3/9 Modeling the standards

In Chapter three, diSessa discusses how students and teachers, and even schools, should have ownership over the programs and the microworlds that are built using the programs. In class, we have discussed what computational literacy can mean, and what it would have to be in order for computational modeling to be a success in the classroom. After looking through the Practice TCAP tests and samples, I noticed that there are many types of literacies that students are expected to master, such as graphs and basic mathematics, scientific language and terms, and even understanding what a questions is asking. Computational modeling, such as Netlogo or Boxer, can be a great resource tool to lead students to mastering these literacies. Most of the authors we have read so far for class, would agree that an ideal computation program would be flexible and easy for students to explore scientific concepts and mathematics. However, how do we make teach computational literacy to students when there is limited time? Should there be a separate class? Or, could giving students enough time in class be enough to let students learn coding languages?

One thing that jumped out at me in the Practice and sample questions was that many of the sample questions from the Practice Test and samples asked students to draw conclusions from graphs. The Netlogo program and models are valuable and useful when teaching to standards, because it can teach this particular literacy and mathematics side of the standards. Netlogo and the ViMAP turtle programs create graphs and often use math functions to code and conduct a microworld. Teachers can take advantage of this by using scaffolded worksheets to have students focus on that part of the modeling activities.

We have also discussed how we would have to create a balance to make sure students learn the material that follows the academic standards and that will be on the standardized tests. Population dynamics, environmental factors that affect the populations, and analyzing graphs seem to be several main themes across the Tennessee grade 8 standards and test sample questions. I can see why Netlogo models, like the wolf sheep model, are so popular. It allows the programmer to manipulate different environmental factors, such as the initial number of organisms, how fast the environment can change (grass growth), and the code can be flexible, adjusted, and added to. Room for revision, which is a NGSS practice standard, and microworld growth and development, are important, according to diSessa. Students and teachers, then have more opportunities to be creative and try new ideas. Harlow from one of our last readings talked about student creativity as a resource teachers believe about students as they teach. Creativity can have its advantages and disadvantages, but diSessa argues that it is a necessary tool to have for students to learn as much as they can from computational modeling. However, I feel that Netlogo gives natural boundaries that would keep a student on track. Or should Netlogo assignments always come with scaffolded worksheets? 

Science question: How could blood pressure and blood flow be modeled?

3/9-Elizabeth-Making Modeling More "Meaningful" to the Majority

In general, it was interesting to see an EOC and TCAP exam and the type of questions asked.  As a student from a private school, I never experienced these examinations so I knew little about them.  I saw many differences between the EOC exam and the TCAP but was depressed by both of them.  As we previously noted, many of the questions asked involve laboratory equipment (EOC exam).  There were several questions about which instrument was more useful in measuring out a certain amount of liquid or to find the density.  To me, while knowing what laboratory tools use should use for different circumstances, there are more important and pressing concepts.  In TCAP, there were more “thinking questions,” but the chemistry questions asked (only 8^th grade) were very random and broad.  When looking at the Tennessee Chemistry Blueprint, while they did include many important topics, they did not include kinetics, such as rate limiting step, activation energy, etc.  This may be because they are more critical thinking questions and not good multiple choice, learned in later grades…I don’t know.  Furthermore, I thought they could include more images/pictures, especially the EOC exam.  For instance, students may not know the names of the laboratory equipment and may benefit more from images, so they can refer back to their own experience in the lab and think about what they used.  While there are no Netlogo programs for laboratory equipment, I did find multiple questions on the EOC Chemistry Exam about the Ideal Gas Law.  While they mainly were plug-and-chug questions, the principles behind the Ideal Gas Law are critical for students to understand.  Furthermore, with this understanding, students can predict their outcome and know if they made a math mistake if something is not right/what they predicted.   The Netlogo model labeled Connected Chemistry 7 Ideal Gas Law would be perfect for this.  Within this model, students have the opportunity to manipulate variables such as the number of particles, volume, pressure, and temperature (variables of the gas law equation).  Through this, they can observe what happens when one variable is raised or lowered and the others are kept constant.  It would be important for students to write down their predictions first with an explanation, run the model, and note the outcome, supporting the conclusion with data.  The complexity of this model can be raised (if students are getting bored because they understand what is going on) by manipulating two variables and seeing how these in turn effect the gas law.  Is one variable more effective than another?  Finally, if students want to break down the number of variables used or you want to make this lesson a multi-day adventure, there are other models in the Connected Chemistry section of Netlogo that deal with two variables (i.e. pressure and number of particles) while keeping the rest constant. 

The only TCAP test that included chemistry within the science section was for the 8^th grade.  However, there were no adequate Netlogo programs that could be used to successfully model a direct concept involved on the TCAP.  The exam surprisingly had multiple questions involving the Law of Conservation of Mass.  One model, Chemical Equilibrium, could be used to show that the number of total particles stays the same (Conservation of Mass).  However, this model could not be used as extensively as the Ideal Gas Law model was used in the EOC exam.  I would interested to see if other modeling programs had better fitted models for this exam.

1.     What is the best way for students to engage in modeling?  Give them a detailed worksheet where they have to answer multiple questions or a more open-ended worksheet?  Small groups, individually, whole class?

2.     Should you include the EOC exam questions/TCAP questions with the unit, on worksheets, include them on your own tests, etc?

3/9 Laura C: The intersection of personalization and standardization

            This week I read through an EOC practice test in Biology and the 7^th grade TCAP science test.  On both exams, I was impressed by the emphasis on crosscutting concepts like cause and effect and practices like plotting and interpreting data and the limited number of purely recall questions (what I expected to see exclusively), though I felt that the level of language used for each question would require a significant amount of study/memorization across a broad array of topics instead of the depth I would hope to achieve in my classroom.  Netlogo can be readily applied to helping students understand thematic elements like cause and effect and skills like graphing, through the deep exploration of a few topics and the opportunity to see how the same themes and skills can apply to other situations.  For example, by working with and adapting the wolf/sheep model, students can learn about interconnectivity, energy flow, and carrying capacity, and practice each step of the modeling cycle.  These skills can then be applied to questions like number 6, “A forest fire adds ash minerals to the soil.  The thick cover of tree leaves is reduced to scattered bare trunks and stumps.  Which response to this ecosystem change is most likely?”, where the student can use their understanding of cause and effect to find the answer without having studied fire ecology. 

            My two largest concerns with the standardized tests I read were the use of potentially exclusionary scientific language and the limits to students’ and teachers’ ownership in its specificity.  I think that scientific literacy is a very valuable goal for all students, however this level of language use from such a broad array of topics takes many years to understand fluently and could inhibit students from understanding a question to which they may actually know the answer.  Because students are expected to know the specific language of so many biological systems, there is a constraint placed on the potential exploration during the school year and could inhibit the potential for ownership which diSessa champions.

Questions:

How can we encourage student and teacher ownership and personalization within the context of standardized curriculum and testing?

How can we optimally (and naturally) incorporate such a broad array of complex scientific terms into a thematic/modeling driven classroom?

What do y’all think of diSessa’s distinction between students feeling in control and actually being in control (p 50)?  This seems to contradict the theories of scaffolding we’ve studied elsewhere, do you think its possible to achieve a teacher’s content goal when students are actually in control? Or is the goal in these moments more practice oriented?

3/9 - Kim K. - Modeling to the Assessments

I looked at the EOC Biology I Item Sampler for the category “Interdependence” because I think NetLogo has some great programs in its library that demonstrate a lot of concepts for this.  Food chain/web dynamics (Q2, Q3), carrying capacity (Q7, Q8, Q29), and fluctuations in populations (Q26, Q27, Q28, Q30, Q31) can be modeled with the programs Rabbits Grass Weeds, Simple Birth Rates, and Wolf Sheep Predation.  I think these programs can allow for students to see how numbers in a population and available food resources and their affects can be represented graphically, an important mathematical connection to make.  Biodiversity (Q12, Q13, Q14, Q15, Q16, Q35, Q36, Q37, Q38) can be modeled partly through Mimicry, Fish Tank Genetic Drift, and Bug Hunters.  These programs show students how constricting factors in an environment affect a population in terms of appearance.  I think these models can be related to questions about extinction on the assessment as well, although it is not as explicit because the model simply shows a population dying off and not necessarily the whole species.

            I do not think NetLogo has a good model for students to learn biological succession and interactions among trophic levels.  However, a lot of related topics can be modeled so one can still use these programs to scaffold learning or even use them as a prior knowledge review for an introduction to these topics.  I think the complexity of interdependence would be difficult for students to grasp if they only read about the concept.  Modeling would make learning authentic for students because the concept becomes something they can manipulate and actually watch the effects of in a pseudo-real time.

Question:

How can we model how human activities can affect the environment?  (I think most of the consequences from human activity are not usually considered or predictable until those adverse results actually happen.)

3/9 Steve: Asse$$ments

I reviewed the first biology sample tests from both the TCAP and the ECA.  The most striking example of where modeling could help students on these tests were the questions about food chains.  These problems usually showed a small section of the food chain, and asked what would happen to one of the organisms if another organism went extinct, or surged in population.  Students who had done the wolf sheep predation model would possess a good intuition about these scenarios as they would have experimented with a variety of different starting conditions and seen the results.  One thing that might actually confuse them would be the difference between the long term effects of a big population change like that versus the short term effects.  For example, introducing a lot more wolves to the system initially cuts the sheep way down, but then if the wolves eat all the sheep the wolves go extinct too.  Hopefully the questions are clear enough about the fact that they are looking only for the immediate results. 

The next thing that modeling could help with would be evolution.  Several models including the butterfly model can demonstrate to students how evolution works.  In the butterfly model, butterflies with longer feeding tubes are more likely to survive, so over time you end up with many more long nosed butterflies.  Students who had done this modeling unit would understand the questions on the TCAP and ECA about evolution because they would have seen it in action on a greatly accelerated time scale. 

Modeling could also be used to show how cells react to solutions of different salinity, which is a type of biology problem that comes up on the tests. 

Another type of question that students might understand better thanks to modeling is the trophic energy level questions.  In the wolf sheep grass model, a discussion would hopefully arise about the different energy amounts gained by eating grass vs eating a sheep, and also about the relative quantities of grass and sheep and where there is more total energy.  These discussions and experiments with different relative energy levels would give students a better chance of correctly answering energy level pyramid questions. 

One question on the TCAP asks about the behavior of the molecules of a gas.  This could easily be explored with modeling which could show how the behavior of molecules changes when temperature increases and the substance changes from solid to liquid to gas.

Questions

·         What are the differences between Boxer and NetLogo?

·         What are some examples other than the butterfly model that would be interesting to act out with students instead of just running the program? 

·         It seems like one good way in biology to learn all the vocab words on these tests is to have games that involve the vocabulary.  Do games that involve science count as scientific modeling, or is that just scientific games? 

·         How can modeling be used to teach about genetics?

3/9 Joey: Computational Modeling Teaching and Testing

I thought diSessa brought up a really great point about student ownership and engagement.  Often, scientific subjects are very textbook heavy and impersonal.  The opportunity to take control and own your model seems like a great way to encourage motivation and involvement.  Since you cannot change what a textbook says or alter a figure to adapt for changing factors the text leaves out,  computational modeling leaves room for creative opportunities to explore subjects in a powerful way.  I was interested in when diSessa was talking about the boxer course and he said, “I want to emphasize that it was not uncommon to change a microworld the day before it was used.  We were forced into it because we were developing the course of the fly” (Pg. 52-53).  He then goes on to highlight how computational medium should be viewed as an adaptable toolkit rather than a turnkey course.  I understand that cultures, communities, and individuals own and personalize many things, but I wonder if he ever felt unprepared.  There is an old quote that I have heard many times by coaches and friends (Davio), “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”  How much of a course should we as educators have planned and prepared, and how much of a course should be done “on the fly”?”

One of the benefits of the NetLogo models is the ability to create and analyze graphs.  Specifically, in the TCAP Grade 8 Set 1 science questions, the 7^th questions asks students to extrapolate what happened to the rabbit population between 1987-1988 based on the graph of rabbit population growth.  By changing potential variables like food, competition, predator population, and or disease in the NetLogo model, students can look at the differences in graphs and what each variable does to the population.  This exercise in the predator prey model could have helped students get this question right on the test.  There seemed to also be many diagrams/graphs/figures/representations in the tests (EOC Biodiversity and Change, and TCAP).  I think modeling and seeing, revising, discussing, and understanding different types of models can also help develop these skills in students before they take these tests.  Computational modeling can definitely be used to help students explore some of the concepts seen in the tests. (One could create northern and southern blue mussels and Asian Shore vs. Green crabs, other predator prey models, form and function models, ecosystems, ect.).