Bringing Holistic Scientific Practice to the Classroom: Insights From Scientist-Student Interactions

• In Event: Learning to Engage: Scientists, Engineers, Educators, and Youth in Learning Collaborations

Abstract

Purpose / Objective
The Next Generation Science Standards were the first science education policy documents to position scientific practice on equal footing with science content knowledge. This study investigates how a curriculum design that partnered high school biology students with related disciplinary experts helped cultivate disciplinary ways of participating in science through the shared construction of an evidence-based classroom artifact, an infographic, intended to communicate the research and implications of climate change on ecosystems.

Theoretical Framework
We leveraged social practice theory, specifically the lens of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to understand how students became engaged in a system of disciplinary practices as they constructed evidence-based arguments in partnership with experts who modeled for students disciplinary habits of mind related to scientific argumentation. We view both the infographic and the shared data sets as boundary objects (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Star & Greisemer, 1989; Wenger, 1999) that mediated and scaffolded scientific discourse between learners and disciplinary experts.

Methods & Data Sources
This study draws from two pilot enactments of a curriculum unit on the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change, created using a design-based research approach (Barab & Squire, 2004) as part of a year-long biology course that partnered disciplinary experts with students via an online learning platform and in person classroom visits. Implementation occurred in three rural and suburban classrooms in the Pacific Northwest (total: 48 student participants).We analyzed scientists’ feedback on 23 infographics. Feedback was analyzed using an iterative, coding strategy (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), with a coding structure that began with a priori parent codes with child codes added via open coding. Each line or sentence of feedback was coded individually; excerpts could and often did have multiple codes. Assertions were generated and the data corpus was reviewed for disconfirming evidence (Erickson, 1986).

Results
Through feedback on the infographic, scientists modeled disciplinary ways of structuring evidence-based arguments and revealed that the construction of successful arguments was deeply entwined with other NGSS scientific practices. Scientists approached developing argumentation expertise not as a stand-alone practice, but rather as a trajectory of participation in a holistic system of practices. For example, scientists used “speculating questions,” that the scientist did not necessarily know the answer to, to demonstrate how s/he would approach consideration of relevant phenomena to evaluate whether or not these phenomena supported an argument. Scientists generated evidence-based questions, and made connections to current research. In addition, scientists examined students’ use and interpretation of professional data sets, and emphasized that providing and appropriately interpreting data, and having congruence between graphics and text were valuable components of argumentation practice.


Significance
Prior research on student-expert partnerships has shown that students are often positioned as witnesses to scientific practice rather than developing experts (Bell et al., 2003). Our research design shows how classroom artifacts serve as boundary objects that apprentice learners into disciplinary practices of evidence-based argumentation. In addition, our findings indicate that professionally collected and processed data may be more effective at mediating student-expert discourse than student-generated data.

Authors

• Elizabeth Walsh, San José State University

• Veronica Cassone McGowan, University of Washington - Seattle