A Comparative Psychology of School Subjects: Promoting Epistemological Sophistication in Elementary Science Learning through the Study of History

本研究探讨了小学课程中科学教育的碎片化和脱节。本研究的目的是探讨教学活动是否可以在小学课堂上实施，促进跨科学和历史的联系，提高学生学习科学的认识论的复杂性。该项目将涉及一系列设计实验，涉及为学生和教师提供智力工具，以明确科学和历史思维的异同。由于这些相似性和差异性很少是课堂辩论的明确主题，学生们通常会自己从一个主题到下一个主题建立联系。结果，那些最不能把概念连贯性带到学校的学生最终承担了必须这样做的负担。这个项目将寻求培养的智力工具是科学和历史共享的。这些是话语和论证的工具。如果该项目是成功地帮助学生适当和适应相关的证据和原因的科学和历史的核心思想的论点的话语工具，它应该实现两个目标：（i）学生将学会欣赏智力工作的连续性和学科的基本特性和（ii）学生将开始把智力资源作为有用的超越狭隘的情况。由于学校一天的碎片化对小学教师来说也是一个挑战，该项目还将研究和支持教师，因为他们在科学和历史上建立联系。基于对认知和学习的特定学科研究的既定传统，本项目将追求学校科目的比较心理学，作为围绕一套教育干预措施组织的实证项目。学科特定方法的扩展建议的动机是这样一个事实，即这种方法未能提供一个学科的调查形式如何可能塑造在另一个智力努力的帐户-一个相当重要的问题，鉴于碎片化的学校一天。这个项目的广泛的智力目标是建立一个整体的理论，大于其部分的总和。该系列设计实验将在五年级的教室与教师合作进行。该项目将收集和分析自然主义的话语数据，并使用专门为支持科学学习过程中的论证而设计的软件。这些设计实验的广泛教育目标是提供一个“存在证明”，即可以培养跨学科结构，同时兼顾不同学科的具体情况，同时建立适当的智力联系。这样做，学生和教师可能会对学校知识的价值产生更大的信心。通过明确强调科学和其他学科（在这种情况下，历史）之间的相似性和差异，学生可以在他们的教育生涯早期学习科学是一种生成性的，相关的和相关的智力活动。

This research addresses the fragmentation of the school day and the disconnectedness of science education within the elementary curriculum. The purpose of the study is to explore whether pedagogical activities can be implemented in elementary classrooms that foster connections across science and history that enhance the epistemological sophistication of students learning science. The project will involve a series of design experiments that involve providing students and teachers with intellectual tools to make explicit the similarities and differences of thinking in science and history. Because these similarities and differences are rarely explicit topics of classroom debate, students are typically left on their own to make connections from one subject to the next. As a result those least able to bring conceptual coherence to the school day-students-end up shouldering the burden of having to do so. The intellectual tools that this project will seek to foster are ones that science and history share. These are tools of discourse and argumentation. If the project is successful in helping students appropriate and adapt the discursive tools of argument related to core ideas of evidence and cause in science and history, it should achieve two goals: (i) students will learn to appreciate the continuity of intellectual work and its essential specificities by discipline and (ii) students will begin to treat intellectual resources as useful beyond narrow circumstances. Because the fragmentation of the school day is no less a challenge for elementary school teachers, the project will also research and support teachers as they make connections across science and history. Building upon an established tradition of discipline-specific research on cognition and learning, this project will pursue a comparative psychology of school subjects as an empirical project organized around a set of educational interventions. The proposed extension of the discipline-specific approach is motivated by the fact that this approach fails to provide an account of how forms of inquiry in one discipline might shape intellectual endeavors in another-an issue of considerable importance given the fragmentation of the school day. The broad intellectual goal of this project is to build a theory of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The series of design experiments will be conducted in fifth-grade classrooms in collaboration with teachers. The project will collect and analyze naturalistic discourse data and use software designed specifically for supporting argumentation during science learning. The broad educational goal of these design experiments is to offer an "existence proof" that cross-disciplinary structures can be cultivated that simultaneously do justice to the specifics of distinct disciplines while at the same time establishing appropriate intellectual connectedness. In so doing, students and teachers are likely to gain greater confidence in the value of school knowledge. By explicitly highlighting the similarities and differences between science and other subjects (in this case, history), students can learn early in their educational careers that science is a generative, connected, and relevant intellectual activity.