Sunday, March 22, 2015

3/23 Davio Bergsmith Inquiry in Science Classrooms

            Both articles included scientific inquiry for scientific knowledge. Also, both articles stressed using evidence to draw conclusions. Students should explain and argue scientific content to build knowledge including vocabulary and theories and also address misconceptions. Reiser says explanations should describe concepts with detail and should include observations that the students have made. These experiences of sharing and talking about science whether between peers or peers and instructor, help to construct a shared science knowledge between peers. Sampson and Gleim used this approach in their Argument-Driven Inquiry strategy. This strategy should be applied throughout science teaching, especially as students are in engaging in scientific practices. The ADI approach has some similarities to the eight science practices laid out by the Next Gen Science Standards. Both involve identifying a task or problem by asking questions, the use of models or experiments to develop a theory or argument, then explain the argument to peers or instructors and revise. Reiser also talks about scaffolding computational use in the classroom. This should be used so that students can develop a use for computational models and gain the most from them. Throughout our class, we have discussed how to include things students want to learn about in our curriculum. When students are interested in the things they study in class, it will give ownership to the inquiry practices that will be offered. The importance of students' ideas and interests also has value in classroom ecology as well as scientific inquiry.


            How difficult would it be to construct a NetLogo model fro scratch? I cannot remember if this has been discussed in class or not yet. When reading about inquiry in the science classroom this week, I thought about what concepts do not have a model in the library and how difficult would it be for my students to try to develop a model from scratch. It would be disappointing to students who showed a high level of interest in a particular concept but then did not have a model available to learn more about the concept. I think that if I devoted some time to NetLogo I could write a program (using some other models for help) but how difficult would this be for high school students? And would students be willing to put in the time to learn about a program so that they may learn about one particular concept?

2 comments:

  1. Yeah I think you're on to the right idea with how to deal with models with no existing analogy in the models library. In computer science classes what they do often is to give you a partially written program with some of the bones and then the students have to flesh it out, and they have to really understand the existing structure to fill in the rest. You could do that with new models.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete