On Being Explicit: Toward a New Pedagogical Synthesis in Science

孩子们，特别是那些传统上在科学上不成功的孩子，如何学会看到他们自己对现象的解释和科学解释之间的关系，并有效地利用这些解释来支持理解？所有的孩子都能从密切关注“日常”和“科学”意义之间的关系以及表达这些意义的方式中受益吗？这些关系的本质是什么？如何在科学教学中建立这些关系？这个为期三年的项目的总体目标是培养对所有儿童在发展对科学思想的理解的同时，如何学会看到“日常”和“科学”账户所代表的物理和生物世界知识的“内部”方式的理解。我们关注的是，在科学方面，低收入族裔、种族和语言上属于少数的孩子与经济条件优越的学生之间存在着持续的成绩差距。为了解决我们的问题，我们将在1-4年级的异构和双语教室中与实践研究人员密切合作，进行一系列设计实验。这将涉及两项主要的研究活动。(1)我们将反复发展一种教学方法，将“进步”的重点放在学生的想法和问题在探究式学习中的中心地位，与“后进步”的重点放在明确教学的重要性上，即语言和符号的形式和功能在组织科学意义建构中的作用。这种新的综合教学法将把儿童思想、说话方式和认知方式的多样性作为科学学习和教学的智力资源加以利用，并使这种多样性成为课堂上讨论和探究的明确对象。在这种方法中，学生和教师将积极探索物理学（如运动和力）和生物学（如有机体生长和发育）的核心思想如何在“日常”和“科学”的描述中表现出来（如口头和书面描述、解释、理论、论证、图表、图纸、模型、表格等）。这些调查的重点将放在意义和形式以及观点和目的上。(2)我们的主要猜想是，通过参与这种探究方法，学生将发展强大的科学理解，开始发展对多种话语及其使用的掌握，并表现出较高的成就。为了达到这个目的，我们将研究孩子们在参与这种探究实践中学到了什么。我们将从多种表现中考察儿童的学习情况，包括课堂基准讨论、表现评估和成就测试。

How do children, especially children who traditionally have been unsuccessful in science, learn to see the relationships between their own and scientific accounts of phenomena and to work with these productively in support of understanding? Would all children benefit academically from close attention to the relationships between "everyday" and "scientific" meanings and ways of representing those meanings? What is the nature of these relationships, and how can they be built upon pedagogically in science? The overarching goal of this three-year project is to develop an understanding of how all children, as they develop understanding of scientific ideas, also learn to see "inside" the ways in which "everyday" and "scientific" accounts represent knowledge about the physical and biological world. It is motivated by our concern with the persistent achievement gap in science separating low-income ethnic, racial and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. To address our questions, we will engage in a series of design experiments, to be undertaken in close collaboration with practitioner researchers in heterogeneous and bilingual classrooms, grades 1-4. These will entail two main research activities. (1) We will iteratively develop a pedagogical approach that integrates "progressive" emphases on the centrality of students' ideas and questions in inquiry-based learning with "post-progressive" concerns on the importance of explicit teaching about the forms and functions of language and symbol use in organizing meaning-making in science. This new pedagogical synthesis will harness the diversity in children's ideas and ways of talking and knowing as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching and make this diversity into an explicit object of discussion and inquiry in the classroom. In this approach, students and teachers will engage in active inquiry into the ways in which core ideas in physics (e.g., motion and force) and biology (e.g., organismal growth and development) are represented in "everyday" and "scientific" accounts (e.g. spoken and written descriptions, explanations, theories, arguments; graphs; drawings; models; tables; etc.). The focus of these inquiries will be on meaning and form as well as perspective and purpose. (2) Our main conjecture is that through participation in this approach to inquiry students will develop robust scientific understanding, begin to develop command over multiple discourses and their uses, and demonstrate high achievement. Toward this end, we will study what children learn as a result of their participation in such inquiry practices. We will examine children's learning as reflected in multiple kinds of performances, including classroom benchmark discussions, performance assessments, and achievement tests.