Invented Science as a Framework for Capitalizing on Variation in Student Ideas

• In Event: 28.071 - Designing for and Engaging With Heterogeneity in Students' Thinking in Science

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes: While this session is motivated by our shared understanding of the value of variation in student ideas—and the inevitability of this variation—there remain open questions regarding the relationship between this epistemological stance and learning outcomes. In particular, our field struggles to articulate how teachers can respond to variable, and often times unexpected, student ideas in ways that enable and build on that variation when working towards particular understandings (Hammer & Sikorski, 2015). This tension is apparent in questions we have all heard, and experienced ourselves, such as: “What do I say to a learner who gives a logical but wrong explanation?” or “Can I let my students leave my class with a wrong idea?”. Our paper offers Invented Science (Authors, accepted) as a framework for tackling practical questions such as these that emerge when educators engage with variation in student ideas.

Theoretical Perspective: Building on the insight of one of our own pre-service teachers that knowledge building in science classes is parallel to the activity of Invented Spelling (e.g., Chomsky, 1971), we propose Invented Science as a framework for articulating how teachers can capitalize on, rather than diminish, the variability in their students’ ideas.
In the Invented Science activity system, learners use a system of constraints made up of elemental, conceptual knowledge coupled with epistemological and experiential knowledge to make sense of the world. These sensemakings need not be correct; they merely need to satisfy their own and their class’ curiosity. Accuracy develops over long time scales involving multiple instantiations of figuring out, as learners come into contact with new constraints and therefore successively apply more constraints to their sensemaking (See Figure 1).
Results: The Invented Science framework provides language for considering the challenges of productively engaging with variation in student ideas. For example, in response to questions about whether it is “ok” for students to leave science class with disparate, incorrect ideas, the Invented Science framework suggests that we should base this decision on the constraints students are using in their sensemaking, rather than the outcome of that sensemaking. That is, heterogeneous understandings are reasonable—and often productive—outcomes when students are applying their current understandings of how the world works in reasonable ways. We will more fully explain this perspective, and other implications of Invented Science, in the full paper.

Significance: While the field of science education has reached agreement regarding the importance of classrooms building on students’ inevitably varied ideas (Schwarz, Passmore, & Reiser, 2016), the relationship between this stance and the outcome of students’ sensemaking remains murky, particularly when considering teacher’s in-the-moment responses to student ideas (Hammer, Goldberg, & Fargason, 2012). Invented Science offers a framework for researchers and educators to explore and discuss this relationship.

Authors

• Rosemary Russ, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison