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

这项研究解决了小学课程中学校生活的碎片化和科学教育的脱节问题。这项研究的目的是探索是否可以在小学课堂上开展教学活动，促进跨越科学和历史的联系，从而提高学习科学的学生的认识论成熟度。该项目将包括一系列设计性实验，包括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。因为这些相似之处和不同之处很少是课堂辩论的明确话题，学生们通常被留下来自己从一个主题到另一个主题建立联系。结果，那些最不能给学生带来概念上的连贯性的人--学生--最终不得不承担起必须这样做的负担。这个项目将寻求培养的智力工具是科学和历史共享的工具。这些都是论述和论证的工具。如果该项目成功地帮助学生使用和适应与科学和历史中证据和原因的核心思想有关的论述工具，它应该达到两个目标：(I)学生将学会欣赏智力工作的连续性及其通过学科的本质特殊性；(Ii)学生将开始将智力资源视为超越狭隘环境的有用资源。由于学校生活的碎片化对小学教师来说同样是一个挑战，该项目还将研究和支持教师在科学和历史之间建立联系。基于认知和学习的特定学科研究的既定传统，该项目将探讨学校科目的比较心理学，作为一个围绕一套教育干预措施组织的经验性项目。提出扩展特定学科的方法的动机是，这种方法未能说明一个学科的调查形式可能如何影响另一个学科的智力努力--考虑到学校生活的碎片化，这是一个相当重要的问题。这个项目的广泛的智力目标是建立一个大于其各部分之和的整体理论。这一系列的设计性实验将在五年级的教室里与老师合作进行。该项目将收集和分析自然主义话语数据，并使用专门为支持科学学习期间的辩论而设计的软件。这些设计性实验的广泛教育目标是提供一种“存在的证据”，证明可以培养出跨学科结构，同时公平地对待不同学科的具体情况，同时建立适当的智力联系。通过这样做，学生和教师可能会对学校知识的价值获得更大的信心。通过明确地强调科学和其他学科(在这种情况下是历史)之间的异同，学生们可以在他们的教育生涯中很早就知道科学是一种生成性的、相互联系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.