| Images of connected features: |
| | | Data Query (The Galapagos Finches) |  |
| | | Standards Table: Guidelines for Writing Notes |  |
| | | Electronic Glossary: e-glossary |  |
| | | What this project is about: Project Introduction |  |
| | | Principle Maker |  |
| | | Scaffolding templates for writing a Story |  |
| | | Video Analysis Tools |  |
| | | Idea Manager |  |
| | | Identify a Phase from a Continuous Process |  |
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Connections 
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| Description: |
Scaffolding learners to explain their ideas to others (teachers, peers, experts, and themselves) can promote their understanding in any topic domain. Raising conjectures, and asking questions is the essence of science. These are basic processes that identify and reinforce connections that are critical for integrated understanding. Scaffolds can enrich the explanations considered by learners and help groups of learners develop some shared criteria and standards for their explanations (McNeill, Lizotte, Krajcik, & Marx, 2006).
Design studies show that students with proper support can develop the ability to make their own thinking visible. Students learn more when they monitor their own progress, stop and reflect, critique their own methodologies, and invent and refine representations of their experimental findings (Chi et al., 1994; Davis & Linn, 2000; diSessa, 2000; White & Frederiksen, 1998).
This principle focuses on the scaffolds that help learners elicit ideas and explanations. Features connected to this principle suggest ways to scaffold or support learners so that they explain their views by using evidence and develop sound arguments.
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Theoretical background:
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When students make their own thinking visible, as in essay assessments, they make visible the ideas about science topics that they bring to science class. For example, prompts can reveal surprising alternative views. Designers of prompts can use sentence-starters to help students describe scientific inquiry activities and to promote planning, monitoring, and reflection. Teachers can use what they learn when students respond to inform the ways they make their own thinking visible.
Tools such as SenseMaker, allows students to group Internet evidence they have surveyed into frames and to lay out an argument. Designers creating materials for SenseMaker need to carefully select materials that enable students to make their arguments visible and therefore inspectable.
Similarly, the causal mapping tool allows learners to make their thinking about scientific models visible. Instructional designers need to support students in making sense of the factors that come into play in scientific models.
Part of making thinking visible involves inspecting and reorganizing one’s knowledge web. Learners reconcile ideas when they reorganize knowledge webs to resolve incompatibilities. They might promote one element while demoting another to create a new, more integrated web.
Ultimately learners benefit from making their thinking visible by creating their own representations. diSessa (2000) shows benefits when a small class of students generated and critiqued their own representations of motion under the guidance of an expert teacher. Maher and Martino (2001) show that when students design representations about combinatorial reasoning using cubes, numeric systems, and illustrations and explain their thinking to their peers, they develop a notion of mathematical proof.
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| References (Off-line): |
Linn, M. C., & Hsi, S., 2000. Computers, Teachers, Peers: Science Learning Partners. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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.
diSessa (2000)
Maher and Martino (2001)
Chi et al., 1994
White & Frederiksen, 1998
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| References (Online): |
| http://www.internetscienceeducation.org/chapter13.html |
| Summary of changes (wiki): |
| Edits to description and to theoretical background |
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History
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