What's the Technology For? Teacher Attention and Pedagogical Goals in a Modeling-Focused Professional Development Workshop

• In Event: 49.051 - Advanced Technologies for Learning SIG Paper Session

Abstract

Science education is often criticized for avoiding the ‘messy’ nature of modeling practice. We investigate how preservice elementary teachers view technological tools as a way to navigate this messy landscape. We analyze patterns in how 11 participating teachers engage in and attend to content, representation, revision, and evaluation as interwoven modeling practices during a professional development workshop using a multimodal technological modeling toolkit. Different teacher groups attended to different practices for different purposes: using the technology to teach modeling (cycles of modeling, revision, evaluation), to engage learners with one another’s ideas (content, modeling), or to reveal student ideas (content). These differences reflected teachers’ pedagogical needs and commitments, and point to an expanded role for technology-mediated modeling in K-12 classroom settings.

Authors

• Michelle Hoda Wilkerson, University of California - Berkeley

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University

• Yara Shaban, Tufts University

• Chelsea Andrews, Tufts University