Students' understanding of the nature and purpose of models

Abstract

The process of thinking in and about models as a scientific practice should be integrated into science teaching and learning. Empirical studies show that students see models primarily in their role as media to facilitate content learning while rarely appreciating models as instruments of scientists which allow the deduction and the testing of predictions. In order to foster students' meta-modeling knowledge successfully, specific diagnostic information about students' understanding of models and modeling is needed. The aim of this study is to gather such diagnostic information by investigating students' understanding of the nature and the purpose of models in biology with respect to context-and grade-specific differences. Students' understanding of the nature and the purpose of models was assessed by using forced choice tasks (N students 5 285). In order to gain qualitative insight into possible reasons for context-specific differences, the students were additionally asked to give reason for their decision in the forced choice tasks by answering open-ended justification tasks. The results indicate that the majority of students in all grades see models as idealized representations of an original which have the purpose to show or to describe this original. Students' levels of understanding of the nature and the purpose of models increase only little across grades. Nevertheless, a gradespecific analysis of the consistency of students' understanding across contexts suggests that the students' understanding becomes more consistent in higher grades. Students' justifications helped to identify model contexts which have a high potential to be fruitful when trying to foster students' understanding of the nature and the purpose of models. K E Y W O R D Sbiology education, contexts, diagnosis, models, students' understanding J Res Sci Teach. 2018;1-26.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tea

Students’and Teachers’ Perception of Scientific Models: Transition From Daily to Scientific Language

“…Results revealed that most students who started their science learning with a preconception of models in the daily language perceptive and strived to move to the scientific language perceptive did not satisfactorily succeed. In contrast to the studies of Grosslight et al (1991) and Gogolin and Krüger (2018) in which they based their levelling of their subjects' understanding of models not only on how they see its representation but also on its function, this research further divided the model perceptions of students and teachers into three levels based on the representations of model, which allowed this research to reveal students' and teachers' understanding toward models in a more fundamental manner. Furthermore, the present study identified that a big portion of students and teachers are in the second level or the transitional perspective stage.…”

“…Students who responded with not sure or agree were regarded as having an incorrect concept of a scientific model, which constituted a large portion of the participants. On the other hand, Gogolin and Krüger (2018) proposed a five-aspect framework of model competence, and from those, the aspect of the nature of scientific models, as the most relevant to this research, had three levels: 1) a model is a replication of the original, 2) a model is an idealised representation of the original and 3) a model is a theoretical reconstruction of the original. Moreover, they found that a majority of the students in all grades (10, 11 and 12) see scientific models as an idealised representation of the original (level 2).…”

“…Given this, when the concept of scientific models as a term is not well shaped among students and teachers in science education, they tend to choose the omnipresent and versatile meaning of models in everyday life. These have made the conceptual change of models in the proper direction more difficult (Gogolin & Krüger, 2018), thus requiring the identification of the most fundamental questions about how students and teachers see models.…”

Mapping undergraduate chemistry students' epistemic ideas about models and modeling

“…For instance, models can be evaluated or changed according to how well they serve their intended purpose and there may be multiple models for a given phenomenon because they serve distinct purposes. Though the dimensions of nature and purpose of models clearly hold value for the science education research community (Crawford & Cullin, ; Grosslight et al, ; Grünkorn et al, ; Schwarz & White, ), we do not discuss them here in part because these dimensions have been well‐explored by other scholars (e.g., Gogolin & Krüger, ; Schwarz et al, ), and because we see them as intertwined with the four dimensions specified.…”

“…In the current project, the construct of interest is students' metamodeling knowledge, that is, students' epistemic knowledge of models and modeling. The literature contains descriptions of several dimensions of metamodeling knowledge, including the nature of models, the purpose of models, model changeability, model multiplicity, the evaluation of models, and the process of modeling (Crawford & Cullin, ; Gogolin & Krüger, , ; Grosslight et al, ; Grünkorn et al, ; Justi & Gilbert, ; Krell et al, ; Krell & Krüger, , ; Schwarz & White, ; Van Der Valk, Van Driel, & De Vos, ). Researchers have described metamodeling knowledge as multidimensional and have examined several specific dimensions including model multiplicity, model changeability, model evaluation, and the process of modeling.…”