Collaborative Research: How Recognizing Gaps in Explanations Influences Children's Interest in Learning

合作研究：认识解释中的差距如何影响儿童的学习兴趣

• 批准号: 1551795
• 负责人: Candice Mills
• 金额: $ 47.46万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Dallas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-06-01 至 2022-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1551795&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; How; Recognizing; Gaps

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. The complex domain of biology has causal pathways that are not always readily apparent to young children, and their explanations often contain many misconceptions and gaps in understanding. This project will add to a limited body of research on how children's recognition of information gaps influence subsequent interest in learning in formal and informal learning settings. The project will examine to what extent, if any, receiving or producing explanations motivates children's future learning, with three specific goals: (1) to examine whether children who first recognize that an explanation has significant gaps are interested in engaging in further learning of a particular topic; (2) to explore how the source of the explanation (by self or others) relates to the link between recognizing information gaps and future learning; and (3) to develop instructional strategies that can be used to induce students' recognition of explanatory gaps, measuring outcomes for these strategies, including children's subsequent ability to critically evaluate explanations and their interest in future learning. The conceptual framework will be guided by the social-cognitive theory, sociocultural theory, and mechanistic reasoning. This combined theoretical framing will promote a better assessment of which processes drive children's explanation evaluation - a crucial part of learning from others - and how mechanistic explanations can be useful lenses for analyzing the interactions of domain-specific (prior knowledge) and domain-general knowledge about learning.This project will use laboratory-based quantitative methods and classroom-based teaching experiments. The quantitative methods include ANCOVAs of multiple covariates about a model that will be developed and implemented to explain developmental, individual, and task differences in responses to information gaps in scientific explanations. Behavioral measures will include ratings of explanation quality and individual difference measures, such as self-reported interest, biological knowledge, and interest in acquiring new information. Based on results from laboratory studies, scaffolds will be developed for classroom contexts to support children's productive engagement in critically evaluating biological explanations. A subset of the above measures will be use to collect pre-post data from classroom participants. Conjecture mapping will be used to conceptualize specific links between scaffolds, mediating processes, and outcomes. Classroom video and observations will be used to determine the extent to which the design scaffolds lead to the hypothesized mediating processes and ultimately the desired learning outcomes of effective evaluation and generation of mechanistic explanations of biological phenomena. Outcomes from these studies will advance scientific understanding of young children's explanation evaluation and construction, as well as provide a suite of scaffolds to support effective education practice. Combining lab and classroom-based research will lead to the development of more ecologically-valid methodologies for studying, and impacting, learning behaviors in ways that are beneficial to interdisciplinary research and education. Insights from the research will be beneficial to parents, children and teachers in both formal and informal settings. Finally, the project will provide insight into creating developmentally-appropriate interventions to help determine whether children of a certain age might benefit from instruction focused on recognizing explanatory gaps in order to motivate them to seek out better answers.

ECR（教育和人力资源核心研究）计划强调基础STEM教育研究，将产生该领域的基础知识。生物学的复杂领域有因果关系的途径，并不总是很明显的幼儿，他们的解释往往包含许多误解和理解的差距。该项目将补充关于儿童对信息差距的认识如何影响随后在正式和非正式学习环境中学习的兴趣的有限研究。该项目将研究接受或提出解释在多大程度上（如果有的话）激励儿童未来的学习，具体目标有三个：（1）研究首先认识到解释存在重大差距的儿童是否有兴趣进一步学习特定主题;（2）探讨如何解释来源（由自己或他人）与认识信息差距和未来学习之间的联系有关;（3）制定教学策略，引导学生认识解释空白，并测量这些策略的效果，包括儿童后来批判性地评价解释的能力和他们对未来学习的兴趣。概念框架将以社会认知理论、社会文化理论和机械推理为指导。这种结合的理论框架将促进更好地评估哪些过程驱动儿童的解释评估-从他人那里学习的关键部分-以及机械解释如何成为分析特定领域（先验知识）和领域一般知识之间相互作用的有用镜头。本项目将使用基于实验室的定量方法和基于课堂的教学实验。定量方法包括ANCOVA的多个协变量的模型，将开发和实施，以解释发展，个人和任务的差异，在科学解释的信息差距的反应。行为测量将包括解释质量和个体差异测量的评级，如自我报告的兴趣，生物知识和获取新信息的兴趣。根据实验室研究的结果，将为课堂环境开发支架，以支持儿童在批判性评估生物学解释方面的富有成效的参与。上述措施的一个子集将用于收集课堂参与者的事前事后数据。猜想映射将被用来概念化支架，调解过程和结果之间的具体联系。课堂视频和观察将被用来确定在何种程度上的设计支架导致假设的调解过程，并最终有效的评估和生成的生物现象的机械解释的理想的学习成果。这些研究的结果将促进幼儿解释评价和建构的科学理解，并提供一套支架，以支持有效的教育实践。结合实验室和教室为基础的研究将导致更生态有效的研究方法的发展，并影响，学习行为的方式，有利于跨学科的研究和教育。从研究的见解将有利于家长，儿童和教师在正式和非正式的设置。最后，该项目将提供洞察力，创造发展适当的干预措施，以帮助确定是否有一定年龄的儿童可能受益于教学重点是认识到解释的差距，以激励他们寻求更好的答案。