The Ideal Science Student: Helping Teachers Adapt to Diversity in the Science Classroom

常规的专业技能，即一个人在一组反复出现的、稳定的任务中做得越来越好，对于在高度多样化的环境中工作的科学教师来说是不够的。学生，特别是城市环境中的学生，在他们为学校学习带来的价值观以及这些价值观在课堂上的演变方式方面是极其多样化的。教师需要成为适应性专家，不断学习和改变，以应对不同的情况。本研究的假设是，教师获得适应性专业知识的重要途径是意识到学生价值观的可变性以及与自己价值观可能存在的不匹配。这可以帮助教师养成寻找相关信息的习惯，克服采用脑海中第一个解决问题的策略和解决方案的自然倾向。只有注意到表明情况如何偏离通常情况的信息，教师才能继续学习，适应和优化学生的学习。为了调查这一假设，本研究将考察学生和教师围绕科学学习的价值体系。与大量关于儿童科学认知的研究相比，价值观并不是儿童科学学习主要理论的核心。然而，在高度多样性的气候下，假设对科学现象的认知是提高国家STEM能力的唯一心理杠杆是不合理的。我们的目标是在一个层面上解决科学学习的社会文化方面的问题，这个层面也包括关于什么是一个好的科学学习者的个人认知。他们将研究课堂文化如何影响学生的价值观、科学学习和教师适应，以及是否有可能帮助教师灵活地使课堂文化适应不同的学生群体。这一建议在智力上有四个优点。首先，它将社会文化、认知和教学方法结合在与科学教学相关的理论和经验议程中。关于研究性学习的影响以及对科学的信念和价值观的影响有大量的研究，但很少有人关注研究性学习和科学倾向之间的相互作用，尽管这两个因素显然对科学学习和成就有重要影响。其次，该提案严格检验了这样一种说法，即明确教师和学生的学习价值观可以帮助科学教师根据课堂的多样性调整教学。第三，该提案提供了一种关于儿童科学学习的社会模式的理论，这可能有助于解释为什么创新的科学材料没有促进所有学生的学习，以及为什么理解一个人在课堂上的角色和责任能促进科学学习。第四，拓展了专家知识文献的理论边界。研究应该超越在解决熟悉问题时发生的短期认知操作，考虑到专业知识发展的活动和社会背景。该提议的更广泛影响有三个方面。首先，该项目将产生一种可扩展的技术，帮助教师和学生自我评估他们对学习和教学的价值。如果成功，它可能有助于减少教师和学生的价值观之间的不匹配，作为改善科学学习的一种方式。其次，该建议有助于我们理解影响适应性专业知识发展的因素，特别是在活动和社会丰富的背景下。这些研究还将为元认知如何通过帮助教师和学生监督和修改彼此的价值观和实践来支持科学教师的专业发展提供新的视角。元认知研究还没有解决如何帮助教师了解学生的价值观，使他们能够适应不同的情况的问题。我们创造了两种新颖但简单且易于传播的技术工具，可以帮助教师更多地了解学生的价值观，而不是依赖于他们已有的假设，这对培养适应性专业知识很重要。第三，这项工作的结果可能有助于多样性的重新概念化，其中的描述超越了人口变量，并包括人们为科学努力带来的价值观的多样性。

Routine expertise, where one gets better and better at a recurrent and stable set of tasks, is not sufficient for science teachers who work in contexts of high diversity. Students, particularly those in urban settings, are extremely diverse in the values that they bring to school-based learning and the ways these values evolve within a classroom. Teachers need to become adaptive experts, who continue to learn and change in response to diverse situations. The hypothesis of this study is that an important pathway to adaptive expertise for teachers is for them to become aware of the variability among their students' values and possible mismatches with their own. This can help teachers develop the habits of seeking relevant information and overcoming the natural tendency to adopt the first problem-solving strategy and solution that comes to mind. It is only by attending to the information that indicates how a situation deviates from the usual one that teachers can continue to learn, adapt and optimize student learning. To investigate this hypothesis, the study will examine the value systems of students and teachers around science learning. Values have not been central to major theories of children's science learning compared to the voluminous research on children's cognition about science. Yet, in a climate of high diversity, it is unreasonable to suppose that cognition about scientific phenomena is the only psychological lever for improving the country's STEM capacity. The goal is to address the socio-cultural aspect of science learning at a level that also includes individual cognition around ideas about what it means to be a good science learner. They will examine how classroom culture affects students' values, science learning and teacher adaptation, and whether it is possible to help teachers flexibly adapt classroom cultures to a diverse population of students. The proposal has four intellectual merits. First, it unites socio-cultural, cognitive and instructional approaches in a theory and empirical agenda relevant to science teaching and learning. There is a large body of research on the effects of inquiry learning and on beliefs and values about science, but less attention has been given to the interaction between inquiry learning and dispositions towards science, even though the two factors together clearly have important impact on science learning and achievement. Second, the proposal rigorously tests the claim that making teachers' and students' values about learning explicit can help science teachers adapt their instruction to the diversity of their classrooms. Third,the proposal offers a theory of children's social models of science learning that may contribute to the explanations for why innovative science materials have not fostered learning of all students and why an understanding of one's roles and responsibilities in the classroom enhances science learning. Fourth, this proposal pushes the theoretical boundaries in the expertise literature. The research should expand beyond the short-term cognitive operations that occur when solving familiar problems to a consideration of the activity and social contexts in which expertise develops.The broader impacts of the proposal are three-fold. First, the project will produce a scalable technology to help teachers and students self-assess their values about learning and teaching. If successful,it may help to reduce the mismatches between teachers' and students' values as a way to improve science learning. Second, the proposal contributes to our understanding of factors that affect the development of adaptive expertise particularly in the activity and social rich context. The studies will also provide a new vision as to how metacognition can support science teachers' professional development by helping teachers and students monitor and revise each other's values and practices. Metacognitive research has not addressed the problem of how to help teachers learn about their students' values, so that they can adapt to different situations. We have created a pair of novel but simple and easily disseminated technology tools that can help teachers learn more about their students' values rather than relying on their pre-existing assumptions, which is important for developing adaptive expertise. Third, the results of the work may contribute to re-conceptualization of diversity, where descriptions go beyond demographic variables, and include the diversity of values that people bring to the endeavor of science.