Development of a Collaborative Task That Integrates Science and Civic Learning

• In Event: The Design of Collaborative Activities Across Disciplines to Promote Student Learning and Agency

Abstract

Conceptualizing and assessing K-12 students’ application of relevant scientific topics that have civic expectations are critical for the integration of academic instruction of science with civic education. Civic learning connects with multiple science topics such as global climate change, water availability, and antibiotic resistance. Furthermore, highlighting civic learning is relevant in the current societal context of digital misinformation and needs for civic participation. Collaborative work is a natural setting to elicit this type of learning, as students need to discuss the credibility of scientific evidence and the implications for scientific-based decisions on human communities. Little research, however, has been conducted to determine how the intersection of science, socioemotional learning, and civics look like.
In this study, we developed a framework about the integration of civics and science domains to guide the task design. Regarding the science components, we unpacked the performance expectations of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) and identified civic outcomes related to specific disciplinary ideas and scientific practices. For the civic components, we identified examples of civic knowledge, skills and dispositions outlined in the 2018 Civics Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We identified skills and competencies that are valued in both areas, such as analyzing and evaluating data, communicating scientific evidence to different audiences, and working collaboratively to understand different perspectives of a scientific phenomenon.
Under the framework, we designed a collaborative task on urban heat islands in the context of climate change education. In this task, students explore the causes that explain differences in summer temperature between urban and suburban settings. Then they analyze and discuss data about daily temperature and heat maps from two New Jersey nearby localities, but with different levels of social and environmental characteristics. Students use these data sources to identify factors that could have contributed to the heat islands phenomenon, making connections to global climate change and showing their understanding of its impact on people living in different places. Finally, students collaboratively write a letter to a local news outlet to communicate this issue to their audience and call for actions that can mitigate the heat islands phenomenon. We received feedback on the task design from an interdisciplinary team and science teachers.
We are conducting cognitive interviews with ten dyads of middle school students to explore the science and civic outcomes and to explore the types of collaboration that students carry out in the task. We are applying a collaborative problem solving framework (Liu et al., 2015) to qualitatively annotate and analyze group discourse process data to identify collaborative features and how these features relate to student conceptual understanding of the issue. We will annotate how various student cultural and family background weaves into their argumentation of civic issues. This study has implications to guide the development of multidisciplinary instructional and assessment tasks that enhance collaboration.

Authors

• Dante Cisterna, Educational Testing Service

• Lei Liu, Educational Testing Service

• Yi Song, Educational Testing Service