2/9 Jenna - Leveling Up (Or Down, It's Flexible)

The Wilensky & Reisman and the Wilensky & Resnick articles of this week both investigate how computational models can help students resolve confusions that arise when they attempt to understand complex systems through the system's "levels." In short, models are well-suited for understanding how the behaviors of individual agents in the system (the micro level) lead to the aggregate behavior of the system (the macro level); Wilensky calls this conception of a complex system an "emergent view" of levels.

In "Thinking in Levels," Wilensky & Resnick specifically examine how students come to understand levels in systems and how the notion of levels helps us understand how misconceptions develop. The issues they discuss are ontological ("when is something a 'thing?'" and the role of individual randomness in aggregate patterns) and they can only be reconciled when students take on a new, "level headed" mindset. This new perspective means that learners can more fluidly flow from considering one level to another. 

As I read this piece, I couldn't help but think of code-switching (the linguistic idea of switching between languages or styles of language). The flexibility of mind that results in code-switching is very similar to what is needed for level-switching:

• What is the purpose of each code/level? 
• What interpretation is best suited for each code/level? 
• What does a particular code/level make possible that another cannot?

"Thinking Like a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Firefly" does not explore the meta-knowledge of levels described in the other article. Instead, it describes how the emergent view of levels promotes the learners' embodiment. In the case studies described by Wilensky & Reisman, students put themselves in the perspective of the agents they were modeling to generate hypotheses about individual behaviors. While students sometimes needed to make initial assumptions in order to constrain the imaginative process to a workable size, students were able to revise these assumptions and research them further to ensure they were sound foundations. This embodiment through imagination helped students develop a "level headed" mindset because they could see how sensory information at the individual level led to noticeable patterns at the macro level.

I think something that these articles do really well is explicitly address an educational assumption that I feel most of us hold, which is that there is a "right" answer that students need to come to know and that our job as science teachers is to make sure students have that correct idea. This assumption is much bigger than us - for example, it pervades the standardized testing movement and the idea that student test scores are a reliable measure of a teacher's ability. The articles for this week make it clear that we need to let go of this "ideal" and let go of our students so that they can engage in meaningful inquiry. However, I don't think the authors put forward a strong enough case that the process is more important than the result in order to convince teachers in practice and policy makers. I think the stakes need to be lower for teachers before they'll buy into teaching science as a practice in classrooms, and alternative measures of student aptitude (or teacher quality) will need to be proposed to win over policy makers.