Beyond instructional practices: Characterizing learning environments that support students in explaining chemical phenomena
Beyond instructional practices: Characterizing learning environments that support students in explaining chemical phenomena
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DOI：
10.1002/tea.21746
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发表时间：
2022-01-13
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Stowe, Ryan L.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Ralph, Vanessa R.;Scharlott, Leah J.;Stowe, Ryan L.
许多围绕改进大招生大学科学、技术、工程和数学 (STEM) 课程的讨论主要（或完全）关注改变教学实践。通过将动态、复杂的学习环境减少为教学方法的集合，我们忽略了课程生态系统中其他有意义的部分（例如课程、评估）。在这里，我们主张将 STEM 教育改革对话扩展到“主动学习与被动学习”之外。我们认为，如果我们的教学和评估内容与我们的教学方式一起讨论，那么研究人员和教师群体将会得到更好的服务。为了能够就支持学生解释现象的学习环境特征进行细致入微的对话，我们定义了一个大学 STEM 学习环境模型，该模型关注考试中强调和奖励的智力工作（即评估重点）、全班会议中教授的内容（即教学重点）以及这些会议的实施方式（即教学实践）。随后，我们描述了三门不同的化学课程，并定性地研究了化学学习环境的特征，这些特征有效地支持学生解释为什么烧杯中的水随着白色固体溶解而变暖。此外，我们还定量研究了入学准备措施在多大程度上解释了学生对每个学习环境中入学情况的解释差异。我们的研究结果表明，有效支持学习者解释溶解的学习环境强调盐在课堂和评估中溶解的方式和原因。改变传统结构课程（即按主要评估数学和记忆的主题组织的课程）的教学方法似乎不会影响学生解释的复杂性。此外，我们观察到，学习环境注册对学生解释中观察到的差异的解释要多于大学前数学准备的衡量标准。这一发现表明，强调和奖励对课堂现象和评估中的因果解释的构建可能会支持更公平的成就。
Many conversations surrounding improvement of large-enrollment college science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) courses focus primarily (or solely) on changing instructional practices. By reducing dynamic, complex learning environments to collections of teaching methods, we neglect other meaningful parts of a course ecosystem (e.g., curriculum, assessments). Here, we advocate extending STEM education reform conversations beyond "active versus passive learning." We argue communities of researchers and instructors would be better served if what we teach and assess was discussed alongside how we teach. To enable nuanced conversations about the characteristics of learning environments that support students in explaining phenomena, we defined a model of college STEM learning environments which attends to the intellectual work emphasized and rewarded on exams (i.e., assessment emphasis), what is taught in whole-class meetings (i.e., instructional emphasis), and how those meetings are enacted (i.e., instructional practices). We subsequently characterized three distinct chemistry courses and qualitatively examined the characteristics of chemistry learning environments that effectively supported students in explaining why a beaker of water warms as a white solid dissolves. Furthermore, we quantitatively investigated the extent to which measures of incoming preparation explained variance in students' explanations relative to enrollment in each learning environment. Our findings demonstrate that learning environments that effectively supported learners in explaining dissolution emphasized how and why salts dissolve in-class and on assessments. Changing teaching methods in an otherwise traditionally structured course (i.e., a course organized by topics that primarily assesses math and recall) did not appear to impact the sophistication of students' explanations. Additionally, we observed that learning environment enrollment explained substantially more of the variance observed in students' explanations than measures of precollege math preparation. This finding suggests that emphasizing and rewarding the construction of causal accounts for phenomena in-class and on assessments may support more equitable achievement.