Signaling in Disciplinarily Integrated Games to Promote Representational Competence in Manipulating and Translating Across Models

• In Event: 32.029 - Supporting Science as a Modeling Practice in the Classroom Through the Lens of Next Generation Science Standards

Abstract

Objectives/Theoretical framework. Interpreting, translating, and manipulating across formal representations is central to scientific practice and modeling (Pickering, 1995; Lehrer & Schauble, 2006a, 2006b; Duschl et al., 2007). We have developed a genre of games that we call disciplinarily-integrated games such that players’ actions involve the iterative development of inscriptions in the form of computational and mathematized models of focal phenomenon in order to investigate key conceptual relationships in the domain while also developing facility with the representations and inscriptions themselves (Authors, 2015, 2016a, 2016b). Supporting students in engaging with these practices of manipulating and transforming across models and representations, however, is challenging. Madsen and colleagues have demonstrated the efficacy of signaling in helping students concentrate on key relationships in diagrams (Madsen, Larson, Loschky, & Rebello, 2012; Madsen, Rouinfar, Larson, Loschky, & Rebello, 2013). Following from that work, the purpose of this study was to assess explore the utility of signaling for supporting students in manipulating and translating across formal representations in disciplinarily-integrated games.
Methods and Data. Sixty-nine students from a diverse public middle school participated in this study. Students were randomly assigned to either the signaling or non-signaling condition. Pretests, posttests, and engagement surveys were administered to all students Interviews/screen recordings were conducted for a subset of students.
Results. The signaling experimental group demonstrated significant pretest-posttest gains while the non-signaling group did not. Further analyses demonstrated that the signaling group performed significantly better than the non-signaling group for questions that bridged phenomenological and Cartesian representations. Students’ game-play metrics were and interviews were also analyzed. Overall, the results demonstrate that signaling functionality can provide support for students in manipulating and translating across multiple representations as the students explore underlying relationships in the models.
Scholarly significance.Can disciplinary integration and the signaling approach from the current study be abstracted and generalized beyond Newtonian dynamics to other core topics? Collins and colleagues (Collins, White, & Fadel, in preparation; Collins, 2011; Collins & Ferguson, 1993) argue that the professional work of scientists can be understood in terms of model types that are the target structures guiding scientific inquiry (epistemic forms) and modeling strategies that are the sets of rules and strategies for creating, manipulating, and refining those model types (epistemic games). While Collins and Ferguson did not write with the intention of informing the design of actual digital games (they used the term “game” as a metaphor), disciplinarily-integrated games can be framed as building on the ideas of Collins and colleagues by structuring digital game play around modeling strategies (epistemic games) of designing and manipulating formal disciplinary model types (epistemic forms). If we frame the puzzles in disciplinarily integrated games as distilling model types and modeling strategies, we open disciplinary-integration well beyond our focus on Newtonian dynamics to span across disciplines. The approach therefore provides powerful affordances for NGSS because the conceptualization of DIGs as multiple representational modeling systems supports connections of crosscutting concepts and practices across curricula.

Authors

• Doug Clark, Vanderbilt University

• Satyugjit Singh Virk, Teachers College, Columbia University