Getting to the CoRe of It! Exploring Content Representations in the Context of Undergraduate Science

• In Event: Gaining CoRe Insight: Examining the Uses of Content Representations for Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development in Science Teaching

Abstract

Objective
Our study focuses on improving students’ content knowledge, most of which are elementary preservice teachers, in a first year Geology course. The premise of this course is to inform students about climate change issues through understanding the life cycle of Earth (geologic time). Our instructional intervention consisted of the Content Representation tool (CoRes) as a component of the students’ weekly laboratory report.

Theoretical Perspective
Research (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999) suggests metacognition, or the act of reflection on one’s understanding of the concepts, is critical to developing scientific literacy (Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989). We used the CoRe (Loughran et al. 2004) as a means of supporting students with developing an understanding of the concepts explored in a lab. To accomplish this, we modified the CoRe questions to focus on explaining content for purposes of developing scientific literacy; a necessary component of PCK development.

Methods and Data Sources
Using a mixed-method approach, we phased in our modified CoRe into the weekly laboratory report of one section of 18 undergraduates. Our data sources included a pre/post geology content test (MOSART, 2011), comparisons of grades on three different course exams, and a qualitative review of the experimental group’s CoRe question responses for labs 6-12 (of 12 labs).

Results/Conclusions
We understand it is difficult to generalize our findings with such a small sample, but do believe our results show the potential of using the CoRe as an instructional tool for improving content knowledge as part of scientific literacy. First, while there were no differences between the groups from Exam 1 to Exam 2 there were differential outcomes for the two groups from Exam 2 to the Final Exam. Second, looking at the pre to post MOSART test results, a Wilcoxon test indicated students in the experimental lab group made more significant gains [Z = -2.965, p=.003] than their peers in the comparison group [Z = -2.112, p=.035. Third, our qualitative analysis of the weekly CoRe responses indicated that by the second half of the semester students were making connections to other labs or current events in their life for the first three questions of the CoRe (the questions focused on explaining for self), but fewer connections with the final three questions (the questions focused on explaining concepts to others). One explanation for this difference may simply be the time students had with the first three questions as they were introduced beginning with lab two and remained for all labs. Whereas the final three questions were not introduced until later (two questions at lab 6 and a final question at lab 10).

Scholarly Significance of the Work
We recognize, like most pilots, there are various design issues and limitations to our study such as a small participant pool, clarity of some CoRe questions, and the progressive scaffolding technique employed. However, we feel the significance of this work is the prospect our results offer and the implications we will share for improving future design and implementation of the CoRe tool in this learning context.

Authors

• Meredith A. Park Rogers, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Adam V. Maltese, Indiana University