Interest Generators for Scientific Knowledge Building

• In Event: 72.065 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 72.065-7 - Computational Methods for Qualitative Learning Sciences Research: Affording Materiality to Text-Based Data

Abstract

Objectives and conceptual framework
In light of recent reforms in science education, researchers and practitioners have become increasingly concerned with engaging students meaningfully in knowledge-building endeavors that emulate the work of scientists (Duschl, 2008; NRC, 2012). Although this kind of engagement leads to deeper understanding of content and of the nature of scientific ideas, doing science this way is difficult for students because it requires sustained engagement and persistence in pursuing rich knowledge-building goals.

Sustained engagement requires interest (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). However, it is unclear whether the form of the activity or the topic is most generative for student interest (e.g. Bathgate, Schunn, & Correnti, 2013; Swarat, Ortony, & Revelle, 2012). In addition, we understand very little about why students find topics or activities interesting. This study explores students’ perspectives on their science class in order to understand what kinds of classroom activities or topics are interesting and why. These findings provide insight into how sustained engagement develops and offer design implications for fostering it.

Data collection and analysis
I conducted this study with 7th grade students in a suburban school that was using a curriculum designed to engage students in scientific knowledge building (Krajcik, McNeill, & Reiser, 2007). I collected students’ written responses to two short-answer questions—“What was the most interesting part of the physics unit?” and “Why was it so interesting for you?”—at the end of a unit that focused on understanding conservation of energy. I transcribed each student’s set of responses and used the NLTK (Bird, 2006) to read the text. I then converted the text into vectors and clustered the vectors using centroid clustering (see Sherin, 2013).

Preliminary results and scholarly significance
In order to see what kinds of classroom activities or topics were most interesting to students, I assigned student responses to the first question into 8 different clusters, identified in Table 1. Interestingly, the majority of clusters consisted of either general principles or ideas from the unit (Clusters 4, 5, & 6) or the “take-away” idea from a specific activity (Clusters 2 and 3). Only one cluster of responses focused only on a specific activity (Cluster 1) and only one cluster focused on miscellaneous facts from the unit (Cluster 7). This analysis suggests that the connection between the activity and the ideas is memorable and interesting to students and implies that designing activities that illustrate or demonstrate a “big idea” or principle that students are to construct and take away is important for generating or maintaining engagement in class as well as for content learning (Barron, et al, 1998).

Continued work will also analyze students’ responses to why the idea or activity they selected was most interesting. Initial analyses suggest that both the novelty of ideas and their generative explanatory power may be important factors in generating and developing student interest. These analyses begin to give us more nuanced information about student interest and engagement that helps us as we support students in their engagement of sustained and demanding scientific knowledge building.

Author

• Christina R. Krist, Northwestern University