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1.
Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using qualitative graphs is a promising, but underexplored approach. In contrast to quantitative graphs, which can lead students to focus too narrowly on the mechanics of plotting points, qualitative graphs can encourage students to relate graphical representations to their conceptual meaning. Guided by the Knowledge Integration framework, which recognizes and guides students in integrating their diverse ideas about science, we incorporated qualitative graphing activities into a seventh grade web-based inquiry unit about cell division and cancer treatment. In Study 1, we characterized the kinds of graphs students generated in terms of their integration of graphical and scientific knowledge. We also found that students (n = 30) using the unit made significant learning gains based on their pretest to post-test scores. In Study 2, we compared students' performance in two versions of the same unit: One that had students construct, and second that had them critique qualitative graphs. Results showed that both activities had distinct benefits, and improved students' (n = 117) integrated understanding of graphs and science. Specifically, critiquing graphs helped students improve their scientific explanations within the unit, while constructing graphs led students to link key science ideas within both their in-unit and post-unit explanations. We discuss the relative affordances and constraints of critique and construction activities, and observe students' common misunderstandings of graphs. In all, this study offers a critical exploration of how to design instruction that simultaneously supports students' science and graph understanding within complex inquiry contexts.  相似文献   

2.
In response to the demand for sound science assessments, this article presents the development of a latent construct called knowledge integration as an effective measure of science inquiry. Knowledge integration assessments ask students to link, distinguish, evaluate, and organize their ideas about complex scientific topics. The article focuses on assessment topics commonly taught in 6th- through 12th-grade classes. Items from both published standardized tests and previous knowledge integration research were examined in 6 subject-area tests. Results from Rasch partial credit analyses revealed that the tests exhibited satisfactory psychometric properties with respect to internal consistency, item fit, weighted likelihood estimates, discrimination, and differential item functioning. Compared with items coded using dichotomous scoring rubrics, those coded with the knowledge integration rubrics yielded significantly higher discrimination indexes. The knowledge integration assessment tasks, analyzed using knowledge integration scoring rubrics, demonstrate strong promise as effective measures of complex science reasoning in varied science domains.  相似文献   

3.
Typical assessment systems often measure isolated ideas rather than the coherent understanding valued in current science classrooms. Such assessments may motivate students to memorize, rather than to use new ideas to solve complex problems. To meet the requirements of the Next Generation Science Standards, instruction needs to emphasize sustained investigations, and assessments need to create a detailed picture of students’ conceptual understanding and reasoning processes.

This article describes the design process and potential for automated scoring of 2 forms of inquiry assessment: Energy Stories and MySystem. To design these assessments, we formed a partnership of teachers, discipline experts, researchers, technologists, and psychometricians to align curriculum, assessments, and rubrics. We illustrate how these items document middle school students’ reasoning about energy flow in life science. We used evidence from review by science teachers and experts in the discipline; classroom experiments; and psychometric analysis to validate the assessments, rubrics, and automated scoring.  相似文献   

4.
Some studies suggest that individuals having completed undergraduate science programs are often poorly prepared to use graphs in ways typical of their disciplines. Science and technology studies have identified competency in graphing as being of central importance to the practice of a scientific discipline. Given the centrality of graphing to the practice of science, an important aspect of becoming enculturated into the practices of a scientific discipline is being able to use and interpret graphs in ways that are typical to that discipline. For example, competency in this usage is important to reading, interpreting and understanding journal articles in a discipline. Undergraduate science students spend a considerable amount of time in lectures where graphical representations play a major role in the presentation of subject matter. To gain an understanding of the use of graphs in lectures and how this use contributes to student understanding, this paper provides a microanalysis of graph use in lectures drawn from artifacts compiled from videotaping all lectures and seminars in a thirteen week ecology course. This analysis focused on both the text and the geestural references made in the reading of a graph in an ecology lecture. We conclude that the common ground existing amongst scientists that help them reach an agreed upon interpretation of a graph is missing from the present lectures and then discuss the constraints this places on students, learning about graphs in lectures.  相似文献   

5.
In scientific literacy, knowledge integration (KI) is a scaffolding-based theory to assist students' scientific inquiry learning. To drive students to be self-directed, many courses have been developed based on KI framework. However, few efforts have been made to evaluate the outcome of students' learning under KI instruction. Moreover, finer-grained information has been pursued to better understand students' learning and how it progresses over time. In this article, a normative procedure of building and choosing cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) and attribute hierarchies was formulated under KI theory. We examined the utility of CDMs for evaluating students' knowledge status in KI learning. The results of the data analysis confirmed an intuitive assumption of the hierarchical structure of KI components. Furthermore, analysis of pre- and posttests using a higher-order, hidden Markov model tracked students' skill acquisition while integrating knowledge. Results showed that students make significant progress after using the web-based inquiry science environment (WISE) platform.  相似文献   

6.
Grounded in Hallidayan perspectives on academic language, we report on our development of an educative science assessment as one component of the language-rich inquiry science for English-language learners teacher professional learning project for middle school science teachers. The project emphasizes the role of content-area writing to support teachers in diagnosing their students’ emergent understandings of science inquiry practices, science content knowledge, and the academic language of science, with a particular focus on the needs of English-language learners. In our current school policy context, writing for meaningful purposes has received decreased attention as teachers struggle to cover large numbers of discrete content standards. Additionally, high-stakes assessments presented in multiple-choice format have become the definitive measure of student science learning, further de-emphasizing the value of academic writing for developing and expressing understanding. To counter these trends, we examine the implementation of educative assessment materials—writing-rich assessments designed to support teachers’ instructional decision making. We report on the qualities of our educative assessment that supported teachers in diagnosing their students’ emergent understandings, and how teacher–researcher collaborative scoring sessions and interpretation of assessment results led to changes in teachers’ instructional decision making to better support students in expressing their scientific understandings. We conclude with implications of this work for theory, research, and practice.  相似文献   

7.
Polysemy in graph-related practices is the phenomenon that a single graph can sustain different meanings assigned to it. Considerable research has been done on polysemy in graph-related practices in school science in which graphs are rather used as scientific tools. However, graphs in science textbooks are also used rather pedagogically to illustrate domain-specific textbook content and less empirical work has been done in this respect. The aim of this study is therefore to better understand polysemy in the domain-specific pedagogical use of graphs in science textbooks. From socio-cultural and cultural-historical perspectives, we perceive polysemy as irreducible to either the meaning-making (semiotic) resources provided by the graph or its readers who assign meaning to it. Departing from this framework, we simultaneously investigated: (a) the meanings 44 pre-university biology students assigned to the Cartesian plane of a graph that is commonly used as a pedagogical tool in Dutch high school biology textbooks (an electrocardiogram); (b) the semiotic resources provided by this graph; and (c) the educational practices of which it is supposedly a part according to the actions constituted by the textbooks that were to be conducted by students. Drawing on this case, we show polysemy in the pedagogical use of graphs in science textbooks. In turn, we show how this polysemy can be explained dialectically as the result of both the meaning-making resources provided by the textbooks and the graph-related practices in which students supposedly engaged by using their textbooks. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.  相似文献   

8.
To improve student science achievement in the United States we need inquiry-based instruction that promotes coherent understanding and assessments that are aligned with the instruction. Instead, current textbooks often offer fragmented ideas and most assessments only tap recall of details. In this study we implemented 10 inquiry-based science units that promote knowledge integration and developed assessments that measure student knowledge integration abilities. To measure student learning outcomes, we designed a science assessment consisting of both proximal items that are related to the units and distal items that are published from standardized tests (e.g., Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study). We compared the psychometric properties and instructional sensitivity of the proximal and distal items. To unveil the context of learning, we examined how student, class, and teacher characteristics affect student inquiry science learning. Several teacher-level characteristics including professional development showed a positive impact on science performance.  相似文献   

9.
New approaches for teaching and assessing scientific inquiry and practices are essential for guiding students to make the informed decisions required of an increasingly complex and global society. The Science Skills approach described here guides students to develop an understanding of the experimental skills required to perform a scientific investigation. An individual teacher''s investigation of the strategies and tools she designed to promote scientific inquiry in her classroom is outlined. This teacher-driven action research in the high school biology classroom presents a simple study design that allowed for reciprocal testing of two simultaneous treatments, one that aimed to guide students to use vocabulary to identify and describe different scientific practices they were using in their investigations—for example, hypothesizing, data analysis, or use of controls—and another that focused on scientific collaboration. A knowledge integration (KI) rubric was designed to measure how students integrated their ideas about the skills and practices necessary for scientific inquiry. KI scores revealed that student understanding of scientific inquiry increased significantly after receiving instruction and using assessment tools aimed at promoting development of specific inquiry skills. General strategies for doing classroom-based action research in a straightforward and practical way are discussed, as are implications for teaching and evaluating introductory life sciences courses at the undergraduate level.  相似文献   

10.
ABSTRACT

The concept of science capital has a growing influence in science education research for understanding young people’s science trajectories. Popularised in the UK, this paper aims to extend and evaluate the applicability of science capital in the context of China by drawing on PISA2015. More specifically, we make use of existing items in the PISA2015 survey as a proxy for operationalising the construct of science capital to explore the science career aspirations and attainments of 15-year-old Chinese and UK students (n?=?23,998). Our findings indicate that science capital has more explanatory power for understanding UK students’ science career aspirations than for Chinese students, where science attainment seems most important. We raise the potential challenge for Chinese students to convert their science capital into scientific self-efficacy and science career aspirations as we highlight the importance of recognising cultural and national differences in operationalising science capital.  相似文献   

11.
Argumentation is fundamental to science education, both as a prominent feature of scientific reasoning and as an effective mode of learning—a perspective reflected in contemporary frameworks and standards. The successful implementation of argumentation in school science, however, requires a paradigm shift in science assessment from the measurement of knowledge and understanding to the measurement of performance and knowledge in use. Performance tasks requiring argumentation must capture the many ways students can construct and evaluate arguments in science, yet such tasks are both expensive and resource-intensive to score. In this study we explore how machine learning text classification techniques can be applied to develop efficient, valid, and accurate constructed-response measures of students' competency with written scientific argumentation that are aligned with a validated argumentation learning progression. Data come from 933 middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and are based on three sets of argumentation items in three different science contexts. The findings demonstrate that we have been able to develop computer scoring models that can achieve substantial to almost perfect agreement between human-assigned and computer-predicted scores. Model performance was slightly weaker for harder items targeting higher levels of the learning progression, largely due to the linguistic complexity of these responses and the sparsity of higher-level responses in the training data set. Comparing the efficacy of different scoring approaches revealed that breaking down students' arguments into multiple components (e.g., the presence of an accurate claim or providing sufficient evidence), developing computer models for each component, and combining scores from these analytic components into a holistic score produced better results than holistic scoring approaches. However, this analytical approach was found to be differentially biased when scoring responses from English learners (EL) students as compared to responses from non-EL students on some items. Differences in the severity between human and computer scores for EL between these approaches are explored, and potential sources of bias in automated scoring are discussed.  相似文献   

12.
This paper presents a transformative modeling framework that guides the development of assessment to measure students’ deep understanding in physical sciences. The framework emphasizes 3 types of connections that students need to make when learning physical sciences: (1) linking physical states, processes, and explanatory models, (2) integrating multiple explanatory models, and (3) connecting scientific models to concrete experiences. We carried out a 2-phase exploratory study that helped further develop and refine the framework. In the first phase, we developed 3 items on sinking and floating and pilot tested them with 18 undergraduate students. Analysis of student responses revealed various student misconceptions and the different connections students made among science ideas. Based on the findings, we revised the assessment, modified the instruction, and collected data from another cohort of 26 students. The second cohort of students showed significant improvement of understanding of sinking and floating after instruction. Implications and limitations of how our assessment framework can be used to improve students’ conceptual understanding in science are discussed.  相似文献   

13.
Science education needs valid, authentic, and efficient assessments. Many typical science assessments primarily measure recall of isolated information. This paper reports on the validation of assessments that measure knowledge integration ability among middle school and high school students. The assessments were administered to 18,729 students in five states. Rasch analyses of the assessments demonstrated satisfactory item fit, item difficulty, test reliability, and person reliability. The study showed that, when appropriately designed, knowledge integration assessments can be balanced between validity and reliability, authenticity and generalizability, and instructional sensitivity and technical quality. Results also showed that, when paired with multiple‐choice items and scored with an effective scoring rubric, constructed‐response items can achieve high reliabilities. Analyses showed that English language learner status and computer use significantly impacted students' science knowledge integration abilities. Students who took the assessment online, which matched the format of content delivery, performed significantly better than students who took the paper‐and‐pencil version. Implications and future directions of research are noted, including refining curriculum materials to meet the needs of diverse students and expanding the range of topics measured by knowledge integration assessments. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1079–1107, 2011  相似文献   

14.
This paper argues that science education has overemphasized the importance of construction at the expense of critique. In doing so, it draws on two key premises—Ford's argument that the construction of knowledge requires a dialectic between construction and critique and Mercier and Sperber's theory of argumentative reasoning that critique is essential for epistemic vigilance. Five separate cases are presented which argue that the absence of critique within school science limits the opportunities for students to engage in scientific reasoning making the learning of science less effective. These five arguments incorporate research literature surrounding the nature of science, epistemology, literacy, pedagogy, and motivation. Furthermore, we draw on data collected from cognitive think-aloud interviews to show that students can, with the appropriate prompts, engage in the important epistemic activity of critique. We conclude by examining the implications for the teaching and learning of science. In essence, we argue that the undervaluing of critique within the curriculum and pedagogy of school science results in a failure to develop the analytical faculties which are the valued hall mark of the practicing scientist; a misrepresentation of the nature of science; and, more importantly, a less effective learning experience. Critique, therefore, needs to play a central role in the teaching and learning of science.  相似文献   

15.
How do university students understand the graphs that they read in their textbooks? How does their knowledge regarding the content and their statistical training influence this understanding? Does the kind of task demand also influence this understanding? To answer these questions, we asked a group of psychology students and a group of economics students to choose the most suitable graph for presenting the results of different psychological research studies (reports) (selection task) or to explain in words the results of the same reports shown by means of their graphic representations only (interpretation task). The results showed there were very few differences between groups. Most of the students were able to relate textual information to the adequate graph, but also revealed significant shortcomings and mistakes in their understanding of important syntactic aspects of graphs. They also interpreted the graphs correctly but their interpretation had different levels of complexity, which were not always optimal. We also identified significant differences regarding the difficulty of the reports and the kinds of misinterpretations of graphs. The two tasks thus revealed different pictures of students’ skills in reading and interpreting graphs and, consequently, how the characteristics of task demands influence their performance.  相似文献   

16.
17.
Researchers who have investigated the public understanding of science have argued that fictional cinema and television has proven to be particularly effective at blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. The rationale for this study lies in the notion that to teach science effectively, educators need to understand how popular culture influences their students’ perception and understanding of science. Using naturalistic research methods in a diverse middle school we found that students who watched a popular science fiction film, The Core, had a number of misunderstandings of earth science concepts when compared to students who did not watch the movie. We found that a single viewing of a science fiction film can negatively impact student ideas regarding scientific phenomena. Specifically, we found that the film leveraged the scientific authority of the main character, coupled with scientifically correct explanations of some basic earth science, to create a series of plausible, albeit unscientific, ideas that made sense to students.  相似文献   

18.
Graphs are commonly used in textbooks and educational software, and can help students understand science and social science data. However, students sometimes have difficulty comprehending information depicted in graphs. What makes a graph better or worse at communicating relevant quantitative information? How can students learn to interpret graphs more effectively? This article reviews the cognitive literature on how viewers comprehend graphs and the factors that influence viewers' interpretations. Three major factors are considered: the visual characteristics of a graph (e.g., format, animation, color, use of legend, size, etc.), a viewer's knowledge about graphs, and a viewer's knowledge and expectations about the content of the data in a graph. This article provides a set of guidelines for the presentation of graphs to students and considers the implications of graph comprehension research for the teaching of graphical literacy skills. Finally, this article discusses unresolved questions and directions for future research relevant to data presentation and the teaching of graphical literacy skills.  相似文献   

19.
This study explores measurement of a construct called knowledge integration in science using multiple-choice and explanation items. We use construct and instructional validity evidence to examine the role multiple-choice and explanation items plays in measuring students' knowledge integration ability. For construct validity, we analyze item properties such as alignment, discrimination, and target range on the knowledge integration scale using a Rasch Partial Credit Model analysis. For instructional validity, we test the sensitivity of multiple-choice and explanation items to knowledge integration instruction using a cohort comparison design. Results show that (1) one third of correct multiple-choice responses are aligned with higher levels of knowledge integration while three quarters of incorrect multiple-choice responses are aligned with lower levels of knowledge integration, (2) explanation items discriminate between high and low knowledge integration ability students much more effectively than multiple-choice items, (3) explanation items measure a wider range of knowledge integration levels than multiple-choice items, and (4) explanation items are more sensitive to knowledge integration instruction than multiple-choice items.  相似文献   

20.
The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an online contextualized test for assessing students’ understanding of epistemic knowledge of science. In addition, how students’ understanding of epistemic knowledge of science interacts with learner factors, including time spent on science learning, interest, self-efficacy, and gender, was also explored. The participants were 489 senior high school students (244 males and 245 females) from eight different schools in Taiwan. Based on the result of an extensive literature review, we first identified six factors of epistemic knowledge of science, such as status of scientific knowledge, the nature of scientific enterprise, measurement in science, and so on. An online test was then created for assessing students’ understanding of the epistemic knowledge of science. Also, a learner-factor survey was developed by adopting previous PISA survey items to measure the abovementioned learner factors. The results of this study show that; (1) by factor analysis, the six factors of epistemic knowledge of science could be grouped into two dimensions which reflect the nature of scientific knowledge and knowing in science, respectively; (2) there was a gender difference in the participants’ understanding of the epistemic knowledge of science; and (3) students’ interest in science learning and the time spent on science learning were positively correlated to their understanding of the epistemic knowledge of science.  相似文献   

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