- Award ID(s):
- 1721000
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10099601
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IDC '19
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 642 to 647
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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With the urgent call for supporting science teachers to promote equity and justice through their daily work of teaching, there is a growing need for better understanding how science teachers come to engage in transformative teaching and learning that is equitably consequential. In this participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we created a professional learning context in which high school chemistry teachers engaged in a pedagogical imagining (Gutiérrez & Calabese Barton, 2015) by leveraging their teaching experiences, knowledge about students and communities, values, and concerns to create powerful learning contexts for Latinx and multilingual students from immigrant, low-income families. Drawing upon the perspective of learning as making and sharing of the world interwoven with making and sharing of selves (Warren et al, 2020), we analyzed teachers’ participations and discourses to examine teachers’ making and sharing that were equitably consequential. The findings illustrated three critical moments of teachers’ making and sharing where: (a) the teachers collectively developed shared pedagogical goals toward transformative learning while formulating agency, (b) the teachers and the researchers came to design a creative stoichiometry unit where students use chemistry to make their community better, and (c) the teachers came to be committed to being ‘intentional’ in their relational work to create a welcoming and safe learning environment using concrete pedagogical strategies. The analyses point out three design features of the professional learning context that were associated with the teachers’ consequential makings: (a) the use of a conceptual tool (i.e., ‘design principles’), (b) the power of “what if” discourses, and (c) creating a space for collective learning. Recommendations for designing professional learning context toward transformative teaching and learning are discussed.more » « less
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Abstract Background Elementary educators are increasingly asked to teach engineering design, motivating study of how they learn to teach this discipline. In particular, there is a need to examine how teachers reason about pedagogical situations and dilemmas in engineering—how they draw on their disciplinary understandings, attention to students' thinking, and pedagogical practices to support students' learning.
Purpose/Hypothesis The purpose of our qualitative study was to examine elementary teachers' pedagogical reasoning in an online graduate program. We asked: What stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? How do these stances shift over the course of the program?
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Results Alma shifted in her reasoning about teaching the design process, from treating it as linear, discrete steps to recognizing the dynamic, overlapping nature of design practices. Similarly, Margaret shifted in how she reasoned about failure and iteration, recognizing the need to help students analyze unexpected design performances to learn from and iterate on their designs. For both teachers, these shifts were dynamic and nonlinear, reflecting both context‐sensitivity and growing stability in their reasoning.
Conclusions Engineering teacher educators should provide opportunities for teachers to reason about the specific pedagogical dilemmas in engineering and consider how teachers integrate disciplinary understandings with attention to students' reasoning and actions and pedagogical practices.
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Abstract This exploratory paper highlights how problem‐based learning (PBL) provided the pedagogical framework used to design and interpret learning analytics from C
rystal Island: EcoJourneys , a collaborative game‐based learning environment centred on supporting science inquiry. In Crystal Island: EcoJourneys , students work in teams of four, investigate the problem individually and then utilize a brainstorming board, an in‐game PBL whiteboard that structured the collaborative inquiry process. The paper addresses a central question: how can PBL support the interpretation of the observed patterns in individual actions and collaborative interactions in the collaborative game‐based learning environment? Drawing on a mixed method approach, we first analyzed students' pre‐ and post‐test results to determine if there were learning gains. We then used principal component analysis (PCA) to describe the patterns in game interaction data and clustered students based on the PCA. Based on the pre‐ and post‐test results and PCA clusters, we used interaction analysis to understand how collaborative interactions unfolded across selected groups. Results showed that students learned the targeted content after engaging with the game‐based learning environment. Clusters based on the PCA revealed four main ways of engaging in the game‐based learning environment: students engaged in low to moderate self‐directed actions with (1) high and (2) moderate collaborative sense‐making actions, (3) low self‐directed with low collaborative sense‐making actions and (4) high self‐directed actions with low collaborative sense‐making actions. Qualitative interaction analysis revealed that a key difference among four groups in each cluster was the nature of verbal student discourse: students in the low to moderate self‐directed and high collaborative sense‐making cluster actively initiated discussions and integrated information they learned to the problem, whereas students in the other clusters required more support. These findings have implications for designing adaptive support that responds to students' interactions with in‐game activities.Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic
Learning analytic methods have been effective for understanding student learning interactions for the purposes of assessment, profiling student behaviour and the effectiveness of interventions.
However, the interpretation of analytics from these diverse data sets are not always grounded in theory and challenges of interpreting student data are further compounded in collaborative inquiry settings, where students work in groups to solve a problem.
What this paper adds
Problem‐based learning as a pedagogical framework allowed for the design to focus on individual and collaborative actions in a game‐based learning environment and, in turn, informed the interpretation of game‐based analytics as it relates to student's self‐directed learning in their individual investigations and collaborative inquiry discussions.
The combination of principal component analysis and qualitative interaction analysis was critical in understanding the nuances of student collaborative inquiry.
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Self‐directed actions in individual investigations are critical steps to collaborative inquiry. However, students may need to be encouraged to engage in these actions.
Clustering student data can inform which scaffolds can be delivered to support both self‐directed learning and collaborative inquiry interactions.
All students can engage in knowledge‐integration discourse, but some students may need more direct support from teachers to achieve this.
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