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Objectives:Interest plays a central role in learning by shaping what, how, when, where, and why learning occurs. In data science education, where complex concepts, lived experiences, and practical skills intersect, capturing and cultivating student interest can be especially generative. This work explores approaches for designing and evaluating interest-driven data science instructional materials.Methods:This paper presents a participatory design study that informs the development of a data science curriculum for high school students. To assess how well learner interests and values are reflected in the resulting curriculum, we used the Integrated Interest Development for Computing Education Framework [56], which provides a concrete operationalization of interest that captures its multifaceted nature.Findings:The paper demonstrates and discusses how participatory design can be used to identify students’ interests and how those interests can be used to inform the creation of an interest-driven curriculum. Further, it highlights how different types of participatory design activities yield insight into different facets of students’ interests and identities, which can then be used to design learning experiences. This work shows how the resulting PD reflects and harnesses the multifaceted nature of student interest and how it can be leveraged to design learning experiences that connect with learners’ lived digital experiences.Conclusions:Participatory design is an effective student-centered approach for tailoring computational learning experiences aligned to students’ voices, values, and interests. The use of various participatory design activities revealed different facets of students’ interests that informed the creation of an interest-driven curriculum that could not have been created without the input of the students themselves.
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Examining Science Teachers’ Conceptions of Student Interest as a Consideration in Designing Assessments
A key goal of science education articulated in A Framework for K-12 Science Education is to create opportunities for students to answer questions about the world that connect to their interests, experiences, and identities. Interest can be seen as a malleable relationship between a person and object (such a phenomenon students might study). In this paper, we analyzed data from a design study of an online course focused on preparing 11 secondary teachers to design three-dimensional tasks that align to the Next Generation Science Standards and that connect to students’ interests. Our data sources were teachers’ descriptions of their design decisions about what phenomena to use to anchor assessment, designed assessment tasks, and interviews with them about those decisions. We found that interest was an important consideration for assessment design, but they considered student interests in different ways. Some teachers shifted their views of what it meant to engage student interests in the context of assessment design over the course of their participation in professional learning. Most teachers made decisions about what they believed their students were interested in based on their knowledge of students or beliefs about their students’ interests. In supporting teachers to design summative assessments that link to students’ interest, it is critical to assume teachers bring a range of conceptions of interest, and to consider the feasibility and utility of task design tools from teachers’ point of view.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2010086
- PAR ID:
- 10599768
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor and Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Science Teacher Education
- ISSN:
- 1046-560X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 21
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- assessment design NGSS interest secondary science
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2024.2435747
