skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 8:00 PM ET on Friday, March 21 until 8:00 AM ET on Saturday, March 22 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Assessing and applying students’ understanding of the scientific practices and crosscutting concepts
The Model-Evidence-Link (MEL) and build-a MEL (baMEL) tasks are designed to engage students in scientific practices, including argumentation and critical thinking. We designed a rubric for teachers to assess the various practices and skills students use while completing a MEL or baMEL, based on several NGSS Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) and Cross Cutting Concepts (CCCs). When applying this rubric, we suggest that teachers only focus on student performance with respect to one SEP or CCC each time they implement a MEL or baMEL. We also developed a transfer task to ascertain how well students are able to perform MEL-related thinking skills, such as identifying a scientific model and alternative (but non-scientific) models, lines of evidence, and plausibility of knowledge claims, in a grade appropriate scientific journal article. The near-transfer activity can help teachers gauge how well students apply their MEL/baMEL skills and can improve students’ scientific literacy.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2027376
PAR ID:
10282187
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The Earth scientist
Volume:
36
Issue:
3
ISSN:
1045-4772
Page Range / eLocation ID:
27-30
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ( , The Earth scientist)
    null (Ed.)
    It is a pleasure to present the second special issue of The Earth Scientist sponsored by the MEL Project team (https://serc.carleton.edu/mel/index.html)! The Model-Evidence Link (MEL) and MEL2 projects have been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 1316057, 1721041, and 2027376) to Temple University and the University of Maryland, in partnership with the University of North Georgia, TERC, and the Planetary Science Institute. In 2016 we shared with you the four MEL diagram activities, covering the topics of climate change, the formation of the Moon, fracking and earthquakes, and wetlands use, as well as a rubric for assessment. This issue brings to you our four new build-a-MEL activities on the origins of the Universe, fossils and Earth’s past, freshwater resources, and extreme weather. Additionally, there are articles about a new NGSS-aligned rubric and transfer task to help students apply their new skills in other situations and about teaching with MEL and build-a-MEL activities. Our goals with all of these activities are to help students learn Earth science content by engaging in scientific practices, notably the evaluation of alternative explanatory models (by looking at the connections between lines of evidence and the competing models) and argumentation. The team has tested these activities in multiple middle and high school classrooms. Our research has shown the activities to be effective in learning both content and skills, and our partner teachers report that students enjoy the activities. These activities are freely available for teachers to use. We hope that you and your students will also find them to be effective and enjoyable approaches to learning about complex and sometimes controversial socioscientific issues within Earth Science. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ( , Science Scope)
    Critical thinking skills are best taught as students participate in the scientific practice of argumentation. When engaged in scientific argumentation, students are expected to engage in active listening and social collaboration through the process of negotiation and consensus building. Socioscientific issues are ideally suited for such activities. Model-Evidence-Link (MEL) diagrams provide an ideal scaffold for helping students learn to build arguments that can help them make connections between evidence and scientific explanations. In these activities students compare competing models by making plausibility judgements, then comparing how well scientific evidence supports each model. In research-based activities, these scaffolds have been shown to help students better understand scientific concepts, to shift students’ plausibility judgments, and to provide insights into how students negotiate consensus through argumentation. In this article we share both the resources and instructional methods for including MEL diagrams in the middle school classroom. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , Science Education)
    Abstract

    Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever‐more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities are not innate and must, therefore, be taught (e.g., McNeill & Krajcik,Journal of Research in Science Teaching,45(1), 53–78. 2008). However, such instruction requires a fundamental shift in science pedagogy so as to foster knowledge and practices like deep, conceptual understanding, model‐based reasoning, and oral and written argumentation where scientific evidence is evaluated (National Research Council,Next Generation Science Standards: For States, by States, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013). The purpose of our quasi‐experimental study was to examine the effectiveness of Quality Talk Science, a professional development model and intervention, in fostering changes in teachers’ and students’ discourse practices as well as their conceptual understanding and scientific argumentation. Findings revealed treatment teachers’ and students’ discourse practices better reflected critical‐analytic thinking and argumentation at posttest relative to comparison classrooms. Similarly, at posttest treatment students produced stronger written scientific arguments than comparison students. Students’ growth in conceptual understanding was nonsignificant. These findings suggest discourse interventions such as Quality Talk Science can improve high‐school students’ ability to engage in scientific argumentation.

     
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ( , Astronomy Education Journal)

    Students often encounter alternative explanations about astronomical phenomena. However, inconsistent with astronomers’ practices, students may not be scientific, critical, and evaluative when comparing alternatives. Instructional scaffolds, such as the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagram, where students weigh connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanations, may help facilitate students’ scientific evaluation and deepen their learning about astronomy. Our research team has developed two forms of the MEL: (a) the preconstructed MEL (pcMEL), where students are given four lines of evidence and two alternative explanatory models about the formation of Earth’s Moon and (b) the build-a-MEL (baMEL), where students construct their own diagrams by choosing four lines scientific evidence out of eight choices and two alternative explanatory model out of three choices, about the origins of the Universe. The present study compared the more autonomy-supportive baMEL to the less autonomy-supportive pcMEL and found that both scaffolds shifted high school student and preservice teacher participants’ plausibility judgments toward a more scientific stance and increased their knowledge about the topics. Additional analyses revealed that the baMEL resulted in deeper evaluations and had stronger relations between levels of evaluation and post-instructional plausibility judgements and knowledge compared to the pcMEL. This present study, focused on astronomical topics, supports our team’s earlier research that scaffolds such as the MELs in combination with more autonomy-supportive classrooms may be one way to deepen students’ scientific thinking and increase their knowledge of complex scientific phenomena.

     
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ( , Teachers and Teaching)
    This paper examines how practicing teachers approach and evaluate students’ critical thinking processes in science, using the implementation of an online, inquiry-based investigation in middle school classrooms as the context for teachers’ observations. Feedback and ratings from three samples of science teachers were analysed to determine how they valued and evaluated component processes of students’ critical thinking and how such processes were related to their instructional approaches and student outcomes. Drawing from an integrated view of teacher practice, results suggested that practicing science teachers readily observed and valued critical thinking processes that aligned to goal intentions focused on domain content and successful student thinking. These processes often manifested as components of effective scientific reasoning—for example, gathering evidence, analysing data, evaluating ideas, and developing strong arguments. However, teachers also expressed avoidance intentions related to student confusion and uncertainty before and after inquiry-based investigations designed for critical thinking. These findings highlight a potential disconnect between the benefits of productive student struggle for critical thinking as endorsed in the research on learning and science education and the meaning that teachers ascribe to such struggle as they seek to align their instructional practices to classroom challenges. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email