The Ideal Science Student: Helping Teachers Adapt to Diversity in the Science Classroom

理想的理科学生：帮助教师适应科学课堂的多样性

• 批准号: 0723795
• 负责人: Xiaodong Lin
• 金额: $ 80万
• 依托单位: Teachers College, Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-10-01 至 2011-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0723795&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Ideal; Science; Student; Helping; Teachers

Routine expertise, where one gets better and better at a recurrent and stable set of tasks, is not sufficient for science teachers who work in contexts of high diversity. Students, particularly those in urban settings, are extremely diverse in the values that they bring to school-based learning and the ways these values evolve within a classroom. Teachers need to become adaptive experts, who continue to learn and change in response to diverse situations. The hypothesis of this study is that an important pathway to adaptive expertise for teachers is for them to become aware of the variability among their students' values and possible mismatches with their own. This can help teachers develop the habits of seeking relevant information and overcoming the natural tendency to adopt the first problem-solving strategy and solution that comes to mind. It is only by attending to the information that indicates how a situation deviates from the usual one that teachers can continue to learn, adapt and optimize student learning. To investigate this hypothesis, the study will examine the value systems of students and teachers around science learning. Values have not been central to major theories of children's science learning compared to the voluminous research on children's cognition about science. Yet, in a climate of high diversity, it is unreasonable to suppose that cognition about scientific phenomena is the only psychological lever for improving the country's STEM capacity. The goal is to address the socio-cultural aspect of science learning at a level that also includes individual cognition around ideas about what it means to be a good science learner. They will examine how classroom culture affects students' values, science learning and teacher adaptation, and whether it is possible to help teachers flexibly adapt classroom cultures to a diverse population of students. The proposal has four intellectual merits. First, it unites socio-cultural, cognitive and instructional approaches in a theory and empirical agenda relevant to science teaching and learning. There is a large body of research on the effects of inquiry learning and on beliefs and values about science, but less attention has been given to the interaction between inquiry learning and dispositions towards science, even though the two factors together clearly have important impact on science learning and achievement. Second, the proposal rigorously tests the claim that making teachers' and students' values about learning explicit can help science teachers adapt their instruction to the diversity of their classrooms. Third,the proposal offers a theory of children's social models of science learning that may contribute to the explanations for why innovative science materials have not fostered learning of all students and why an understanding of one's roles and responsibilities in the classroom enhances science learning. Fourth, this proposal pushes the theoretical boundaries in the expertise literature. The research should expand beyond the short-term cognitive operations that occur when solving familiar problems to a consideration of the activity and social contexts in which expertise develops.The broader impacts of the proposal are three-fold. First, the project will produce a scalable technology to help teachers and students self-assess their values about learning and teaching. If successful,it may help to reduce the mismatches between teachers' and students' values as a way to improve science learning. Second, the proposal contributes to our understanding of factors that affect the development of adaptive expertise particularly in the activity and social rich context. The studies will also provide a new vision as to how metacognition can support science teachers' professional development by helping teachers and students monitor and revise each other's values and practices. Metacognitive research has not addressed the problem of how to help teachers learn about their students' values, so that they can adapt to different situations. We have created a pair of novel but simple and easily disseminated technology tools that can help teachers learn more about their students' values rather than relying on their pre-existing assumptions, which is important for developing adaptive expertise. Third, the results of the work may contribute to re-conceptualization of diversity, where descriptions go beyond demographic variables, and include the diversity of values that people bring to the endeavor of science.

常规的专业知识，其中一个越来越好地在一个经常性和稳定的任务，是不够的科学教师谁在高度多样性的背景下工作。学生，特别是城市环境中的学生，在他们为校本学习带来的价值观以及这些价值观在课堂上发展的方式方面极其多样化。教师需要成为适应性专家，不断学习和改变以应对各种情况。 本研究的假设是，教师适应性专业知识的一个重要途径是让他们意识到学生的价值观之间的变化和可能的不匹配与自己。这可以帮助教师养成寻找相关信息的习惯，克服采用第一个想到的解决问题的策略和解决方案的自然倾向。 只有通过关注表明情况如何偏离通常情况的信息，教师才能继续学习，适应和优化学生的学习。 为了验证这一假设，本研究将考察学生和教师围绕科学学习的价值体系。相对于大量关于儿童科学认知的研究，价值观在儿童科学学习的主要理论中并没有占据核心地位。然而，在高度多样性的环境下，认为对科学现象的认知是提高国家STEM能力的唯一心理杠杆是不合理的。我们的目标是解决科学学习的社会文化方面的水平，也包括个人认知周围的想法是什么意思是一个好的科学学习者。他们将研究课堂文化如何影响学生的价值观，科学学习和教师适应，以及是否有可能帮助教师灵活地适应课堂文化，以适应不同的学生群体。 该建议有四个知识上的优点。首先，它将社会文化，认知和教学方法统一在与科学教学和学习相关的理论和经验议程中。 研究性学习对科学信念和价值观的影响已经有了大量的研究，但很少关注研究性学习与科学倾向之间的相互作用，尽管这两个因素共同对科学学习和成就有着重要的影响。其次，该提案严格检验了这样一种说法，即明确教师和学生的学习价值观可以帮助科学教师调整他们的教学以适应课堂的多样性。第三，该建议提供了一个理论的儿童的社会模式的科学学习，可能有助于解释为什么创新的科学材料没有促进所有学生的学习，为什么一个人的角色和责任的理解在课堂上提高科学学习。第四，这一建议推动了专业知识文献的理论界限。研究应该超越解决熟悉问题时发生的短期认知操作，考虑专业知识发展的活动和社会背景。首先，该项目将产生一种可扩展的技术，以帮助教师和学生自我评估他们对学习和教学的价值。如果成功，它可能有助于减少教师和学生的价值观之间的不匹配，作为一种改善科学学习的方式。第二，该建议有助于我们理解的因素，影响适应性的专业知识的发展，特别是在活动和社会丰富的背景下。这些研究还将为元认知如何通过帮助教师和学生监控和修改彼此的价值观和实践来支持科学教师的专业发展提供新的视角。 元认知研究没有解决如何帮助教师了解学生的价值观，使他们能够适应不同的情况。 我们创造了一对新颖但简单且易于传播的技术工具，可以帮助教师更多地了解学生的价值观，而不是依赖于他们先前存在的假设，这对于发展适应性专业知识非常重要。 第三，这项工作的结果可能有助于对多样性进行重新概念化，其中描述超越了人口统计变量，并包括人们为科学奋进带来的价值观的多样性。