Promover la educación científica a través de las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC)

La educación científica debe preparar a los estudiantes para analizar y evaluar los avances tecnológicos, desde el láser al genoma humano. A fin de planificar el cuidado de la propia salud o elegir una nueva residencia, los ciudadanos deben evaluar alternativas que reflejan avances tecnológicos. A medida que la ciencia y la tecnología avanzan, los ciudadanos necesitan desarrollar la capacidad de responder a nuevas alternativas y de criticar mensajes persuasivos sobre muchas cosas, desde medicamentos hasta materiales de construcción. El Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) ayuda a los estudiantes y diseñadores de currículo que buscan alcanzar estos objetivos. A medida que experimentamos con programas educativos para alcanzar estos objetivos, nos beneficiamos de la colaboración internacional y de la comunicación. Cuanto más podamos aprender los unos de los otros, más puede mejorar nuestra educación científica.Science education must prepare students to analyze and assess advances in technology from lasers to the human genome. To plan one's health care or select a new residence, citizens must evaluate alternatives that reflect technological advances. As science and technology advance, citizens need the ability to respond to new alternatives and to criticize persuasive messages about everything from drugs to building materials. The Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) supports students and curriculum designers who seek to achieve these goals. As we experiment with educational programs to meet these goals we benefit from international collaborations and communication. The more we can learn from each other the better our science education can become

Lifelong science learning: A longitudinal case study

How do students link school and personal experiences to develop a useful account of complex science topics? Can science courses provide a firm foundation for lifelong science learning? To answer these questions we analyze how "Pat" integrates and differentiates ideas and develops models to explain complex, personally-relevant experience with thermal phenomena. We examine Pat's process of conceptual change during an 8th grade science class where a heat flow model of thermal events is introduced as well as after studying biology in ninth grade and after studying chemistry in the 11th grade. Pat regularly links new ideas from science class and personal experience to explain topics like insulation and conduction or thermal equilibrium. Thus Pat links experience with home insulation to experiments using wool as an insulator. This linkage leads Pat to consider "air pockets" as a factor in insulation and to distinguish insulators (with air pockets) from metal conductors that "attract heat." These linkages help Pat construct a heat flow account of thermal events and connect it to the microscopic model introduced in chemistry. Pat's process of conceptual change demonstrates how longitudinal case studies contribute to the understanding of conceptual development. Future work will synthesize the conceptual change process of all 40 students we have studied longitudinally

Supporting Teachers to Customize Curriculum for Self-Directed Learning

Guiding teachers to customize curriculum has shown to improve science instruction when guided effectively. We explore how teachers use student data to customize a web-based science unit on plate tectonics. We study the implications for teacher learning along with the impact on student self-directed learning. During a professional development workshop, four 7th grade teachers reviewed logs of their students’ explanations and revisions. They used a curriculum visualization tool that revealed the pedagogy behind the unit to plan their customizations. To promote self-directed learning, the teachers decided to customize the guidance for explanation revision by giving students a choice among guidance options. They took advantage of the web-based unit to randomly assign students (N = 479) to either a guidance Choice or a no-choice condition. We analyzed logged student explanation revisions on embedded and pre-test/post-test assessments and teacher and student written reflections and interviews. Students in the guidance Choice condition reported that the guidance was more useful than those in the no-choice condition and made more progress on their revisions. Teachers valued the opportunity to review student work, use the visualization tool to align their customization with the knowledge integration pedagogy, and investigate the choice option empirically. These findings suggest that the teachers’ decision to offer choice among guidance options promoted aspects of self-directed learning

Comparing Expert and ChatGPT-authored Guidance Prompts

Students bring a multitude of ideas and experiences to the classroom while they are reasoning about scientific phenomena. They often need timely guidance to refine build upon their initial ideas. In this study we explore the development of guidance prompts to provide students with personalized, real-time feedback in the context of a pedagogically grounded chatbot. In the current version of the tool, guidance prompts are authored by learning scientists who are experts in the content of the items and in Knowledge Integration pedagogy. When students engage with the chatbot, an idea detection model is used to determine the ideas that are present in a student explanation and then the expert-authored guidance prompts are assigned based on rules about which ideas are or are not present in the student explanation. While this approach allows for close attention to and control of the pedagogical intent of each prompt, it is time consuming and not easily generalizable. Further this rule-based approach limits the ways in which students can interact with the chatbot. The work in progress study presented in this paper explores the potential of using generative AI to create similarly pedagogically grounded guidance prompts as a first step towards increasing the generalizability and scalability of this approach. Specifically, we ask: using criteria from the Knowledge Integration Pedagogical Framework, how do ChatGPT 3.5-authored guidance prompts compare to human expert-authored guidance prompts? We find that while prompt engineering can enhance the alignment of ChatGPT-authored guidance prompts with pedagogical criteria, the human expert-authored guidance prompts more consistently meet the pedagogical criteria

Comparing two forms of concept map critique activities to facilitate knowledge integration processes in evolution education

Concept map activities often lack a subsequent revision step that facilitates knowledge integration. This study compares two collaborative critique activities using a Knowledge Integration Map (KIM), a form of concept map. Four classes of high school biology students (n ‹ 81) using an online inquiry-based learning unit on evolution were assigned to one of two conditions. Student dyads in one condition compared their concept maps against an expert map while dyads in the other condition conducted a peer-review. Analysis of the concept maps suggests that students in both conditions improved their understanding of evolution from pretest to posttest. However, the two conditions lead to different criteria: Students in the expert-map condition focused mostly on concept-focused criteria like concept classi®cation while students in the peer-review condition used more link-focused criteria like link labels and missing connections. This paper suggests that both forms of KIM critique activities can be bene®cial for constructing more coherent connections across different topics in evolution education. These results support the value of collaborative KIM critique activities and help clarify the forms of collaborative activities that are most likely to be effective to facilitate knowledge integration processes

Understanding Users’ Capability to Transfer Information between Mixed and Virtual Reality: Position Estimation across Modalities and Perspectives

International audienceMixed Reality systems combine physical and digital worlds, with great potential for the future of HCI. It is possible to design systems that support flexible degrees of virtuality by combining complementary technologies. In order for such systems to succeed, users must be able to create unified mental models out of heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we present two studies focusing on the users' accuracy on heterogeneous systems using Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) displays, and combining viewpoints (egocentric and exocentric). The results show robust estimation capabilities across conditions and viewpoints