Studies of Sense-Making in Biology in Language Minority Classrooms....

本项目将探讨语言少数民族学生如何通过参与生物学（如动物行为学、植物学、生态学、胚胎学）的合作科学探究来适应科学意义的新形式。调查将以海地5-8年级学生形成的科学理解形式的描述为基础，并分析这些新兴形式是如何在课堂环境中社会建构的。在这个项目的框架中，理解包括：生物学的概念性知识、科学意义构建实践和关于科学的认识论信念。建议的工作包括开发研究工具，以探索学生科学理解的各个维度，与双语课堂教师直接合作，以提高他们在合作探究中教授科学的能力，与儿童进行发展研究，以确定他们的科学理解如何随着时间的推移而变化，在课堂上进行人种学研究，分析学生的科学理解是如何社会建构的。通过对科学理解的社会建构方式的实证研究，本研究将为在科学课堂中建立意义建构社区提供理论依据和实践模型。它将描述促进语言少数民族学生科学理解发展的具体意义建构实践。此外，通过其对生物学的关注，它将有助于建立一个关于生物学概念变化的新兴知识库

This project nwill investigate how language minority students appropriate new forms of scientific sense-making through their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry in biology (e.g., ethology, botany, ecology, embryology). The investigation will be anchored in a description of the forms of scientic understanding that Haitian students in grades 5-8 develop and an anlysis of how these emerging forms are socially constructed in classroom settings. In the framework of this project, understanding encompasses: conceptual knowledge in biology, scientific sense-making practices, and epistemological beliefs about science. The proposed work encompasses development of research instruments to probe the various dimensions of students scientic understanding, direct work with bilingual classroom teachers to enhance their competence to teach science as collaborative inquiry, developmental research with children to determine how their scientific understanding changes overtime, and ethnographic research in classrooms to analyze how students scientific understanding is socially constructed. Through empirical study of the ways in which scientific understanding is socially constructed, this research will provide both a theoretical rationale and practical model for building sense-making communities in the science slassroom. It will characterize specific sense-making practices which engender the development of scientific understanding in language minority students. In addition, through its focus on biology, it will contribute to an emerging knowledge base on conceptual change in biology.//