The impact of classroom context upon 1st and 2nd grade students' critical criteria for science representations

We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an import...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Instructional science 2015-11, Vol.43 (6), p.665-682
Main Authors: Danish, Joshua A., Saleh, Asmalina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Classroom Communication
Classroom Environment
Classrooms
Criticism
Cues
Education
Educational Psychology
Elementary Education
Elementary School Science
Elementary School Students
Elementary School Teachers
Elementary Schools
Evaluation Criteria
Grade 1
Grade 2
Group Activities
Interactive learning
Learner Engagement
Learning and Instruction
Pedagogic Psychology
Science Activities
Science education
Science Instruction
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an important practice when working with representations. Effective critique requires understanding the purpose of the representation and the context of its use. We use Activity Theory to explore how a change in teacher prompts can facilitate a shift in how the teacher and the students organize their collective activity ultimately resulting in a change to the nature of their critical criteria for evaluating their peers' representations. To explore this relationship, we worked with a teacher to iteratively adapt and refine whole-group discussions of students' representations to provide a context in which students critique their peers' work on scientific grounds. After each representational activity, the teacher engaged the students in discussing the representations (three groups of students across a total of six sessions, N = 39). Findings indicate that contextual cues lead to a statistically significant shift in students talk. Video analysis indicates that shifts in contextual cues resulted in dramatic shifts in how the activity is mediated, resulting in the verbalization and application of increasingly robust scientific criteria across three different sessions.
ISSN:0020-4277
1573-1952
DOI:10.1007/s11251-015-9355-8