Collaborative Research: Scaffolding middle and high school students’ scientific evaluations of sources and alternative claims in Earth and environmental sciences

当代科学和社会问题，如水安全或气候变化，往往是复杂和相互关联的。这需要理性和科学的评估，以确定适当的应对措施。尽管理性和科学的评估可能会对学生构成挑战，但设计良好的教材可能会促进当代科学和社会问题的教与学。学习这些社会科学问题的学生既会遇到代表当前共识和理解的科学来源，也会遇到可能与当前科学不符的日常信息来源。这个项目解决了支持学生阅读和评估各种来源的工具，以比较解决社会科学问题的各种主张。它借鉴科学教育和社会研究中的扫盲概念来开发和实施脚手架工具，这些工具可以支持学生理解数据、证据和声明之间的联系，同时考虑来源的可信度和似是而非。该项目将设计和测试这样的教学支架，目的是帮助初中和高中的科学和社会研究专业的学生在一个正常运作的民主社会中按照公民的期望进行理性评估时，加深他们的评估技能。该项目的基本研究问题是：(1)支持初中生发展更关键的来源可信度和声称真实性评估的教学支架的特征是什么？(2)当参与这些教学支架时，学生的评估与他们的可信度和真实性判断向合理理解的转变有什么关系(例如，基于证据和推理)？(3)这些评估和判断与学生关于社会、公民和与社会科学问题相关的科学概念的核心学科知识的变化有何关系？该项目将开发辅助教学支架，以支持来源和索赔评估，并与成对的初中和高中科学和社会研究教师举行专业发展会议，使他们能够在课堂上有效地实施这些支架。此外，项目团队将进行严格的课堂测试，以衡量学生对这些主题背后的基本科学、社会和公民现象的参与、推理和理解。项目团队预计，这些支架将支持学生推理和加深对社会科学现象的理解。探索研究PREK-12计划(DRK-12)旨在通过研究和开发创新资源、模型和工具，显著提高Pre-K-12学生和教师在科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)方面的学习和教学。DRK-12计划中的项目建立在STEM教育的基础研究和先前的研究和开发工作的基础上，为拟议的项目提供了理论和经验上的证明。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Contemporary scientific and social issues, such as water security or climate change, are often complex and interrelated. This requires reasoned and scientific evaluations to determine appropriate responses. Although reasoned and scientific evaluations may be challenging for students, well-designed instructional materials may facilitate the teaching and learning of contemporary scientific and social issues. Students learning about these socioscientific issues encounter both scientific sources that represent current consensus and understanding as well as everyday information sources that may not be consistent with current science. This project addresses tools to support students in reading and evaluating a variety of sources to compare various claims addressing socioscientific issues. It draws on literacy concepts from science education and social studies to develop and implement scaffolding tools that can support students' understanding of the links among data, evidence, and claims while considering the trustworthiness and plausibility of sources. The project will design and test such instructional scaffolds with the goal of helping middle and high school science and social studies students to deepen their evaluation skills as they make reasoned evaluations as expected of citizens in a functional democratic society.The project's fundamental research questions are: (1) What are the features of instructional scaffolds that support middle and high school students to develop more critical source trustworthiness and claim plausibility evaluations? (2) When engaging in these instructional scaffolds, how do students' evaluations relate to their shifts in trustworthiness and plausibility judgments toward justifiable understandings (e.g., based on evidence and reasoning)? (3) How do these evaluations and judgments relate to changes in students’ core disciplinary knowledge of social, civic, and scientific concepts related to socioscientific issues? The project will develop complementary instructional scaffolds to support source and claim evaluation and conduct professional development sessions with pairs of middle and high school science and social studies teachers to enable them to implement these scaffolds in their classrooms effectively. Furthermore, the project team will conduct rigorous classroom-based tests to gauge students' engagement, reasoning, and understanding of the fundamental scientific, social, and civic phenomena underlying these topics. The project team anticipates that these scaffolds will support students' reasoning and deepening understanding of socioscientific phenomena. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.