Making classroom assessment more accountable to scientific reasoning: A case for attending to mechanistic thinking

Abstract

ABSTRACT:When teachers or students assess the quality of ideas in science classes, they do so mostly based on textbook correctness; ideas are good to the extent they align with or lead to the content as presented in the textbook or curriculum. Such appeals to authority are at odds with the values and practices within the disciplines of science. There has been significant amount of attention to this mismatch in the science education research literature, primarily with respect to experimentation and argumentation as core disciplinary means of assessing ideas. In this article, we call attention to another aspect of scientific reasoning: a focus on causal mechanisms in explaining natural phenomena. We highlight examples and research from the history and philosophy of science to clarify what scientists mean by "mechanism" and to make the case for its centrality. We then present an excerpt from a second-grade class in which a student provides an incorrect mechanistic explanation, and the teacher gives priority to textbook correctness. As the conversation proceeds, the student shifts from mechanistic sensemaking to quoting terminology she does not understand. We argue that attention to mechanism in the classroom would better support student reasoning and better reflect disciplinary epistemology.

Using the resources framework to design, assess, and refine interventions on pressure in fluids

“…He urges us to listen to student talk in more ways than evaluating for textbook correctness, looking instead for progress and resources in their many guises. As an example of how focus on textbook correctness leads to undesirable effects, Russ et al [54] describe a classroom interaction where insistence on correctness quickly changed a student from mechanistic reasoning to hunting for (poorly understood) scientific terms. Conversely, Scherr and Robertson [51] point out the initial focus on productivity instead of correctness can "promote both student agency and student conceptual progress," and that normative reasoning can evolve through "negotiation and reconciliation.…”

“…IX that we can see some of these indicators in written work, and so can see productivity there as well. In-the-moment productivity also gives instructors another lens (besides textbook correctness) for deciding when and how to intervene in student discussion [54].…”

“…Their reasoning appears to be half mechanistic because they consider the frequency but not the strength and so did not explain how pressure can stay the same based solely on entities and their properties. Similarly, Russ [54] notes that use of the mathematical model given by the IGL is not mechanistic, but causal.…”

Reasoning Strategies in the Context of Engineering Design with Everyday Materials

“…The fact that she uses the same underlying ideas to design and troubleshoot provides additional justification for referring to these approaches as reasoning strategies, as they appear to help the student reason through various portions of the challenge. Finally, the depth of explanation provided is analogous to the constructs of mechanistic reasoning and causal reasoning (e.g., Lehrer & Schauble, 1998;Russ, Coffey, Hammer, & Hutchison, 2009), builds on deep structural features (Chi et al, 1981), and appears to leverage robustly encoded schemas (Colhoun et al, 2008;Gick & Holyoak, 1983;Loewenstein, 2010).…”

Tres Elementos Fundamentales en La Formación De Docentes De Ciencias

“…involucren a los estudiantes en una variedad de prácticas científicas y demanden la integración de conceptos e ideas con el fin de construir explicaciones causales de fenómenos concretos o diseñar y justificar soluciones a problemas específicos de interés (Russ et al, 2009). Estas tareas típicamente requieren que los estudiantes colaboren en la recolección, análisis y evaluación de datos de distintos tipos y representados de distintas formas.…”