Scaffolding Young Children's Data-Based Scientific Research:Narrowing The Gap Between Children's and Scientists' Inquiry

项目总结~。项目摘要应说明目标、所采用的方法以及拟议活动对促进知识或教育的意义。避免使用第一人称来完成此摘要。不要超过一页。(一些项目可能会施加更严格的限制。)搭建基于数据的幼儿科学研究缩小儿童和科学家调查之间的差距美国学生在评估科学和数学成绩方面表现习惯性差，再加上社会和个人对科学和数学素养的许多需求，表明在这些学科领域进行根本性改革的重要性。最新的《国家教育进步评估》(1990年)的结果表明，学生在这些学科上的理解水平仍然很低。例如，在数学方面，只有一小部分学生能够熟练地解决非常规的、多步骤的问题。在科学方面，只有少数高中生有足够的知识来解释图表或表格形式的科学数据，或者设计实验。数学和科学教育界都提出了扭转这一可怕局面的建议。这一拟议项目的框架是根据我们从数学和科学教育改革文献中看到的关键建议之间的协同作用来制定的，这些建议结合在一起，构成了强有力地解决这两个学科领域所需变革的教学方法的基础。简而言之，颇具影响力的全国数学教师委员会(NCTM)主张对数学课程进行更强的概念性和应用性取向，目标是实现一门课程，让孩子们逐渐将数学视为创造意义和解决真正问题的强大手段。NCTM认为，课程中问题的性质需要大大扩大，包括扩展的开放式调查，许多调查涉及儿童对问题的表述，关于如何着手解决问题的决定，以及对结果的陈述和解释。根据NCTM的说法，即使在小学一年级，儿童也应该进行基于数据的调查，并反思统计和概率的想法(NCTM，1989)。尽管有更多的团体参与制定基础科学教育改革的建议，对现实的教育目标的共识似乎也较少(美国科学促进会，1993年；美国国家科学院，1995年)，但科学教育界与数学教育界有着共同的长期目标，即培养对各自的知识企业持有丰富愿景的独立和持怀疑态度的探索者--科学思维或数学思维意味着什么。该项目将开发科学课程原型，让儿童设计、研究并随后分析和解释他们的数据。基于当前对数学课程更具应用性的关注，以及让数学和科学课程反映学科构建和评价知识的方式，课程的科学模式包括领域的初步探索、问题的形成、实验的计划、后续数据的收集、表示和解释、理论发展以及研究的修改和扩展。为了支持儿童的数据分析和最终的独立探究，课程原型将纳入基本统计概念的教学支持，如随机性、随机变量、大数定律和抽样。由于一些认知文献已经将特定领域的知识确定为决定推理充分性的关键因素，该项目将把儿童的调查集中在两个相互关联的领域：(A)动物行为(如昆虫S、啮齿动物和鸟类)和(B)儿童行为。由于技术工具可以使研究人员能够访问特定领域的知识库以及数据表示和分析任务，项目扩展环境将提供技术工具，并为儿童提供战略资本。该项目将仔细审查基于这些原则的教学在小学和小学高年级儿童中支持的以数据为基础的研究。项目研究将在两个背景下进行：(A)完好无损的小学二年级和五年级教室，以及(B)实验室。这种背景的结合使项目研究能够反映课堂的丰富性以及实验室支持的严谨和控制。将在整个学年的宏观和微观两个层面进行分析，以审查儿童发展基于数据的研究的动态，并与他们新出现的科学和统计知识相互作用。该项目旨在为认知理论和教育实践做出贡献。通过研究儿童在科学数据分析中对不确定性、偶然性和因果性的应用，整合和推进了儿童关于机会的推理和儿童关于因果的推理的研究文献。通过对儿童数学实践活动的设计和考察，在一个具有丰富意义和目的的背景下，推进儿童数学教育。最后，通过搭建儿童研究设计和数据分析的脚手架，拉近了儿童研究与科学家研究之间的距离。NSF表格1358(1/94)

PROJECT SUMMARY ~ . The Project Summary should include a statement of objectives, methods to be employed, and the significance of the proposed activity to the advancement of knowledge or education. Avoid use of first person to complete this summary. DO NOT EXCEED ONE PAGE. (Some Programs may impose more stringent limits.) Scaffolding Young Children's Data-Based Scientific Research Narrowing the Gap Between Children's and Scientists' Inquiry The habitual poor performance of US students on evaluations of both science and mathematics achievement, together with the many societal and individual needs for scientific and mathematical literacy, point to the importance of fundamental reform in these subject areas. The results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (1990) indicate that students continue to attain only a low level of understanding in these disciplines. For example, in mathematics only a minority of students demonstrate proficiency at solving non-routine, multi-step problems. In science, only a minority of high school seniors have the knowledge adequate to interpret scientific data in graphs or table form, or to design experiments. Both the mathematics and science education communities have formulated recommendations for reversing this dire situation. This proposed project is framed in terms of a synergy we perceive between key recommendations from the mathematics and science education reform literatures, recommendations that when combined form the basis of an instructional approach powerfully addressing needed changes in both subject areas. In short, the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has argued for a stronger conceptual and applied orientation to mathematics curriculum, with the goal of attaining a curriculum where children come to view mathematics as a powerful means of sense-making and solving genuine problems. NCTM contends that the nature of the problems in the curriculum needs to be greatly expanded, to include extended open-ended investigations, many involving the children's formulation of the question, decisions about how to go about solving the problem, and representing and interpreting their results. According to NCTM, even at the primary grade level children should be conducting data-based investigations and reflecting on ideas of statistics and probability (NCTM, 1989). Although more groups are involved in developing recommendations for elementary science education reform and there appears to be less consensus concerning realistic educational objectives (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Academy of Sciences, 1995), the science education community shares with the math education community the long-term goal of developing independent and skeptical inquirers who hold rich visions of their respective intellectual enterprises --of what it means to think scientifically or mathematically. The project will develop science curriculum prototypes where children design research and subsequently analyze and interpret their data. Grounded in current concerns to have math curriculum more applied and to have both math and science curriculum reflect the discipline's way of constructing and evaluating knowledge, the model of science underlying the curriculum encompasses preliminary explorations of the domain, fommation of questions, planning of experiments, subsequent collection, representation and interpretation of data, theory development, and revision and extension of research. In order to support children's data analysis and eventual independent inquiry, the curriculum prototypes will incorporate instructional support in fundamental statistical concepts, such as randomness, chance variation, the Law of Large Numbers and sampling. Since several cognitive literatures have identified domain-specific knowledge as a key detemminant in adequacy of reasoning, the project will concentrate the children's investigations in two interrelated domains: (a) animal behavior (such as insect s, rodents, and birds) and (b) child behavior. As technological tools can empower researchers in their access to domain-specific knowledge-bases and the task of data representation and analysis, the project reaming environments will provide technological tools and scaffold the children's strategic capitalization thereof. The project will closely examine the data-based research that instruction based on these principles supports among children at the primary and upper elementary levels. Project research will take place in two contexts: (a) intact elementary school classrooms at the second and fifth grade levels, and (b) the laboratory. This combination of contexts allows the project research to reflect the richness of the classroom and the rigor and control supported by the laboratory. Analysis will be conducted at both the macro and micro levels across the longitudinal context of the school year, in order to examine the dynamics of children's developing data-based research, in interaction with their emergent scientific and statistical knowledge. The project is designed to make contributions to both cognitive theory and educational practice. It integrates and advances the research literatures of children's reasoning about chance and children's reasoning about causality, through study of children's application of uncertainty, chance and causality in their scientific data analysis. It advances children's mathematics education, through design and investigation of children's practice of mathematics in a context of rich meaning and purpose. Finally, it narrows the gap between children's and scientists' inquiry, through scaffolding children's research design and data analysis. NSF FORM 1358 (1/94)