Funneling Versus Focusing: When Talk, Tasks, and Tools Work Together to Support Students’ Collective Sensemaking

Rigorous and responsive science teaching is based on supporting all students in making progress in their understanding of important science ideas over time. In this article, we explore how did classroom talk patterns of funneling and focusing support student sensemaking. We share how talk, tasks, and tools within classroom activity work together to either funnel students toward reproducing normative scientific answers or focus students on deepening their understanding about unobservable causal mechanisms of phenomena. We use classroom examples from two science lessons where students used data to describe and communicate about how and why stars change over time. By recognizing these funneling and focusing patterns in classroom activity, teachers can attend to and modify the talk, tasks, and tools to improve and support opportunities for students’ sensemaking about important science ideas while they make progress on revising their own ideas over time

Problems without Ceilings: How Mentors and Novices Frame and Work on Problems-of-Practice

Support for new forms of teaching expertise with rigorous and equitable outcomes for student learning is a particular challenge when communities of actors working together do not share a similar language or vision of teaching practice. For this project we coordinated activities in and outside of secondary science classrooms for Cooperating Teachers (CTs) and their Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs) to inquire into a set of research-based teaching practices and tools. Using frame analysis we contrast three problems of practice addressed by 23 dyads: problems of developing novice teachers, problems of improving teaching, and problems of improving student learning. The last frame, improving student learning, required actors to share and cocreate knowledge with members outside of their dyads. To do this, groups of dyads formed new or repurposed existing social networks to share tools and work on problems “without ceilings,” meaning those that fueled on-going lines of inquiry. We describe ways in which knowledge became shared, actors assumed new roles, and new types of tools, activities, and forms of discourse emerged for contextualizing collective work. This study suggests a need for a systems-level approach to teacher education that focuses on institutional networks of shared tools, practices, and deliberate socio-professional routines for improving practice

Drawings as Diagnostic Cues for Metacomprehension Judgment

The accuracy of comprehension monitoring affects the effectiveness of rereading, which in turn affects comprehension. Thus, much research has focused on finding ways to improve monitoring accuracy. The cue-utilization framework of metacognitive monitoring provides a framework for understanding how to improve monitoring accuracy. It suggests that accuracy is driven by cues people use to judge comprehension. When people utilize cues that are highly diagnostic of performance on a test of comprehension, accuracy should improve. Many interventions that have been shown to improve monitoring accuracy have attributed the improved accuracy to increased access to highly diagnostic cues, but have failed to identify highly diagnostic cues. In our recent research, we found that instructing students to generate drawings before judging comprehension improved monitoring accuracy. Using graphic analyses protocol, we identified highly diagnostic cues. In this chapter, we will describe the procedure we used to identify these cues contained in drawings

Rigor and Responsiveness in Classroom Activity

Background/Context: There are few examples from classrooms or the literature that provide a clear vision of teaching that simultaneously promotes rigorous disciplinary activity and is responsive to all students. Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom. Focus of Study: What does highly rigorous and responsive talk sound like and how is this dialogue embedded in the social practices and activities of classrooms? Our aim was to examine student and teacher interactions in classroom episodes (warm-ups, small group conversations, whole group conversation, etc.) and contribute to a growing body of research that specifies equity in classroom practice. Research Design: This mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small group conversations, whole group conversation, etc.) that elevated, or failed to elevate, students’ explanatory rigor in equitable ways. Data include 222 secondary science lessons (1,174 episodes) from 37 novice teachers. Lessons were videotaped and analyzed for the depth of students’ explanatory talk and the quality of responsive dialogue. Findings: The findings support three statistical claims. First, high levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements. Second, the architecture of a lesson matters. Teachers and students engaging in highly rigorous and responsive lessons turned potentially trivial episodes (such as warm-ups) of science activity into robust learning experiences, connected to other episodes in the same lesson. Third, episodes featuring one or more forms of responsive talk elevated rigor. There were three forms of responsive talk observed in classrooms: building on students’ science ideas, attending to students’ participation in the learning community, and folding in students’ lived experiences. Small but strategic moves within these forms were consequential for supporting rigor. Conclusions/Recommendations: This paper challenges the notion that rigor and responsiveness are attributes of curricula or individual teachers. Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences; the interactions within the classroom are essential for sustaining the highest quality of scientific practice and sense-making. The data supported the development of a framework that articulates incremental differences in supporting students’ explanatory rigor and three dimensions of responsiveness. We describe implications for using this framework in the design of teacher programs and professional development models

Characteristics of US-Based STEM Webcams \u3cem\u3eat a Glance\u3c/em\u3e

STEM organizations operate thousands of publicly available webcams, which have the potential to provide rich informal learning opportunities. To date, no research has analyzed the breadth of STEM webcams. In our study, we developed an inventory by performing internet searches for US-based STEM webcams and recorded operator name, organization type, webcam subject, etc. This inventory serves as the basis for a follow-up survey of webcam operators, which seeks to better understand the goals, outcomes, and investments of STEM webcam programs. We characterized nearly 1000 webcams that fit within our inclusion criteria. The majority of the cams fell within the life sciences or geosciences. Of the animal webcams, mammals (60%) and birds (23%) were strongly represented in contrast to reptiles (2%) and insects (4%). Within the mammal subjects, tigers, elephants, otters, and giraffes were most common (5-7% each). Within the 23 different bird webcam subjects, penguins (30%) and osprey (20%) were most common. Other studies have shown the over-representation of charismatic animals (e.g., elephants, giraffes, tigers, bears) in zoos, and our study suggests that webcams may amplify this phenomenon. Further, these preliminary results suggest that life sciences topics dominate STEM webcams, leaving potential for other visually engaging fields to participate

Stakeholder Roles in an Action-Oriented Science Space

This study operationalized design principles based on using students’ assets as resources, critiquing and expanding canonical knowledge, and using science to engage in transformative action to explore the research question of what roles stakeholders took on when action-oriented science was jointly negotiated in an afterschool science club. Teaching and learning in this science space required roles to be dynamic and responsive to the unique needs found in action-oriented science. As students learned about the toxic lake and ways to clean it up in an afterschool science club called MARS, stakeholder roles had to quickly shift to address the in-the-moment questions, stories, and uncharted science knowledge. Shifting stakeholder roles centered on the collective goal of the need for a deep understanding of the science behind the lake toxicity and the desire to help the extended community learn ways that they could help the lake’s future. This common goal bonded the stakeholders and focused conversations as they shared ideas, employed these ideas, and ultimately shared understandings and actions with the extended community

Using Science to Take a Stand: Action-Oriented Learning in an Afterschool Science Club

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2015This dissertation study investigates what happens when students participate in an afterschool science club designed around action-oriented science instruction, a set of curriculum design principles based on social justice pedagogy. Comprised of three manuscripts written for journal publication, the dissertation includes 1) Negotiating community-based action-oriented science teaching and learning: Articulating curriculum design principles, 2) Middle school girls’ socio-scientific participation pathways in an afterschool science club, and 3) Laughing and learning together: Productive science learning spaces for middle school girls. By investigating how action-oriented science design principles get negotiated, female identity development in and with science, and the role of everyday social interactions as students do productive science, this research fills gaps in the understanding of how social justice pedagogy gets enacted and negotiated among multiple stakeholders including students, teachers, and community members along what identity development looks like across social and scientific activity. This study will be of interest to educators thinking about how to enact social justice pedagogy in science learning spaces and those interested in identity development in science

Unpacking ?Signs of Learning? In Complex Social Environments: Desettling Neoliberal Market-Driven Educational Methodologies, Epistemologies and Recognitions of Learning

This structured poster session examines the design and study of meaning making in and across multimodal contexts, exploring how recognition of new signs of learning, in new ways, might enter into the reconfiguration of educational practices and institutions. We expand on recent work in the learning sciences that challenges prevailing power structures and the ways that they are produced by existing ways of recognizing learning. The presentations build on the work of sociocultural and semiotic theories to challenge current neoliberal ideals about what counts as knowing, learning, and becoming, as well as who can come to know

Supporting Student Success by Embedding Personal Narratives in Engineering Courses

Student persistence in STEM programs is linked to student sense of belonging and identification with their major or profession. Lack of professional identification and lack of belonging exacerbate departures of Black, Latinx, Native, and Female students from STEM programs, for whom exclusionary department cultures and biased policies have amplified impact. This workshop provides an overview of the science and craft of storytelling which has been developed with The Story Collider

Lay of the Land: Professional Identity in Our Student Body

This poster will analyze the professional identity of students in the College of Engineering at Boise State University. Beginning with an initial study of third year Materials Science students in partnership with the Story Collider podcast, it was observed that students better related to their degree after writing and sharing a personal story relating to materials science. The Story Collider shares true stories about science and does so through live shows, their weekly podcast, and workshops. In this next stage of the study, the analysis of engineering professional identity is being expanded to all majors in the College of Engineering. In this work we describe the design and preliminary results from our new survey instrument, created to understand student professional identities through the lenses of recognition, subject interest, confidence, their definition of an “engineer”, and demographic aspects as well. We describe patterns of challenges and successes in developing personal stories that have arisen across four years of storytelling workshops with engineering students and faculty. This study will also analyze the impact of storytelling assignments in a population of second-year Mechanical Engineering students and will explain how storytelling impacted different aspects of their professional identity