The impact of classroom context upon 1st and 2nd grade students’ critical criteria for science representations

Abstract

We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an important practice when working with representations. Effective critique requires understanding the purpose of the representation and the context of its use. We use Activity Theory to explore how a change in teacher prompts can facilitate a shift in how the teacher and the students organize their collective activity ultimately resulting in a change to the nature of their critical criteria for evaluating their peers' representations. To explore this relationship, we worked with a teacher to iteratively adapt and refine whole-group discussions of students' representations to provide a context in which students critique their peers' work on scientific grounds. After each representational activity, the teacher engaged the students in discussing the representations (three groups of students across a total of six sessions, N = 39). Findings indicate that contextual cues lead to a statistically significant shift in students talk. Video analysis indicates that shifts in contextual cues resulted in dramatic shifts in how the activity is mediated, resulting in the verbalization and application of increasingly robust scientific criteria across three different sessions.

Teaching for Emergent Disciplinary Drawing in Science? Comparing Teachers’ and Children’s Ways of Representing Science Content in Early Childhood Classrooms

“…Although drawing in a local ECE classroom is not as specialised as in the science disciplines, we assume that when children draw, they relate to explicit and implicit conventions at play in their classroom. For example, Lundin and Jakobson ( 2014 Danish and Saleh's (2015) study, teachers supported 6-to 9-year old children to review each other's drawings of the life cycle and habitat of turtles. Consequently, the children changed their idea of what constitutes a good representation in terms of detail, accuracy, and correct sequence.…”

Why and how teachers make use of drawing activities in early childhood science education

“…ECE teachers' views on the role of drawing in science education are underexplored in research. Nevertheless, some studies of ECE classrooms indicate that children's drawing practices are influenced by how their teachers view drawing in science, for example, that drawings should be detailed and accurate (Danish & Saleh, 2015) and descriptive, without embellishments (Ero-Tolliver et al, 2013). The teachers' views were not explicitly investigated in these studies, but can be inferred from the way they organised the activities, and how they gave feedback on children's drawings.…”

“…They conclude that the outcome of a drawing activity is dependent on back-and-forth interactions between the rules for what constitutes a good drawing in science (e.g. detailed and accurate), the material tools used (templates, books and websites), the division of labour (individual or collaboration), and teacher mediation (Danish & Saleh, 2014, 2015.…”

“…The teachers' views were not explicitly investigated in these studies, but can be inferred from the way they organised the activities, and how they gave feedback on children's drawings. In the study conducted by Danish and Saleh (2015), researchers and teachers supported the 6-9-year old children to review each other's drawings. Consequently, the children gradually changed their idea of what constitutes a good representation in terms of detail, accuracy and correct sequence.…”

Examining secondary school students’ views of model evaluation through an integrated framework of personal epistemology

“…Additionally, past research has suggested that epistemic views or epistemic criteria are domain-specific and context-sensitive (diSessa 2002 ; Krell et al 2014 ; Lee and Tsai 2012 ). The different contextual information such as the characteristics of the presentation and the intended tasks could evoke different responses (Barzilai and Eilam 2018 ; Danish and Saleh 2015 ). In order to explore whether students’ understanding of model evaluation is context-specific, two question contexts, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and dinosaur extinction were provided.…”