skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

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


Title: BRIDGING FREQUENTIST AND CLASSICAL PROBABILITY THROUGH DESIGN
The frequentist and classical models of probability provide students with different lenses through which they can view probability. Prior research showed that students may bridge these two lenses through instructional designs that begin with a clear connection between the two, such as coin tossing. Considering that this connection is not always clear in our life experiences, we aimed to examine how an instructional design that begins with a scientific scenario that does not naturally connect to theoretical probability, such as the weather, may support students’ bridging of these two models. In this paper, we present data from a design experiment in a sixth-grade classroom to discuss how students’ shifts of reasoning as they engaged with such a design supported their construction of bridges between the two probability models.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1742125
PAR ID:
10383425
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Editor(s):
Lischka, A. E.; Dyer, E. B.; Jones, R. S.; Lovett, J. N..; Strayer, J.; Drown, S.
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. (, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)
    null (Ed.)
    Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking. 
    more » « less
  2. (, 2020 Marvalene Hughes Research in Education Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, Water)
    Socially-relevant and controversial topics, such as water issues, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public (herein, students) find plausible. Students need to be more evaluative of the validity of explanations (e.g., explanatory models) based on evidence when addressing such topics. We compared two activities where students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations. In one activity, students were given four evidence statements and two models (one scientific and one non-scientific alternative); in the other, students chose four out of eight evidence statements and three models (two scientific and one non-scientific). Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that both activities engaged students’ evaluations and differentially shifted students’ plausibility judgments and knowledge. A structural equation model suggested that students’ evaluation may influence post-instructional plausibility and knowledge; when students chose their lines of evidence and explanatory models, their evaluations were deeper, with stronger shifts toward a scientific stance and greater levels of post-instructional knowledge. The activities may help to develop students’ critical evaluation skills, a scientific practice that is key to understanding both scientific content and science as a process. Although effect sizes were modest, the results provided critical information for the final development and testing stage of these water resource instructional activities. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, Instructional Science)
    Most social challenges fall outside of the authority of any single individual and therefore require collective action—coordinated efforts by many stakeholders to implement solutions. Despite growing interest in teaching students to lead collective action, we lack models for how to teach these skills. Collective action ostensibly involves design: the act of planning to change existing situations into preferred ones. In other domains, instructors commonly scaffold design using an instructional model known as studio critique in which students strengthen their plans by exchanging arguments with peers and instructors. This study explores whether studio critique can serve as the basis for an effective instructional model in collective action. Using design-based research methods, we designed and implemented scoping deliberations, a new instructional model that augments studio critique with domain-specific templates for planning collective action and repeats weekly to enable iterations. We used process tracing to analyze data from field notes, video, and artifacts to evaluate causal explanations for events observed in this case study. By implementing scoping deliberations in a 10-week undergraduate course, we found that this model appeared effective at scaffolding engagement in planning collective action: students articulated and refined their plans by engaging in argumentation and iteration, as expected. However, students struggled to contact the community stakeholders with whom they planned to work. As a result, their plans rested on implausible, untested assertions. These findings advance instructional science by showing that collective action may require new instructional models that help students to test their assertions against feedback from community stakeholders. Practically, scoping deliberations appear most useful for scaffolding thoughtful planning in conditions when students are already collaborating with stakeholders. 
    more » « less
  5. ; (, Proceedings of the 47th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2).)
    Evans, Tanya; Marmur, Ofer; Hunter, Jodie; Leach, Generosa; Jhagroo, Jyoti (Ed.)
    Dialogic instructional videos feature authentic conversations of students as they engage in complex mathematical problems. Because these videos show students engaging in rich mathematical interactions students might use them as models for how they should engage in such interactions. In this study, we investigated how watching a dialogic video that showed two students creating pictures to illustrate mathematical relationships shaped what two pairs of students thought was necessary to include in their own pictures. We found that while the video the students watched did indeed shape what they thought was necessary to include in their pictures, the degree to which they felt they needed to mirror the pictures in the video varied considerably. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email