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

合作研究：为中学生和高中生提供对地球和环境科学来源和替代主张的科学评估

• 批准号: 2346657
• 负责人: Carla McAuliffe
• 金额: $ 30.97万
• 依托单位: Institute for Global Environmental Strategies
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-11-01 至 2026-10-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2346657&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Scaffolding; middle; students

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.

当代的科学和社会问题，如水安全或气候变化，往往是复杂和相互关联的。这需要进行合理和科学的评估，以确定适当的反应。虽然理性和科学的评价对学生来说可能具有挑战性，但精心设计的教学材料可以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一致的日常信息来源。这个项目提供了一些工具来支持学生阅读和评估各种来源，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素养概念，开发和实施脚手架工具，支持学生理解数据、证据和主张之间的联系，同时考虑来源的可信度和合理性。该项目将设计和测试这样的教学框架，目的是帮助初高中的科学和社会研究学生加深他们的评估技能，因为他们在一个功能性民主社会中对公民的期望做出理性的评估。本项目的基本研究问题是：(1)支持初高中学生发展更重要的信息源可信度和声称合理性评估的教学脚手架的特征是什么？(2)当使用这些教学脚手架时，学生的评价如何与他们的可信度和合理性判断向合理理解（例如，基于证据和推理）的转变相关？(3)这些评价和判断与学生对社会科学问题相关的社会、公民和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框架，以支持资源和主张评估，并与初中和高中科学和社会研究教师进行专业发展课程，使他们能够在课堂上有效地实施这些框架。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的推理和加深对社会科学现象的理解。探索研究preK-12项目（DRK-12）旨在通过研究和开发创新资源、模型和工具，显著提高preK-12学生和教师对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）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实证依据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。