Elementary School Students’ Engagement and Emotions When Participating in Scientific Practices

• In Event: Promoting Epistemic Practices in Science Classes

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical framework
During the last decades science education has changed considerably, with reform documents placing an emphasis on scientific practices NRC, 2012). These efforts were initiated to prepare more students to follow science careers, and to help students appreciate the connections of science to everyday life (Aikenhead, 2006). Several studies in science education explored ways to engage students in the learning of science (e.g. M. Ainley & Ainley, 2011; Reschly, Huebner, Appleton, & Antaramian, 2008), but all of the studies are doing so from the perspective of the researcher, and not the student. For example, socioscientific issues, argumentation and modeling are often used as a context to engage students (Evagorou, 2011; Mcdonald, 2010), but there is no evidence that the students conceive them as pleasant or engaging. Based on the aforementioned gap, the research questions guiding this work are: (a) What are students’ emotions about participating in various scientific practices? and (b) Do students’ emotions about the scientific practices influence their participation?
Methods and data sources
In order to explore these issues a learning environment was designed based on a socio-scientific issue, asking students to construct models to use as part of their decision making process. The driving question of the learning environment was: ‘What solution(s) do you propose as more appropriate to deal with the excessive mosquitoes in your area?’ During the 14 lessons (40 minutes each) the students visited the salt-lake that was causing the, they constructed and deployed physical models of the lake, explored different solutions for the problem and chose one to represent in their models, argued collaboratively, and presented their solution to local authorities. The project was implemented with 19 students (11-12 year olds) in Cyprus. All students were individually interviewed after the end of the instruction in order to explore their emotions as emerged by the instruction. Additionally, all groups were video-recorded during all lessons and videos were analyzed to identify students’ participation in the activities and their emotions.
Selected results
Our initial findings suggest that students experienced positive emotions for most of the scientific practices, e.g. creating physical models to represent their solutions, investigating an authentic problem as group, presenting their findings to stakeholders, discussing their solutions as a group before deciding. Additionally, almost all students reported negative emotions about the uncertainty of the solutions. Specifically the students expressed frustration because all the proposed solutions had a number of implications for the environment, and there was no single ‘correct’ solution. Students’ positive emotions influenced their participation in the scientific practices – for example the students that reported excitement about the modeling process were actively engaged in that. On the contrary students’ negative emotion did not necessarily influence their practice – for example students who reported frustration about the uncertain aspect of the socio-scientific issue were actively engaged.
Significance
The data reported here provide useful insights that could inform teachers’ in-class instructional efforts. Implications include respecting individual students’ emotions during instruction, and appreciating that authentic investigations might be negatively perceived by students.

Authors

• Christiana Theophani Nicolaou, University of Cyprus

• Maria Evagorou, University of Nicosia

• Chrystalla Lymboridou, Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus