A Framework for the Assessment of Learning by Modeling

Back to the drawing board : creating drawing or text summaries in support of system dynamics modelling

“…To further clarify the use of System Dynamics modelling in this thesis, this section will discuss the System Dynamics modelling task that was used in the experiments in Chapters 3, 4 and 5; a simplified version of the topic was used in the experiment in Chapter 2. The subject of this modelling task is 'The energy of the Earth' , adopted from the work of Van Borkulo and colleagues (Van Borkulo et al, 2008). The goal of this task is to create a System Dynamics model that can predict the temperature of the Earth based on factors such as the influx of sunlight, reflectivity of the Earth's surface and atmosphere and the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.…”

“…The difference in group size is a consequence of the school's preference for having as many learners as possible in the drawing group. All participants received a worksheet containing an assignment to create a System Dynamics model on the topic of 'Energy of the Earth' (Van Borkulo, Van Joolingen, Savelsbergh & De Jong, 2008). Students in the drawing condition were instructed to summarize the information on the sheet combined with any prior knowledge they have about the topic to create a drawing summary of the topic 'Energy of the Earth' .…”

“…To answer the research questions presented above, a modelling task called 'Energy of the Earth' used by Van Borkulo and colleagues (Van Borkulo et al, 2008) was tailored to suit the current study's requirements. Five conditions were designed to answer the three research questions: in two text conditions students created both a text summary and a System Dynamics model about the topic 'Energy of the Earth' .…”

“…Figure 4-1). In the first session, participants were administered a pre-test assessing their scientific reasoning as measured by their ability to apply, create and evaluate models in a fantasy domain 4 (Van Borkulo et al, 2008). In the apply items, a model is given and the students is asked to apply the functioning of the model such as "If variable x increases, does variable y increase/decrease /stay the same?"…”

“…This test was designed by Van Borkulo and colleagues to be a parallel test of the post-test on the domain of their study ('Energy of the Earth'), and it functions as a pre-test to compare the post-test with. They made this choice because of the discovery learning character of their study: a pre-test that would be on-topic would give away too much information for the discovery learning task (Van Borkulo et al, 2008). The same pattern of fantasy domain pre-test, training, experiment, on topic post-test was adopted in our study 5 .…”