4/6 Jenna - Modeling Teachers' Perspectives on Implementation

The three articles for this week are compelling cases for modeling in science classrooms. They talk about modeling as engaging students in a task, increasing student interest and discussion, and improving scientific questioning. Although they talk mostly of using models to teach mechanics and assessing students with the Force Concept Inventory, I think that the more important learning that is going on occurs in the metacognitive domain. Many of the authors talk about how they and their students co-construct what meaningful data and experimental design looks like, develop multiple representations of systems, and use Socratic dialogue to push thinking further. As skills develop, students have more agency in constructing these meanings on their own. While the authors concede that they do not cover as much content in their courses, the metacognitive skills they cultivate in students through modeling activities have universal power, and are arguably more important than the content.

I thought that the articles provided a good overview of the affordances and constrains of modeling instruction that we have been discussing all semester. We've expressed our concern over time limitations, content coverage, accountability to standards, and student fluency with practices and technology. Braunschweig's article was pretty thorough at situating these concerns, but his inclusion of student reflections highlighted why modeling is such an important design choice for science instruction. However, I also felt that these testimonials were a bit stiff and generic; honestly, I felt like they sounded like advertisements, aimed at teachers who were on the fence about using modeling.

I'm not sure if I'll be teaching in a science classroom in the future, but I do see modeling as having a large role in my future work in Vanderbilt's PhD program as I work on SURGE Symbolic. In this game, students create and manipulate multiple representations of motion as they move an avatar across their screen. I'll be interesting in seeing how students move between representations as they use the game and how other modeling activities and questioning discussions are used to support learning in classrooms. The articles for this week all mentioned white-boarding as opportunities for students to present their models and arguments to the class; I'm curious how these opportunities can be embedding in a modeling game.

• In the articles, scientific modeling is a collaborative endeavor: students work in groups to design experiments, discuss arguments, and critique presentations, and the teacher facilitates these processes. Could these processes be done on one's own (i.e., can students work on scientific modeling individually, with the same success)?  
• These articles don't seem to use programming for modeling, and only vaguely mention computational models in relation to creating mathematical models. How do you see coding and/or graph-fitting at work in your future practice?