Pickering discussed that humans are agents interacting with their environment. This is a concept we have touched on previously. Engaging students in the practice of science is the way to develop young minds to think about science. Science is and has been shifting away from the theory of a body of knowledge to the sociology of science knowledge, as described by Pickering. Science should be taught as a practice of engaged students. These students will act as agents within their classroom as a model for how they will and do interact with their environment.
Many of the models found in the NetLogo
library will serve as engagement or enrichment activities for my students.
Students may use NetLogo to discover ideas such as titrations or natural
selection then apply what they discovered to theoretical work and classroom
discussions. Within practice problems such as scenarios and word problems, my
students will be able to use their experiences with NetLogo to reference
interactions between themselves and the model, such as the embodiment of
themselves or another, or the agents within the model and scaffold their
knowledge. NetLogo models may then be revisited after some classroom work or
possibly laboratory exercises. Through the revision of models, students will be
able to construct their knowledge with many personal experiences to reference.
My most emerging question is how to
predict what misconceptions will arise in my classroom when making connections
between models and practices. Students will use and possibly create models
using NetLogo, but at what points will these models create incorrect knowledge
for my students? Will these misconceptions be found during class discussion or
will the engagement of practices create a false knowledge that my students rely
on? NetLogo is quite useful to myself to practice and engage in concepts that I
have or have not studied in a few years, although I also studied different
fields of science as an undergraduate. However, will these models ever hinder a
student’s knowledge by creating false information who have yet to study science
as much as I have? Most importantly, how I will as an instructor be able to
identify these misconceptions and scaffold a student to create the correct
knowledge?
David I think you brought up a great point about identifying misconceptions and trying to scaffold students to avoid these misconceptions and ultimately get the right knowledge. It reminds me of Heather’s class where we found a representation and looked at the affordances as well as possible misconceptions and tried to draw out these misconceptions to see what other representations or aspects of the original representation we should use/focus on. However, I would say as we used multiple models and explanations to help students understand a concept before, this same tactic would have to be used here as well. If students are learning about a certain phenomena or unit in class through computational modeling that is great! However, to help make sure students are getting the right knowledge I think using multiple forms of representation will help rectify any misconceptions. (Use not only computational models, but also physical/representation/mental models to check for understanding). Also, hopefully they will do some research to see how accurate their model is and their understanding of the phenomena. Hopefully students will be able to catch possible fallacies this way as well.
ReplyDeleteI think Joey brings up a great point about using multiple models to help clear up misconceptions. Remember that we have gone through multiple models of the atom, and the current one we use is most likely still misleading in a number of ways. In physics classrooms we still use a ray model of light for some topics even though we know the wave-particle model to be more accurate. I think the important part is to engage students in discussions about the strengths and weaknesses of their different models and help them understand what the limitations of models are.
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