Within the science education reform movement, there have been long standing calls initiated to attend to equity in the science classroom. These calls are sought to de-settle and advance the broad strokes of “equity for all” into deeper, more meaningful actions, considering the way we view equity and how equitable practices unfold in the classroom. Productive science discourse or productive science talk is just one instructional practice used and discussed which leverages students as sensemakers. This study seeks to better understand productive science talk as a practice of equitation instruction. In examining Ms. Savannah’s practice, a high school biology teacher, two major findings emerged around the use of productive talk: (1) pattern of moves to leverage student ideas and (2) timing of moves to stimulate interest or motivation. These talk moves and timing gave insight into talk as both having the ability to hinder and foster student ideas and provide an initial “on-ramp” for students’ voice to be heard, taken up and have accountability in the classroom. This work continues to sustain a call toward attention to equity and a need to evaluate the equity-aligned practices that are fore-fronted in PDs and workshops.
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Examining interactions between collaborative professional development, science, teachers’ knowledge, and students’ reasoning
Recent educational reforms conceptualize science classrooms as spaces where students engage in Science-as-Practice to develop deep understandings of scientific phenomena. When students engage in Science-as-Practice they are constructing explanations, arguing from evidence, and evaluating and communicating information to develop scientific knowledge (NGSS Lead States, 2013). This process of learning requires a focus on productive science talk in which students grapple with and socially negotiate their ideas (Kelly, 2014) through interactions involving talk, joint attention, and shared activity aimed at building, negotiating, and refining new understandings of phenomena and relevant science concepts (Ford, 2015; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012). Productive talk requires the ‘nimble’ involvement of the teacher to help students productively contribute their ideas to the class and use them as resources to drive instructional activities supporting the development and refinement of more sophisticated scientific understandings (Christodoulou & Osborne, 2014; González‐Howard & McNeill, 2020).
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- Award ID(s):
- 1720587
- PAR ID:
- 10422118
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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
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Abstract Both professional and classroom‐based scientific communities develop and test explanatory models of the natural world. For students to take up models as tools for sensemaking, practice must be agentive (where students use and revise models
for specific purposes) and conceptually productive (where students make progress on their ideas). In this paper, we explore principles to support agentive and conceptually productive modeling. One is that models can “do work”; that is, participate in students' sensemaking by offering resources, making gaps visible, or pushing back on modelers' understandings. A second is that working across, and seeking to align, multiple models—what we explain asinterlocking models—supports models to do work. A third is that modeling activity can support fine‐grained conceptual progress. We detail how we used these ideas to guide and refine the design of a fifth‐grade investigation into the conservation of matter across phase change. We identify four ways that models participated in students' sensemaking as they interlocked: by providingcontradictions ,constraints ,representational surplus , andgaps for students to engage with. We discuss how designing for models to be co‐participants in sense‐making and to interlock can provide productive paths forward for curriculum designers, researchers, and teachers. -
Science Education has transitioned to science proficiency-- students are to gain the ability to engage in sense making about the natural world (National Research Council [NRC, 2012])--learning to “figure things out” (Passmore, 2014). One emerging area of focus is the emotional work students participate in during science sense making. There is growing recognition that these emotions are not just unnecessary by-products of scientific work, but rather they are part-and-parcel of doing science, as these emotions are part of what “instigates and stabilizes disciplinary engagement” in scientific pursuits (Jaber & Hammer, 2016b, p. 189). The research question that guided this study is: What is the teacher's role in reframing moments of epistemic vexation, so students experience productive meta-affect in the science classroom? After reviewing video footage and student and teacher interviews, three themes emerged: (1) Without reframing from the teacher during moments of epistemic vexation, students disengage from sense-making, (2) Productive meta-affect is more likely to occur when students understand why the teacher allows for failure to connect ideas or understand scientific concepts, and (3) When the teacher does not reframe moments of epistemic vexation, students build solidarity and reach out to each other for emotional support in developing productive meta-affect.more » « less
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