| Images of connected features: |
| | | Zooming-in: From the big picture to the details |  |
| | | Contextualized definitions in “Hanging with Friends - Velocity Style! |  |
| | | Scaffolding templates for writing a Story |  |
| | | Authentic contexts in the Jasper project |  |
| | | Hands-on examples of molecular visualization content |  |
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Connections 
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| Description: |
This principle calls for designing instruction that encourages learners to investigate personally relevant problems and revisit their science ideas regularly.
Too often students find academic science lacking personal relevance. This sense of irrelevance leads to lack of personal interest and low engagement levels (Duschl, Schweingruber, & Shouse, 2007). Personally-relevant problems drawn from students’ everyday lives, such as determining how to keep a drink cold or how to minimize the potential radiation danger associated with cellular phone use can make science accessible and authentic. Such problems can elicit intuitive ideas to fuel inquiry (Fortus, Dershimer, Krajcik, Marx, & Mamlok-Naaman, 2004; Linn & Hsi, 2000; Songer & Linn, 1991) because students have had prior experiences related to the problem scenarios. Linn, Davis, and Bell (2004) show that eliciting the broad range of student ideas about science and supporting students to negotiate and explore these ideas enables them to build more coherent, durable scientific knowledge.
To make science accessible, instructional designers have to design the scientific content they offer students rather than necessarily choosing the most sophisticated ideas or the most attractive illustration. Designers have the responsibility of selecting the scope of knowledge integration, the examples, the sequence of topics, and the context of generalization.
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Theoretical background:
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To make science accessible to students and encourage students to revisit their science knowledge web, the Computer as Learning Partner research grounded instruction in personally-relevant problems. This research showed that students reason about personally-relevant problems such as determining how to keep a drink cold more effectively than laboratory problems like cooling a beaker of water because they contrast their own ideas with class ideas (Linn & Hsi, 2000; Songer & Linn, 1991).
Clement (1991; 1993) studied how students interpret examples including depictions of Newton’s first law. Often texts describe a car driving on an icy road. Many students in the United States have difficulty connecting this example because they have not experienced icy roads and lack driving licenses. A more connectable example might ask students to compare a ball rolling on mud, grass, and pavement. Clement referred to successful examples as “bridging analogies” because they help students connect scientific ideas to more familiar situations they encounter in their lives.
This work resonates with research on the advantages of complex examples. The Vanderbilt group shows the advantage of anchoring mathematics problems in a realistic situation such as a rescue mission and offering students a challenge based on the anchoring situation (Bransford et al., 1990; CGTV, 1997).
Making the ideas of science accessible is a good first step but students also need to participate in the process of inquiry to integrate their ideas. Krajcik and colleagues (1998) use “driving questions” to ground students’ investigations in personally meaningful, sustainable, and challenging inquiry contexts. Songer and Linn (1991) and Linn and Hsi (2000) show the benefit of asking students to predict, test, and reconcile their ideas about complex phenomena such as design of picnic coolers. To place examples in more complex contexts educators in mathematics (Cobb & Bowers, 1999; Lampert & Blunk, 1998), computer science (Kolodner, 1993; Linn & Clancy, 1992), business (Yin, 1994), teacher education (Lundeberg et al., 1999) and other fields cite similar strengths for authentic case studies.
Memory research reinforces the need to scaffold inquiry. Complex, confusing examples compared to straightforward examples can encourage students to reconsider the connections in their knowledge web with appropriate scaffolding. Bjork (1999), Kintsch (1998) and others have shown that when students encounter verbally presented information that seems straightforward and logical they recall less than when the information takes more effort to understand. For example, when an outline aligns perfectly with a text it helps learners immediately; an outline that aligns poorly with the text elicits more inquiry and ultimately enhances long-term recall (Kintsch, 1998). Similarly students learn material such as foreign language vocabulary better when they practice, perform an intervening task that results in some forgetting, and then practice some more rather than when they skip the complex, intervening task (Bjork, 1994). In both of these examples, the successful condition required students to spend time testing their ideas and resolving apparent discrepancies.
Linn and Eylon (2000) found that students were more successful in learning the scientific idea of displaced volume when scaffolded to interpret examples. This study contrasted a principle condition with an enhanced experimental condition. In both conditions, students encountered the full range of examples. Students in the principle condition connected their ideas to examples with and without feedback and wrote principles to summarize their results, thus making connections at multiple levels of analysis. Students in the investigations experimental condition performed multiple experiments, including experiments they designed themselves and explained their results but did not abstract principles. The two conditions were equally successful immediately. The principle condition was more successful on the delayed posttest, supporting the advantage of scaffolding inquiry to encourage connections at several levels of analysis. Similarly Eylon and Helfman (1984) found that students who were scaffolded to construct principles across the full range of examples were more successful than students who performed multiple experiments or those who encountered a subset of the examples.
This discussion illustrates the contribution of well-designed examples combined with scaffolding that incorporates a representative range of contexts to promote knowledge integration. The scaffolding spurs comparisons, reorganizations, and even critiques of views in the repertoire of ideas.
Pivotal cases (Linn & Hsi, 2000; Linn, in press) are complex examples that enable students to reorganize and sort out their ideas and come up with a more cohesive and normative account of a scientific phenomena. Research to date suggests four criteria for pivotal cases. First, pivotal case designers should provide a compelling comparison distinguishing two situations to illustrate the key ideas and central variables. For example, a pivotal case for thermal equilibrium involves contrasting the perceived temperature of wood and metal in a cool room and on a hot day—at room temperature metal feels cooler than wood but on a hot day, metal feels hotter than wood drawing attention to the human sensory system. (See Clark, Chapter 8, for further discussion of this pivotal case.) In another example from the CLP research, the Heat Bars simulation allowed students to compare rate of heat flow in different materials such as wood and metal and helped students visualize the process of heat flow (Foley, 1999; Lewis, 1991; Linn, in press).
Second, designers need to place inquiry in an accessible, relevant environment. If the context is too esoteric, students may miss the central idea. For example, a pivotal case for students considering the worldwide threat of malaria concerns the role of DDT. Students who contrast the benefits of DDT for preventing infant mortality with the hazards of biomagnification of DDT in the diets of birds reconsider their ideas about environmental stewardship.
Third, designers should provide feedback to promote pro-normative self-monitoring. If students cannot monitor their progress they take too many wrong paths. For example, the thermal equilibrium software provides spontaneous feedback to students in the form of temperature readings and tactile input.
Fourth, designers should enable narrative accounts of science. When students reconstruct their ideas in an argument they recognize gaps in their knowledge and elaborate the connections among their ideas. For example, the DDT case allows students to recount historical events leading to policy decisions and to incorporate new information, from sources such as the international debate about the ban on use of DDT. Work on argumentation shows how designers can scaffold the articulation of complex ideas in narrative form (Bell, Chapter 6; Osborne, 1996).
In summary, these results illustrate the difficulty of designing effective examples, cases, or views to add to the repertoire of ideas in the knowledge web and at the same time makes it clear that well-designed examples are necessary but not sufficient for successful knowledge integration. All of the successful studies described above also design the inquiry conditions under which students interact with these new ideas. These studies show that to make science accessible instructional designers have to design the scientific content they offer students rather than necessarily choosing the most sophisticated ideas or the most attractive illustration. Designers have the responsibility of selecting the scope of knowledge integration, the examples, the sequence of topics, and the context of generalization. As we discuss in Chapter 4 (Bell, Hoadley, & Linn), the examples often require refinement based on trials in classrooms.
In summary, making science accessible also depends on the goals of instruction. Too often science instruction in the United States mandates more science topics than students can integrate. As a result when compared to other countries, the United States curriculum has been described as, “an inch deep and a mile wide” (Schmidt et al., 1997). National standards and benchmarks (NRC, 1996; AAAS, 1993) encourage teachers to cover many science topics each year. Research shows, however, that allowing students to explore topics in depth enables many more connections, ultimately leading to more coherent and linked understanding (Clark, 2000). This type of instruction may set students up for improved learning even in areas they have not yet experienced in school (Linn & Muilenburg, 1996). Reducing the number of topics covered in any given course, then, works in tandem with designing the examples and activities students study to make science more accessible to all students.
Thus, making science accessible involves adding ideas to the mix that students bring to science class, scaffolding the inquiry process so that students generate new connections, and providing supports that move students in a normative direction. It also involves ensuring that students connect ideas in a web such that they are prepared to revisit science in everyday life rather than isolate school science. Finally, making science accessible means ensuring that students get feedback on their reasoning that motivates them to continue to learn science rather than to either give up on understanding science or on taking more science courses.
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| Tips (Challenges, Limitations, Tradeoffs, Pitfalls): |
Implementing this principle involves seeking examples that resonate with student experiences and interests. These are individual, cultural and contextual, and might be difficult to predict.
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| References (Off-line): |
Linn, M. C., Davis, E. A., & Bell, P. (2004). Internet environments for science education. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Kali, Y., Fortus, D., & Ronen-Fuhrmann, T. (in press). Synthesizing TELS and CCMS design knowledge. In Y. Kali, M. C. Linn & J. E. Roseman (Eds.), Designing Coherent Science Education. NY: Teachers College Press. |
| References (Online): |
| http://www.internetscienceeducation.org/chapter13.html |
| Summary of changes (wiki): |
| 1.Changed name of principle |
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History
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