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Sadhana Puntambekar

March 2009

Scientific knowledge seems to grow at an exponential rate. The sheer amount of data and knowledge and understanding of the world and of the universe keeps growing. That’s obvious. But less obvious is the fact that approaches to science education also change over time.

Of course science education still involves teaching students about the current scientific knowledge base. But another part of science education receiving attention is teacher-facilitated inquiry—that is, helping students learn how to ask a scientific question, how to pursue that question through a series of activities, and how to make activities and data sources cohere.

When science teachers adopt innovative curricula, it’s important that they structure students’ activities as a unit, rather than as a set of linear, discrete events. That’s because students learn with deeper understanding when the teacher has woven the concepts and activities into a coherent whole. Recent research by UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar has helped to pinpoint how that’s done, and how science teachers effectively facilitate classroom discussion.

Coherent presentation of activities in a science unit is especially critical when students use a variety of information resources—for example, books, CD-ROMs, and hypertext systems—along with their hands-on activities. Students need teacher help, or scaffolding, as they work to make sense of all the available information.

When given an information source for a task or set of tasks, students often think they are merely to find the “right” answer instead of thinking about how the information will help them in their projects. Effective science teachers know how to structure classroom activities and interactions so that they help students take this additional step.

Puntambekar studies the ways middle school science teachers enact the curriculum. In a recent study, she compared two teachers’ approaches to enacting an inquiry curriculum. Both teachers taught a unit on simple machines using an approach to science education called CoMPASS. CoMPASS consists of a computer hypertext system and accompanying science curriculum modules based on the pedagogical principles of learning by design. Learning by design emphasizes the value of learning through creating, programming, or participating in other forms of design. The approach values both the process of learning and its outcomes or products.

The CoMPASS hypertext system (see illustration) helps students learn by making more visible the relations between science concepts and principles. It presents students with two representations of science content—text and concept maps. Students navigate through the system in multiple passes during problem solving as they proceed through their hands-on activities in a science unit.

Students referred to CoMPASS to refine their initial design ideas and to find out
more about the specific topic so that they could optimize their designs and interpret
the data they collected.

Puntambekar observed and videotaped the two science teachers and their 146 sixth-grade students, who represented different ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic levels, and academic abilities. One teacher, Jane (a pseudonym), incorporated an inquiry approach in her teaching. While structuring the unit carefully, she allowed students a certain amount of freedom to explore. The second teacher, Linda (a pseudonym), followed a more highly structured approach. She often told students how to complete activities. Although Linda had been teaching longer than Jane, she was new to implementing an inquiry curriculum.

This unit on simple machines required students to work with a set of pulleys to lift a weight using the least amount of effort. Students brainstormed their initial design ideas and drew plans. They were challenged to design the best system using fixed pulleys, movable pulleys, or both. Using scales, students measured effort and distance. They raised questions and used CoMPASS to find information to help them with their challenge. A prize awaited the winning group.

Students in both classes carried out all the activities in the three phases of the unit: early brainstorming and question generation; small group facilitation while students used CoMPASS; and whole class discussion after students completed their challenge. However, the way the teachers sequenced the activities within the 2-week period was very different.

On the whole, Linda taught the unit in a linear fashion. Each activity was completed as a “task,” and there was little overlap between any two activities. In contrast, Jane carried out the different phases of the pulley challenge as an interconnected set of events.

Jane’s discussion helped students “situate” the current activity. First, she enabled them to solve the pulley challenge in the context of the simple machines unit as a whole, as well as everyday knowledge of pulleys. Second, she used “relating activities” to help students understand the purpose of their inquiry, and she restated students’ comments and questions. Third, she helped students raise questions that were deep, as opposed to “fact” questions, and she provided students with encouragement.

In contrast, Linda gave students many instructions. Throughout the three phases of the unit Linda emphasized task completion and providing instruction over reiterating big ideas, helping students make connections between concepts, and helping them relate abstract science concepts to their hand-son experiences.

An important aspect of Jane’s facilitation in the early part of the unit was to help students understand that the questions they raised had a purpose. In other words, she kept their focus on their goal. She also encouraged them to see the relation between asking questions and finding information. In short, she helped them to relate different activities to one another.

Students in Linda’s class did not use the questions that they had raised in class for their exploration on CoMPASS. Instead, they were instructed to use questions Linda had written before class and handed out to them.

To summarize, in Jane’s class, the brainstorming session focused on grounding the current investigation in what students already knew, both from school and from their real-world experience. Jane helped them connect the activity of generating questions to the research in CoMPASS and to the overall goal of designing the best pulley system. After students raised questions in class, Jane asked them to select the questions that would best help them complete the challenge. She also asked them to focus more on understanding the purpose of finding information on CoMPASS than on answering all the questions.

Linda’s discussion with the students revolved around the questions that she had given them—for example, Why is power important? Students were mostly writing down information verbatim. Linda’s students were finding answers to her questions, not ones that they had generated and understood the significance of. Linda also provided answers during small group interactions, whereas Jane focused on having students find the information and asked them more questions.

This study found no differences between students’ scores on the multiple-choice questions in the posttest. However, students in Jane’s classes performed significantly better than those in Linda’s classes on the open-ended questions and in the concept-mapping test. Both measures tapped students’ deeper understanding of science phenomena.

Linda's struggles with inquiry teaching are not unique to teachers implementing a project or design based curriculum for the first time, and are well documented in research in the learning sciences. Based on the lessons learned in this study, the CoMPASS team has designed a comprehensive program of professional development. The program has been successful in helping teachers who are new to the inquiry approach,learn a different way of facilitating learning in classrooms.

More about the CoMPASS project: http://www.compassproject.net/info

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation early CAREER grant and a NSF IERI grant.