High school students' situational engagement associated with scientific practices in designed science learning situations

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how different scientific practices in high school science classrooms are associated with student situational engagement. In this study, situational engagement is conceptualized as the balance between skills, interest, and challenge when the reported experiences are all high. In this study, data on situational engagement were collected using the experience sampling method (ESM) from 142 students in southern Michigan (the United States), resulting 993 ESM responses, and 133 students in southern Finland, resulting 1,351 responses. In both countries, scientific practices related to developing models and constructing explanations were associated with higher student situational engagement than other practices. In southern Finland, using a model was also associated with a high level of student situational engagement. The results indicate that students may experience situational engagement more often in science classrooms that use models than those that do not employ such practices. Thus, scientific practices related to models should be used frequently in science ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Engagement in Learning Physics Through Project-Based Learning: A Case Study of Gifted Finnish Upper-Secondary-Level Students

“…According to the results, however, the module included activities that the students found especially challenging, including answering the driving question, creating models, and generating research questions. This finding is consistent with the results reported by Inkinen et al (2020), who investigated the impact of scientific practices on situational engagement among students at high school: They found that developing and using models as well as constructing explanations were related to higher engagement compared with other activities. Thus, our results imply that such practices should also be used more frequently among the gifted.…”

The role of interest in climate change instruction

“…Thus, the unit was designed to provide students with the opportunity to gain firsthand experience with how scientists collect data to predict the impacts of climate change on trees and forests. There is evidence that scientific modeling (Freeman et al, 2002; Inkinen et al, 2020) and hands‐on activities (Potvin & Hasni, 2014; Swarat et al, 2012), including hands‐on learning with trees (Jung et al, 2019), can foster youth's situational interests in science lessons. Moreover, modeling and mathematical analysis activities have been shown to improve students' knowledge about climate change (Pruneau et al, 2010).…”

Combining Machine Learning and Qualitative Methods to Elaborate Students’ Ideas About the Generality of their Model-Based Explanations

“…While this approach is merited given the complexity of assessing three-dimensional learning, the result of such efforts is rubrics or scoring guides that provide detailed descriptions of what three-dimensional learning might look like in a given content area (e.g., DeBarger et al 2013;Harris et al 2019;Penuel et al 2019), but many do not yet differentiate between meaningful versus rote forms of engagement. Moreover, most focus upon what students are doing-albeit with great nuance and value to the field (see Inkinen et al 2020)but do not capture the epistemic undergirding of why and how they are doing it (Manz 2015).…”