Designing, launching, and implementing high quality learning opportunities for students that advance scientific thinking

Abstract

Instructional tasks are key features of classroom practice, but little is known about how different components of tasks-such as selecting or designing tasks for a lesson, launching, and implementing them with students-shape the conditions for students' intellectual engagement in science classrooms. Employing a qualitative multiple case study approach, we analyzed 57 science lessons taught by 19 first-year teachers. We examined the potential for students' intellectual work built into the tasks across the phases of instruction, and how the demand of the unfolding task deepened (or failed to deepen) students' engagement in science. The findings suggest the importance of beginning a lesson with high quality instructional tasks-complex tasks that bear appropriate levels of epistemic uncertainty for a particular group of students in a particular moment. Beginning a lesson with high quality tasks; however, was insufficient by itself to ensure rigorous learning opportunities. With the use of complex tasks, higher quality opportunities to learn were observed in lessons in which: (i) the tasks were framed as a process of understanding contextualized phenomena; (ii) the specific disciplinary concepts in the task were related to big science ideas that transcended the activities themselves; and (iii) students' implementation of these tasks were structured using tools that supported changes in thinking. #

Preservice Teachers’ Learning to Plan Intellectually Challenging Tasks

“…Specifically, each lesson was examined holistically by determining (a) what students are asked to produce, and (b) how and with what resources. After identifying the main instructional tasks, the intellectual demand of tasks was coded as either high or low using the Science Task Framework (Kang et al, 2016; see the details in the Section "Theoretical Framework").…”

“…Instructional tasks refer to some form of work assignment to students that is defined by teachers for the purpose of developing understandings of concepts, skills, disciplinary practices, and that results in some inscribed documentation of the outcomes of intellectual work (Kang et al, 2016). It is an activated form of curriculum materials for a set of students in a particular time and setting.…”

Tres Elementos Fundamentales en La Formación De Docentes De Ciencias

“…Varios investigadores en educación de las ciencias han identificado rasgos fundamentales de tareas instruccionales con alta capacidad para promover el aprendizaje significativo de conceptos, habilidades y prácticas científicas (Chi y Wylie, 2014;Kang et al, 2016;Roberson y Franchini, 2014). Sin embargo, unas cuantas visitas a salones de clase desde los niveles primarios hasta el posgrado bastan para darse cuenta de que pocos docentes involucran a sus estudiantes en tareas con tales características.…”

“…Estas tareas buscan crear un nivel adecuado de incertidumbre cognitiva, epistémica y procedimental para los estudiantes. Esta incertidumbre en qué y cómo pensar y actuar para enfrentar la situación planteada abre oportunidades para que los estudiantes se planteen preguntas, generen hipótesis, construyan modelos y argumenten ideas (García y Rentería, 2011;Kang et al, 2016). Estas tareas se plantean como una búsqueda de explicaciones o soluciones a fenómenos o problemas específicos en contextos concretos y no como actividades genéricas sin más propósito que el ejercicio intelectual o manual que proporcionan.…”

Diseño de actividades para el desarrollo de competencias científicas. Utilización del marco PISA en un contexto relacionado con la salud

“…Entendiendo que las buenas oportunidades de aprendizaje son el producto no solo del diseño sino también del apoyo pedagógico que se realiza durante el desarrollo de las actividades en el aula (Kang, Windschitl, Stroupe y Thompson, 2016).…”