Change in Thinking Demands for Students Across the Phases of a Science Task: An Exploratory Study

Tekkumru‐Kisa, Miray; Schunn, Christian D.; Stein, Mary Kay; Reynolds, Bertha C.

doi:10.1007/s11165-017-9645-z

Cited by 25 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…As mentioned earlier, some might argue that this difference was responsible for variation in students' thinking and reasoning observed in the pre‐ versus post‐PD classrooms. In the end, we argue that the phenotype task may have provided a starting‐line advantage in the post‐PD instruction, but as soon as it was unleashed into the classroom, its potential was susceptible to decline (Henningsen & Stein, ; Stein et al, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ).…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…While we cannot disregard the role of the task (see Stein et al, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa et al, ), consistent results in research for the past few decades have shown that it is the interaction of the task, students, and the teacher that shapes the ways in which students engage with the disciplinary ideas and practices (Cohen & Ball, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa & Stein, ). As summarized earlier in the paper, prior research has shown that the cognitive demand of tasks often decline once they are launched in actual classrooms settings (e.g., Kang et al, ; Stein et al, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ). Although less well substantiated, some research in mathematics education has also begun to show that the cognitive demand of low‐level tasks can be raised during enactmentment (Stein, Kelly, Moore, Correnti, & Russell, ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In our analysis of the video‐recorded pre‐ and post‐PD lessons, we used the part of the video that started after the teacher set up (i.e., launched) the task (Jackson, Garrison, Wilson, Gibbons, & Shahan, ; Stein et al, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ) and ended with either the conclusion of the task or the class period. Because the task was not completed in one class period in all the classrooms, the part of the video that we used for our analysis did not always cover the entire enactment of the task or the entire class period.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Past research has identified instructional factors that facilitate students' thinking in the classroom (e.g., listening to, interpreting, and responding to student thinking Jacobs, Lamb, Philipp, & Schappelle, ; Levin, Grant, & Hammer, ; Levin, Hammer, Elby, & Coffey, ; Levin & Richards, ; Sherin & Han, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ). Research has also identified factors that limit student thinking, including overemphasizing procedures and correct answers at the expense of meaning and understanding (Levin, ; Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ), prematurely evaluating and focusing on the correctness of students' utterances (Davis, ; Mehan, ), and actually stepping in and doing some or all of the thinking work that is needed to successfully complete the task (Henningsen & Stein, ). In the TSCD‐PD, we did not explicitly teach these instructional factors to the teachers; for example, we did not provide a list of factors associated with facilitating or limiting student thinking, and ask teachers to analyze them in classroom videos.…”

Section: Practice‐based Professional Development and Teacher Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent studies in science education have shown that NGSS‐aligned, high‐level tasks can be transformed once they are unleashed in science classrooms because teachers fail to maintain the tasks' demand on student thinking and/or their potential to meaningfully engage students in scientific practices (Kang, Windschitl, Stroupe, & Thompson, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa et al, ). Teachers often reduce high‐level demands on students' thinking by breaking the task into less challenging subtasks, by proceduralizing the work for the students, or by focusing on the correctness and completeness of the tasks rather than students' sensemaking (Henningsen & Stein, ; Tekkumru‐Kisa, Schunn, et al, ). As NGSS‐aligned cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' intellectual engagement without reducing the high‐level demand on student thinking will become an increasingly important skill for teachers to develop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

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Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS‐inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' engagement in high‐level thinking as they work on these tasks will become an increasingly important instructional challenge to address. This study reports findings from a video‐based professional development effort (i.e., professional development [PD] that use video‐clips of instruction as the main artifact of practice to support teacher learning) to support teachers' learning to select cognitively demanding tasks and to support students' learning during the enactment of these tasks in ways that are aligned with the NGSS vision. Particularly, we focused on the NGSS's charge to get students to make sense of and deeply think about scientific ideas as students try to explain phenomena. Analyses of teachers' pre‐ and post‐PD instruction indicate that PD‐participants began to adopt instructional practices associated with facilitating these kinds of student thinking in their own classrooms. The study has implications for the design of video‐based professional development for science teachers who are learning to facilitate the NGSS vision in science classrooms.

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Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Practice‐based Professional Development and Teacher Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

2017

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Applying the ambitious science teaching framework in undergraduate biology: Responsive talk moves that support explanatory rigor

Grinath

Southerland

2018

Science Education

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Orchestrating opportunities for students to engage in scientific talk in the classroom is challenging for most teachers and even more so for novice teaching assistants (TAs) who typically instruct introductory science laboratories at the postsecondary level. This study was designed to understand how TA moves are related to instances of scientific discourse in the classroom (meaning discourse that includes a high degree of explanatory rigor). For this, we examined the enactment of a planned “elicitation discussion” that took place in 26 sections of a general biology laboratory for nonscience majors. Our research was driven by two‐related questions: What patterns of discourse emerged? What TA discursive moves were related to high levels of explanatory rigor in student talk? Using conversation analysis, four distinct patterns of discourse were identified, each representing different levels of explanatory rigor. Regression analysis revealed that the type of question the TA used to initiate classroom talk was not significantly related to the students’ explanatory rigor. Rather, the most important aspect of TA talk for elevating the explanatory rigor of student discourse was TA responses to student contributions to TA's initiating questions. The implications of these findings for TA professional development are discussed.

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Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

2020

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The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires many teachers to drastically change their classroom instruction. Curricular materials offer a tool to support this transition, but there are questions about the degree to which available curricula truly reflect the shifts required by the NGSS. This study proposes a framework of four key elements of NGSS design that can be used to analyze both curriculum and instruction for alignment to the NGSS. The four key elements include phenomenonbased, three-dimensional, supports student epistemic agency, and coherent. We used this analytic framework to analyze one commercially available middle school curriculum and its implementation in two classrooms. We found that the curriculum and instruction oversimplified the complex vision of science learning required by using natural phenomena primarily as hooks or examples, creating lessons in which students engaged in core ideas and science practices but separately in service of different goals, placing the cognitive load on the teacher to do most of the sensemaking rather than the students, and having the teacher, rather than the students, build coherence between the lessons. Our work suggests that future curriculum should focus on asking students to tell a how and why story around a phenomenon to support threedimensionality, student epistemic agency, and coherence. Furthermore, future work should explore how educative

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Change in Thinking Demands for Students Across the Phases of a Science Task: An Exploratory Study

Cited by 25 publications

References 31 publications

Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

Applying the ambitious science teaching framework in undergraduate biology: Responsive talk moves that support explanatory rigor

Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

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