how students discuss and interpret data and whether these actions vary depending on the type of data they are using. More specifically, we are interested in examining potential differences between first and secondhand data. Implications of the finds are discussed in regard to the use of first and secondhand experiences in the design of curriculum materials and student learning.
The Role of Nature of Science
in Supporting Explanations
Lisa Kenyon, Northwestern University
Constructing scientific explanations is an essential aspect of engaging in scientific inquiry in classrooms (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Sandoval, 2003). The IQWST units are designed to teach scientific principles and the scientific practices of constructing and defending scientific explanations by providing students and teachers with a framework that clearly defines these complex practices. In addition, the reform documents recommend that achieving scientific literacy requires more than engaging in this complex practice, suggesting that students should acquire understandings about the nature of science (AAAS, 1990; NRC, 1996). This poster presents two studies examining these related issues of learning about nature of science and constructing scientific explanations. In one study, we focused on finding out the role understanding nature of science can serve in supporting scientific explanations. In the second, we identified the ways in which the students’ written work reveals a commitment to the scientific ways of defending a claim. We conclude the poster with possible design strategies for supporting students as they develop understandings of the nature of science and use those understandings to scientifically defend their claims.
American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1990). Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Driver, R., Newton, P., & Osborne, J. (2000). Establishing the norms of scientific argumentation in classrooms. Science Education, 84, 287–312.
National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: Author.
Sandoval, W. A. (2003). Conceptual and epistemic aspects of students' scientific explanations. The Journal of Learning Sciences, 12(1), 5–51.
Supporting Evidence-Based Scientific
Explanations
Leema Kuhn, Northwestern University
Constructing scientific explanations is an essential aspect of engaging in scientific inquiry in classrooms (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Sandoval, 2003). The IQWST units are designed to teach scientific principles and the scientific practices of constructing and defending scientific explanations by providing students and teachers with a framework that clearly defines these complex practices. In addition, the reform documents recommend that achieving scientific literacy requires more than engaging in this complex practice, suggesting that students should acquire understandings about the nature of science (AAAS, 1990; NRC, 1996). This poster presents two studies examining these related issues of learning about nature of science and constructing scientific explanations. In one study we focused on finding out the role understanding nature of science can serve in supporting scientific explanations. In the second, we identified the ways in which the students’ written work reveals a commitment to the scientific ways of defending a claim. We conclude the poster with possible design strategies for supporting students as they develop understandings of the nature of science and use those understandings to scientifically defend their claims.
American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1990). Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Driver, R., Newton, P., & Osborne, J. (2000). Establishing the norms of scientific argumentation in classrooms. Science Education, 84, 287–312.
National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: Author.
Sandoval, W. A. (2003). Conceptual and epistemic aspects of students' scientific explanations. The Journal of Learning Sciences, 12(1), 5–51.
Recognizing Adaptation in Curricular
Enactment
Kirsten Mawyer, Northwestern University
This study examines how teachers implement Looking at the Environment (LATE), a yearlong high school environmental science curriculum. Specifically, it explores the question: How and when do teachers adapt the curriculum as they enact it? The theory that I am developing seeks to bring certain practices of adaptation into focus. By focusing on adaptation the study seeks to address the failure to recognize that the systematic modification of curricular materials during enactment may put some of the design goals and underlying motivations at risk and thus poses a significant challenge to science education reform. The first phase of the analysis established a taxonomy of the methods that teachers used to adapt the curriculum. The second phase developed a process model of curriculum use in order to explore the relationships between the different categories. The data emerging from this study should inform the further design and refinement of professional development materials and better prepare and support teachers as they enact this curriculum in their classrooms.
The Development of Middle School
Students’ Conception of Energy During a Qualitative Unit in Which Energy
is Not Defined
Jeff Nordine, University of Michigan
Energy is an abstract idea that has been developed through the quantitative investigation of nature. Although energy can be calculated, we are unable to define what it is. Commonly, energy is treated in physical science courses as “the ability to do work” and students are often prompted to do simple energy calculations. Offering a simple definition for energy can be misleading, and past research suggests that a problem-based approach seems to do little to develop students’ conceptions. We developed a standards-based unit in which energy was never defined or quantified because we feel that this approach is most developmentally and scientifically appropriate.
This study is designed to investigate how students’ energy conceptions evolve even when no qualitative or quantitative definition of energy is offered. Eight students (>10% of the population) were interviewed at four checkpoints during the unit and asked to comment on how energy may be involved with various situations. Their responses were analyzed in order to describe how their energy conception changed over the course of the unit.
A Multimodal Semiotic Exploration
of the Food Web Diagram in Contemporary Middle School Textbooks and Assessments
Philip Piety, University of Michigan
Pedagogies and authentic practices of the natural sciences are rich with many conventionalized representational forms, from those that are language based like verbal explanations to those that draw upon the visuospatial semiotic. Often, these two symbolic categories of language and visuospatial communication are treated as distinct. The food web diagram as it appears in middle school texts presents a number of interesting opportunities for analysis of the graphical-linguistic interrelationships in science. Visually, the food web is a graphical element, but its semantic substrate is largely propositional: it can be translated. In both authentic practice and pedagogical texts it also has quantitative dimensions and has intra-textual relationships to other semiotic elements, so it is an example of a form of literacy and numeracy.
This small study looked at five middle school science textbooks from four publishers and some national and state assessment instruments. Using the textbook unit/chapter as a unit of analysis, I conclude that while different publishers do use different graphical approaches, a strong genre is apparent in the textual construction. Looking at both the diagrammatic visual elements and the prose, this genre has food web diagrams integrally connected to the text overall in regular and specific ways. In comparing the textbooks genre to the national and state tests, important similarities and differences are apparent that invite further study.
Examining Student Buy-in
to Project-Based Science Curricula
Virginia Pitts, Northwestern University
This poster presents a piece of my dissertation work, which involves the examination of student buy-in in project-based science curricula. "Project-based" describes that family of curricula in which students develop content understanding through the pursuit of authentic problems. "Buy-in" refers to the extent to which students' perceptions of themselves and the activity they are engaged in align with the "project scenario" envisioned by the teacher or designers. While the project scenario is intended to motivate activities and contextualize instruction, research to date has not explored the extent to which the scenario actually motivates student participation in practice. My dissertation research addresses that gap, through investigating (a) the extent to which students adopt or "buy-into" the project scenario, (b) the influences of contextual and individual factors on buy-in, and (c) the ways in which buy-in influences participation and engagement. This mixed-method study focuses on two 7th-grade science classrooms and involves student interviews, classroom observation, and use of frequent "mini-surveys" to explore students' experiences of these curricula.
Rubric Design for Assessing
Students' Environmental Decision Making
Anna Switzer, University of Michigan
Current environmental issues can provide an exciting and relevant context for science learning. These issues are by nature multifaceted, requiring consideration of ecology, economics, politics, and personal values. The Looking at the Environment (LATE) curriculum not only gives students the opportunity to examine science in its social context, but also teaches a decision making framework. Understanding how students take on this framework as well as how they bring various types of content together will go a long way to inform the teaching of such issues. I have designed a scoring rubric to tease apart the process and content used by students when making an environmental decision. The rubric design as well as examples of its use with actual student responses from a pre-/post-unit assessment are presented here.
The Environmental Literacy
Project
Blakely K. Tsurusaki and Rebecca Forthoffer, Michigan State University
During the 2004–2005 year, the five Environmental Literacy working groups—Carbon Cycle, Water Cycle, Connecting Human Actions to Environmental Systems, Evolution and Natural Selection, and Physical and Chemical Changes—developed and implemented pre-tests to assess elementary and/or secondary student knowledge of various science concepts. Through analysis of the results, similar themes have arisen that connect ideas of the working groups. In addition, we have come up with big ideas that we believe are important for an environmental literacy curriculum. We are currently working with elementary and secondary science teachers on developing curriculum that will teach students to be environmentally literate. This poster provides an overview of the work that we have done this past year, including brief summaries of results from the pre-test analysis of all five working groups and a synopsis of the themes that connect ideas of the working groups and the big ideas that are important for an environmental literacy curriculum.
CCMS Early Career Research Associates (ECRA) Poster Abstracts
The Process of Trust Building
between University Researchers and School Personnel
Mike Barnett, Assistant Regional Editor—North America, International
Journal of Science Education
A wide range of research has examined trust building within corporations, businesses, and schools, and between and within organizations, but little research has been conducted that examines trust formation between university researchers and classroom-based teachers. Using a qualitative methodological approach, we examined the development of trusting relationships between our educational research team and a series of urban science teachers after three years of partnerships. We found that teachers were initially cautiously optimistic about working with us; they did not want to invest much effort in the partnership until we had proven we were open, honest, and most importantly, dedicated to helping their students. We also found that the process of trust building began with an initial tentative and hesitant frontstage persona on the part of teachers and eventually progressed to the point where they felt comfortable dropping their frontstage mask to engage in backstage conversations. We discovered that the trust building process was transformative in that, as trust was developed, it fostered the blurring of our social identities with the teachers, as the teachers became teacher/researchers and we likewise became researcher/teachers.
Teachers’ Implementation
of the Constructing Ideas in Physical Science (CIPS) Curriculum
Clarisa Bercovich-Guelman, San Diego State University
Constructing Ideas in Physical Science (CIPS) is a standards-based, yearlong physical science course for middle school students. In this curriculum students construct a meaningful understanding of science concepts through hands-on experiences followed by guided questions that help them make sense of the experiment. These questions are answered in small groups and then discussed with the whole class.
The literature suggests teachers’ implementation of reform-based curricula is influenced by teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning. Therefore, as a first step in designing our professional development package we tried to understand how our materials (even though highly structured/scripted) could be transformed by teachers with different theoretical perspectives on learning and teaching. This information could then be used to guide the kind of professional development support provided to the teachers during their implementation. In our one-year study, we found through classroom observations and interviews that teachers have difficulties in dealing with students’ alternative ideas. Teachers don’t try to help students confront conflicting views by referring them back to experimental evidence. The most common strategy was to expose the student to the right idea without discussing the evidence. The main reason for this behavior is a lack of deep understanding of what it really means for students to construct knowledge.
Seeing the Forest and the
Trees: Multiple Facets of Instructional Materials Implementation in an Urban
District
Jennifer L. Cartier, Jeanetta Lee, Wendy Sink, Tingho Huang, and Linda
Messineo, University of Pittsburgh
This poster describes the results of a two-year study of instructional materials implementation in a large urban school district. It also describes the theoretical framework underlying the study and two research instruments developed throughout the course of our work: One is a classroom observation tool for documenting teachers’ practices and the other is a software tool for analyzing instructional materials. Both are based upon the BITT (Big Ideas, Tools, and Talk) framework undergirding the study.
In our study, we utilized an iterative professional design context (Cobb et al., 2003) to strengthen the science teaching practices of a group of urban public school teachers in a district that recently adopted the Full Option Science System (FOSS) kit-based program. Specifically, we asked whether the project professional development experiences enabled teachers to (1) use and/or adapt instructional materials to teach "big ideas" (or key conceptual models) in science and (2) develop classroom contexts where students used a variety of tools (e.g., representations, three-dimensional objects, etc.) and engaged in talk about data and explanations as a means of developing understanding in science. We found that the CMI approach was a successful professional development intervention in that teachers adopted core aspects of the BITT model in their instruction. Specifically, once supported to identify the big ideas underlying instructional units, teachers regularly used these concepts to frame hands-on tasks and guide discussion. They also readily incorporated representational tools into their instruction (both tools provided by FOSS and ones they created themselves). However, we noted the important ways in which teachers’ underlying beliefs about their students (likely mediated by their professional identities and school contexts) constrained them when implementing the most sophisticated aspects of BITT, namely the support of student talk. Using contrastive case studies, we argue that, without a belief in the robustness of students’ life experiences, teachers will not provide opportunities for them to construct understanding of big ideas through exploration of phenomena and connection to prior knowledge. Rather, they will leverage tasks and tools to tell students what the big ideas are. This approach is contrary to the underlying commitments of most reform materials designers.
Our study may have broad implications for districts attempting to adopt reform materials. Specifically, professional development opportunities that accompany the implementation of such materials should include explicit opportunities for teachers to recognize and come to value the prior knowledge and experiences of their students. Districts also need to acknowledge that school contexts themselves can contribute to or detract from efforts to implement materials and they need to take seriously their responsibility for creating respectful, empowering contexts for teachers’ professional practice.
Students' Discussions of
Data: Affordances and Constraints of First and Secondhand Experiences
Barbara Hug, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kate McNeill,
University of Michigan
Students develop scientific knowledge by actively engaging in scientific ways of knowing, such as asking questions, designing experiments, and analyzing data. Recent research literature and national standards call for students to engage in scientific inquiry practices, such as designing investigations and analyzing data. Yet scientific inquiry practices have been shown to be challenging for students.
We present initial findings regarding how students discuss and interpret data and whether these actions vary depending on the type of data they are using. More specifically, we are interested in examining potential differences between first and secondhand data. Implications of the finds are discussed in regard to the use of first and secondhand experiences in the design of curriculum materials and student learning.
Diverse Students’ Achievement
and Perceptions of an Inquiry-Based Earth Systems Curriculum
Julie Lambert, Florida Atlantic University
As part of a longitudinal intervention that focuses on increasing science and English literacy achievement among diverse elementary student groups, this study examined changes in fifth grade students’ achievement and their perceptions of an inquiry-based earth systems curriculum. The study involved all 700 fifth grade students at six elementary schools in a large urban school district. Changes in students’ performance on an earth systems unit test and a sample of NAEP and TIMSS items were analyzed. At the end of the school year, all schools showed statistically significant improvements on both assessments. Analysis of an open-ended student questionnaire indicates that students were more confident and had more positive perceptions of learning science. Students’ perspectives regarding the different domains of the intervention are discussed, as are implications of the findings and recommendations for future research.
Curriculum Development, Modification,
or Implementation: Varied Entry Points for Teachers in Their Journey Toward
Model-Based Instruction
Cynthia Passmore, University of California, Davis
Providing opportunities for students to reason like scientists—develop, apply, and revise models that account for natural phenomena—is a complex undertaking and one that requires teachers to make significant changes in their practice. Appropriate entry points for teachers into this type of curricular change can vary depending on content background and pedagogical orientation. This poster explores a framework for providing such varied entry points for teachers and examines how teachers might move along the continuum from curriculum implementation to modification and then to curriculum development.
Using Benchmarks for
Science Literacy and Project 2061’s Criteria to Inform the Development
of a Curricular Unit on Evolution
Luli Stern, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
Two essential ideas are brought forth by the evolution theory. The first is the idea that the proportion of individuals that have advantageous characteristics increases in populations through the mechanism of natural selection. The second is the idea that the millions of different organisms that live on earth today (and those that became extinct) are related by descent from common ancestors. While many studies in the past three decades have focused on the learning and teaching of natural selection, very few studies attempted to explore students’ ideas related to common descent or to evaluate the effectiveness of relevant curricular interventions. In this study, high school students’ ideas (N=231) related to common descent and speciation were characterized using a diagnostic questionnaire, validated through three cycles of research and development.
Our findings, together with findings from previous studies and the Project 2061 analytical criteria, served to inform the development of a curricular unit on evolution. Benchmarks and national standards provided further guidance for the development by providing learning goals on which to focus the instruction. The unit was tried with 53 grade 10 students in the north of Israel. Our findings show that following instruction more than 70% of the students improved their understanding of natural selection and more than 50% improved their understanding of the idea of common descent. This was evident in students’ responses to familiar and novel questions. Moreover, most students expressed positive sentiments following the learning experience—both towards the instructional strategies and the topic of evolution.
Exploring How Configurations
of Students, Teachers, and Materials Can Foster Agency in the Science Classroom
Iris Tabak, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and William Sandoval,
UCLA
This poster presents a comparative analysis of two teachers’ enactment of the same 5-week introductory high school biology unit on evolution. A microethnographic analysis of the two enactments revealed gross differences in inquiry activities but striking similarities in more traditional “dry-lab” activities. This prompted finer-grain content and discourse analyses of the similar activities. The poster presents results from these analyses and discusses implications concerning the ways in which teachers’ discourse moves and materials design interact to promote or inhibit student agency.
