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All I Ever Needed to Know About Learning Science I Learned From Being Halfway There

Nancy Butler Songer, The University of Michigan (Click name for speaker's biography)
Friday, October 31, 2008
1:00 - 2:30; Room 2087 SEL

What does it mean to have a partial understanding of a complex scientific idea? Current theories on how children learn to be complex thinkers in a subject area emphasize constructivist-based pathways that are likely to build understandings in fits and starts, resulting in knowledge that can sometimes be categorized into clear representational groups or levels. Despite what is known about how children learn to be complex thinkers in science, many test experts admit that existing high-stakes tests provide only a small sample of evidence of what children know, and many current high-stakes tests are not well suited to evaluate complex reasoning in science. Nevertheless these tests are often used to make broad, high-stakes decisions about student intelligence, school reform effectiveness, and/or teacher effectiveness.

To address these issues and to further characterize what it might look like when students demonstrate progress towards, but still a partial understanding of, a complex scientific idea, the BioKIDS/DeepThink research project is developing and evaluating four coordinated scholarly products focused on unpacking progress of biodiversity and ecology built over three consecutive years. The products are: 1) A three-year learning progressions for the development of evidence-based explanations about biodiversity, 2) three coordinated curricular units for fourth, fifth and sixth grades that are manifestations of our learning progressions, 3), assessment instruments to provide evidence of progress and problems students demonstrate on their way towards building complex reasoning over the three consecutive units, and 4) professional development modules for in-service teachers. This presentation will provide samples of our scholarly products as well as empirical results from our first year of implementation within 28 Detroit Public School classrooms. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the problems and the reasons for the coordinated development and empirically based refinement of curricular activities, learning technologies and assessment systems that illuminate, and build productively with, early, intermediate and more advanced levels of knowledge development over time.

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