Scaffolding Young Children's Data-Based Scientific Research:Narrowing The Gap Between Children's and Scientists' Inquiry

项目摘要 ~ . 项目总结应包括目标、拟采用的方法以及拟议活动对促进知识或教育的重要性的说明。避免使用第一人称来完成此摘要。不要超过一页。(Some程序可能会施加更严格的限制。） 为幼儿基于数据的科学研究搭建支架缩小儿童与科学家探究的差距 美国学生在科学和数学成绩评估方面的习惯性表现不佳，以及社会和个人对科学和数学素养的许多需求，都表明了这些学科领域根本改革的重要性。最近一次全国教育进展评估（1990年）的结果表明，学生对这些学科的理解仍然很低。例如，在数学方面，只有少数学生能够熟练地解决非常规的多步骤问题。在科学方面，只有少数高中生有足够的知识来解释图表或表格形式的科学数据，或设计实验。 数学和科学教育界都提出了扭转这种可怕局面的建议。这个拟议的项目是框架的协同作用，我们认为从数学和科学教育改革文献的关键建议，建议，当结合形成一个教学方法的基础上，有力地解决两个学科领域所需的变化。简而言之，有影响力的全国数学教师理事会（NCTM）主张对数学课程进行更强有力的概念和应用导向，目标是使儿童将数学视为建立意义和解决真正问题的有力手段。NCTM认为，课程中的问题的性质需要大大扩展，包括扩展的开放式调查，许多涉及儿童的问题的制定，关于如何解决问题的决定，以及代表和解释他们的结果。根据NCTM，即使在小学一级，儿童也应该进行基于数据的调查，并思考统计和概率的概念（NCTM，1989年）。尽管有更多的团体参与制定小学科学教育改革的建议，但在现实的教育目标方面似乎没有达成共识（美国科学促进协会，1993年;国家科学院，1995年），科学教育界与数学教育界共享长期以来本学期的目标是培养独立的、持怀疑态度的探究者，他们对各自的智力事业--科学或数学思考的意义--有着丰富的见解。 该项目将开发科学课程原型，让儿童设计研究，随后分析和解释他们的数据。基于当前的关注，有更多的应用数学课程，并有数学和科学课程反映学科的构建和评估知识的方式，该模型的科学基础课程包括初步探索的领域，形成的问题，计划的实验，随后收集，表示和解释的数据，理论发展，修订和扩展的研究。为了支持儿童的数据分析和最终的独立调查，课程原型将纳入基本的统计概念，如随机性，机会变化，大数定律和抽样的教学支持。由于一些认知文献已经确定领域特定的知识作为一个关键的detemminant充分的推理，该项目将集中在两个相互关联的领域儿童的调查：（a）动物行为（如昆虫，啮齿动物和鸟类）和（B）儿童行为。由于技术工具可以使研究人员能够访问特定领域的知识库和数据表示和分析的任务，项目扩眼环境将提供技术工具，并为儿童的战略资本化提供支架。 该项目将仔细审查基于数据的研究，即基于这些原则的教学支持小学和小学高年级的儿童。项目研究将在两种情况下进行：（a）二年级和五年级的完整小学教室，（B）实验室。这种背景的结合使项目研究能够反映课堂的丰富性和实验室支持的严谨性和控制性。分析将在整个学年的纵向背景下在宏观和微观两个层面进行，以检查儿童发展基于数据的研究的动态，与他们新兴的科学和统计知识的互动。 该项目旨在为认知理论和教育实践做出贡献。通过研究儿童在科学数据分析中对不确定性、偶然性和因果性的应用，整合和发展了儿童关于偶然性推理和儿童关于因果性推理的研究文献。它通过对儿童数学实践的设计和调查，在丰富的意义和目的的背景下，推进儿童数学教育。最后，通过搭建儿童研究设计和数据分析，缩小儿童与科学家探究之间的差距。 NSF表格1358（1/94）

PROJECT SUMMARY ~ . The Project Summary should include a statement of objectives, methods to be employed, and the significance of the proposed activity to the advancement of knowledge or education. Avoid use of first person to complete this summary. DO NOT EXCEED ONE PAGE. (Some Programs may impose more stringent limits.) Scaffolding Young Children's Data-Based Scientific Research Narrowing the Gap Between Children's and Scientists' Inquiry The habitual poor performance of US students on evaluations of both science and mathematics achievement, together with the many societal and individual needs for scientific and mathematical literacy, point to the importance of fundamental reform in these subject areas. The results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (1990) indicate that students continue to attain only a low level of understanding in these disciplines. For example, in mathematics only a minority of students demonstrate proficiency at solving non-routine, multi-step problems. In science, only a minority of high school seniors have the knowledge adequate to interpret scientific data in graphs or table form, or to design experiments. Both the mathematics and science education communities have formulated recommendations for reversing this dire situation. This proposed project is framed in terms of a synergy we perceive between key recommendations from the mathematics and science education reform literatures, recommendations that when combined form the basis of an instructional approach powerfully addressing needed changes in both subject areas. In short, the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has argued for a stronger conceptual and applied orientation to mathematics curriculum, with the goal of attaining a curriculum where children come to view mathematics as a powerful means of sense-making and solving genuine problems. NCTM contends that the nature of the problems in the curriculum needs to be greatly expanded, to include extended open-ended investigations, many involving the children's formulation of the question, decisions about how to go about solving the problem, and representing and interpreting their results. According to NCTM, even at the primary grade level children should be conducting data-based investigations and reflecting on ideas of statistics and probability (NCTM, 1989). Although more groups are involved in developing recommendations for elementary science education reform and there appears to be less consensus concerning realistic educational objectives (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Academy of Sciences, 1995), the science education community shares with the math education community the long-term goal of developing independent and skeptical inquirers who hold rich visions of their respective intellectual enterprises --of what it means to think scientifically or mathematically. The project will develop science curriculum prototypes where children design research and subsequently analyze and interpret their data. Grounded in current concerns to have math curriculum more applied and to have both math and science curriculum reflect the discipline's way of constructing and evaluating knowledge, the model of science underlying the curriculum encompasses preliminary explorations of the domain, fommation of questions, planning of experiments, subsequent collection, representation and interpretation of data, theory development, and revision and extension of research. In order to support children's data analysis and eventual independent inquiry, the curriculum prototypes will incorporate instructional support in fundamental statistical concepts, such as randomness, chance variation, the Law of Large Numbers and sampling. Since several cognitive literatures have identified domain-specific knowledge as a key detemminant in adequacy of reasoning, the project will concentrate the children's investigations in two interrelated domains: (a) animal behavior (such as insect s, rodents, and birds) and (b) child behavior. As technological tools can empower researchers in their access to domain-specific knowledge-bases and the task of data representation and analysis, the project reaming environments will provide technological tools and scaffold the children's strategic capitalization thereof. The project will closely examine the data-based research that instruction based on these principles supports among children at the primary and upper elementary levels. Project research will take place in two contexts: (a) intact elementary school classrooms at the second and fifth grade levels, and (b) the laboratory. This combination of contexts allows the project research to reflect the richness of the classroom and the rigor and control supported by the laboratory. Analysis will be conducted at both the macro and micro levels across the longitudinal context of the school year, in order to examine the dynamics of children's developing data-based research, in interaction with their emergent scientific and statistical knowledge. The project is designed to make contributions to both cognitive theory and educational practice. It integrates and advances the research literatures of children's reasoning about chance and children's reasoning about causality, through study of children's application of uncertainty, chance and causality in their scientific data analysis. It advances children's mathematics education, through design and investigation of children's practice of mathematics in a context of rich meaning and purpose. Finally, it narrows the gap between children's and scientists' inquiry, through scaffolding children's research design and data analysis. NSF FORM 1358 (1/94)