Confrustion, a mix of confusion and frustration sometimes experienced while grappling with instructional materials, is not necessarily detrimental to learning. Prior research has shown that studying erroneous examples can increase students’ experiences of confrustion, while at the same time helping them learn and overcome their misconceptions. In the study reported in this paper, we examined students’ knowledge and misconceptions about decimal numbers before and after they interacted with an intelligent tutoring system presenting either erroneous examples targeting misconceptions (erroneous example condition) or practice problems targeting the same misconceptions (problem-solving condition). While students in both conditions significantly improved their performance from pretest to posttest, students in the problem-solving condition improved significantly more and experienced significantly less confrustion. When controlling for confrustion levels, there were no differences in performance. This study is interesting in that, unlike prior studies, the higher confrustion that resulted from studying erroneous examples was not associated with better learning outcomes; instead, it was associated with poorer learning. We propose several possible explanations for this different outcome and hypothesize that revisions to the explanation prompts to make them more expert-like may have also made them – and the erroneous examples that they targeted – less understandable and less effective. Whether prompted self-explanation options should be modeled after the shorter, less precise language students tend to use or the longer, more precise language of experts is an open question, and an important one both for understanding the mechanisms of self-explanation and for designing self-explanation options deployed in instructional materials.
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Enhancing student explanations of evolution: Comparing elaborating and competing theory prompts
In this study, we explore how two different prompt types within an online computer‐based inquiry learning environment enhance 392 7th grade students’ explanations of evolution with three teachers. In the
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10239466
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Research in Science Teaching
- Volume:
- 53
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0022-4308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1341-1363
- Size(s):
- ["p. 1341-1363"]
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Confrustion, a mix of confusion and frustration sometimes experienced while grappling with instructional materials, is not necessarily detrimental to learning. Prior research has shown that studying erroneous examples can increase students’ experiences of confrustion, while at the same time helping them learn and overcome their misconceptions. In the study reported in this paper, we examined students’ knowledge and misconceptions about decimal numbers before and after they interacted with an intelligent tutoring system presenting either erroneous examples targeting misconceptions (erroneous example condition) or practice problems targeting the same misconceptions (problem-solving condition). While students in both conditions significantly improved their performance from pretest to posttest, students in the problem-solving condition improved significantly more and experienced significantly less confrustion. When controlling for confrustion levels, there were no differences in performance. This study is interesting in that, unlike prior studies, the higher confrustion that resulted from studying erroneous examples was not associated with better learning outcomes; instead, it was associated with poorer learning. We propose several possible explanations for this different outcome and hypothesize that revisions to the explanation prompts to make them more expert-like may have also made them – and the erroneous examples that they targeted – less understandable and less effective. Whether prompted self-explanation options should be modeled after the shorter, less precise language students tend to use or the longer, more precise language of experts is an open question, and an important one both for understanding the mechanisms of self-explanation and for designing self-explanation options deployed in instructional materials.more » « less
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Abstract Background As engineering becomes increasingly incorporated into precollege classrooms, it is important to explore students' ability to engage in engineering practices. One of these practices,
engaging in argument from evidence , has been well studied in science education. However, it has not yet been fully explored in engineering education.Purpose This study aims to identify the classroom situations that prompt students to justify their engineering design ideas and decisions. The following research question guided the study:
What initiates the need for fifth‐ to eighth‐grade students to use evidence‐based reasoning (EBR) while they are generating solutions to engineering design problems in engineering design‐based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) integration units? Methods Within the naturalistic inquiry methodology, we analyzed student team audio recordings from the implementation of seven different engineering design‐based STEM integration curricula across three school districts to identify instances of EBR and categorize the situations that led to them.
Results This analysis produced seven categories of situations that prompted students to use EBR. Two of these categories,
responding to adult anddocumenting , were teacher‐prompted; students frequently justified their design ideas and decisions when talking with adults or responding to prompts on worksheets. The other five categories were student‐directed:negotiating ,correcting ,validating ,clarifying with team , andsharing . These categories occurred without direct prompts from adults or documents.Conclusions This study offers implications for teachers and curriculum developers about how to explicitly integrate scaffolds for EBR into design‐based curricula as well as what situations teachers can look for to observe student‐directed use of EBR.
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Abstract 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. -
Sharing ideas can strengthen students’ science explanations. Yet, how to guide uses of peers’ ideas, and what the impacts of those ideas are on students’ learning, are open questions. We implemented a web-based cell biology unit with 116 grade 7 students, and explored how peers’ ideas are used during explanation building, and how prompts to draw on peers to either diversify or reinforce existing ideas impacted the quality of students’ written explanations. Among other findings, exchanging ideas with peers led to all students improving their explanation quality upon revision; and students prompted to diversify their ideas showed greater learning gains by the end of the unit, while students prompted to reinforce ideas, who used more peer-generated ideas in preparation to write their explanations, produced higher quality explanations. This study builds our understanding of the influence of peer ideas on learning, and offers insight into supporting students in engaging effectively with peers’ ideas.more » « less
