Leveraging a Virtual Chemistry Lab Environment to Engage Students in 3-D Learning

• In Event: 47.088 - Overcoming Challenges in Developing and Implementing Next Generation Science Standards–Aligned Instructional Materials and Assessments

Abstract

Our project aims to create interactive online chemistry activities that address disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts by engaging students in science and engineering practices of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Though researchers and practitioners strive for science instruction that integrates conceptual knowledge and science practice skills, much of the focus has been on lower grade levels and through the science practices of model building or evidence-based argumentation (e.g., Berland et al., 2015).

At the high school level, students must move beyond domain-general strategies, such as control of variables, to domain-specific strategies, such as how to design an experiment that specifically targets the chemical components of interest and provides measures relevant to the problem at hand (Duschl & Bybee, 2014). The volume and complexity of the content knowledge poses special challenges for meaningfully applying scientific principles to investigations. These challenges include: 1) How can we help students think more like experts when engaging in investigations? 2) What phenomena provide rich contexts for exploration?, and, 3) What types of online tasks can provide evidence of three-dimensional science learning?
To apply the vision of three-dimensional learning set forth from NGSS, the work builds on research in science education and cognitive science. In the field of chemistry education, the Johnstone triangle (Johnstone, 1991), captures three representations of chemical phenomena that must be coordinated to understand the disciplinary core ideas of chemistry: symbolic (e.g., notations of chemistry), submicroscopic (e.g., interactions of particles and forces), and macroscopic (e.g. substances or solutions in a lab).

How do experts coordinate these representations when planning investigations? As experts automate many problem-solving processes, their self-reports often fail to specify important steps (e.g., Blessing & Anderson, 1996; Feldon, 2007). For the current project, we apply an organizational framework for how experts approach experimental design based on cognitive task analysis.
Our activities are iteratively designed using an evidence-centered design approach that aligns a student model to a task model and then to an evidence model (e.g., Almond et al., 2002; Mislevy & Riconscente, 2006; Mislevy, 2007). The research and development cycle involves specifying the three dimensions of NGSS that are targeted for each activity, testing prototypes in authentic contexts in collaboration with teachers, and creating revisions based on observations and interviews. We will share insights from iterative development based on data from four teachers and 339 students at diverse high schools.

Over the course of developing novel activities for high school chemistry, our project team has developed a framework for eliciting expert reasoning about science practices. We will describe our process for selecting phenomena, such as testing for containments in drinking water, or creating cold packs that allow students to engage in authentic practices while learning core content. Finally, we will provide examples of a design process to develop tasks that require students to engage in 3D learning.

Authors

• Jodi Davenport, WestEd

• David Yaron, Carnegie Mellon University