Identifying middle school students' challenges in computational thinking-based science learning.
Identifying middle school students' challenges in computational thinking-based science learning.
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DOI：
10.1186/s41039-016-0036-2
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发表时间：
2016-01-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Clark, Douglas
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Basu, Satabdi;Biswas, Gautam;Clark, Douglas
计算思维（CT）与科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）教育的核心实践平行，被认为可以有效地支持学生对科学和数学概念的学习。然而，尽管CT和STEM教育之间存在协同效应，但将两者整合以支持协同学习仍然是一项重要挑战。相对而言，人们对学生在这种学习环境中如何发展概念理解以及他们在使用这种综合课程学习时面临的困难知之甚少。在本文中，我们提出了一项基于计算思维的K-12科学学习环境CTSiM （Computational Thinking In Simulation and Modeling）的研究，在该环境中，学生建立和模拟计算模型来学习和理解科学过程。我们调查了中学生在使用CTSiM时面临的一系列核心挑战（包括计算和科学领域相关的挑战），这些挑战如何在不同的建模活动中演变，以及人类观察者提供的帮助学生克服这些挑战的支持类型。我们确定了四大类挑战和14个子挑战，并表明人类提供的支架有助于减少学生面临的挑战数量。最后，我们讨论了修改CTSiM接口和将脚手架工具嵌入CTSiM的计划，以帮助学生克服各种编程，建模和科学相关的挑战，从而更深入地了解科学概念。
Computational thinking (CT) parallels the core practices of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and is believed to effectively support students' learning of science and math concepts. However, despite the synergies between CT and STEM education, integrating the two to support synergistic learning remains an important challenge. Relatively, little is known about how a student's conceptual understanding develops in such learning environments and the difficulties they face when learning with such integrated curricula. In this paper, we present a research study with CTSiM (Computational Thinking in Simulation and Modeling)-computational thinking-based learning environment for K-12 science, where students build and simulate computational models to study and gain an understanding of science processes. We investigate a set of core challenges (both computational and science domain related) that middle school students face when working with CTSiM, how these challenges evolve across different modeling activities, and the kinds of support provided by human observers that help students overcome these challenges. We identify four broad categories and 14 subcategories of challenges and show that the human-provided scaffolds help reduce the number of challenges students face over time. Finally, we discuss our plans to modify the CTSiM interfaces and embed scaffolding tools into CTSiM to help students overcome their various programming, modeling, and science-related challenges and thus gain a deeper understanding of the science concepts.