Modeling the Wild: Using Microcosms to Support Students' Ecological Field Studies

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

Abstract

Objectives. Over the past decade, the field of science education has reframed student learning as participation in the practices of science (National Research Council, 2012). This shift has been informed by our understanding of how scientists construct knowledge and emphasizes the integration of knowledge and practice (Ford, 2015; Ford & Forman, 2006). However, much is still unknown about how the practices of science interact in students’ activity and how practice co-develops alongside core disciplinary ideas. This paper addresses these needs by examining how students recruited the core ideas and practices that emerged from classroom-based modeling of aquatic microcosms to advance their ecological field studies of a local creek.
Theoretical Framework. I adopt a science-as-practice perspective and position student learning as emerging from participation in meaningful approximations of disciplinary work (Ford & Forman, 2006; Kelly, 2011; Osborne, 2014). Though similarities of practice extend across science, this study is specifically situated within the domain of ecology. Ecologists investigate questions by conducting experiments and creating models in laboratory settings; however, they also carry out much of their research in the field (Eberhardt & Thomas, 1991; Hall, Stevens, & Torralba, 2002; Korfiatis & Tunnicliffe, 2012; Lefkaditou, Korfiatis, & Hovardas, 2014; Mauz & Granjou, 2013). Movement across these spaces often problematizes ecologists’ current assumptions and advances new forms of knowledge and practice.
Methods and Data. This paper presents a case study of one team of four students from a design study (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) in which middle school students investigated a local creek. This study was sequenced around four mini-cycles of investigation. The first cycle (creek visit 1) aimed to expand students’ awareness of the creek. The second cycle (classroom microcosms) introduced new abiotic factors and used microcosm investigations to uncover ecological relationships. The third cycle (creek visit 2) supported students in researching their own questions. And the fourth cycle (creek visit 3) explored whether the differences in students’ data could be due to chance or revealed key ecological functions. I collected video records of students’ activity, retrospective interviews, pre/post-tests, and written artifacts and analyzed this data corpus using interaction analysis (Hall & Stevens, 2015; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) as appropriate.
Results. When modeling the microcosms, students drew upon different forms of ecological knowledge and practice than during their first creek investigations. They then used these new resources to restructure their second and third creek investigations in five key ways. First, students shifted the questions they asked to focus on ecological relationships rather than organism incidence. Second, they imported new abiotic measures into their investigations. Third, they positioned elements from the creek as functionally equivalent to different elements from the microcosm and merged these in ecological explanations. Fourth, they looked for patterns in data rather than relying on single points of data. And fifth, they used the experiences of others to make sense of their own data.
Scholarly significance. This study expands our understanding of how classroom-based modeling can help advance students’ field-based research.

Author

• Michelle Forsythe, Texas State University