What does three‐dimensional teaching and learning look like?: Examining the potential for crosscutting concepts to support the development of science knowledge

Abstract

Science education reforms focus on the integration of three dimensions: disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), scientific and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCCs). While research has examined the role of DCIs and SEPs in teaching and learning, little research has explored how the CCCs might be integrated. This research proposes an approach for integrating the CCCs into instruction to support students to understand the utility of the CCCs before applying them to make connections across science ideas.Using lessons co-developed with the teacher who enacted them, this design experiment describes a teacher's use of the three dimensions to support student learning. The findings use students' conceptual models and classroom dialogue as evidence to illustrate the roles that the CCC played in opportunities to learn. The CCCs appear to play three roles: (1) they implicitly served as a frame for the classroom activities and dialogue, (2) they explicitly framed a discussion to develop students' understanding about their use as a lens to examine the phenomenon, and (3) the components of the CCC appeared in students' conceptual models highlighting aspects of their understanding. This research has implications for how learning environments can be developed to support students' learning of threedimensional science knowledge.

The challenges of alignment for the Next Generation Science Standards

“…This should be expected given the language in the Framework and in Taking Science to School (NRC, ) about learning progressions (LPs). It matches the idea of curriculum coherence as successively connected disciplinary ideas (Hadenfeldt, Neumann, Bernholt, Xiufeng, & Parchmann, ; Fortus & Krajcik, ; Schmidt, Wang, & McKnight, ), scientific practices (Osborne, Henderson, MacPherson, Szu, Wild, & Yao, ; Yao & Guo, ), or crosscutting concepts (Fick, ) that go across grades and courses. Some sources use this LP basis to guide planning for curriculum and pedagogy (Nordine et al, ; Pruitt, ), whereas others focus on assessments (Gotwals & Songer, ; Liu, Rogat, & Bertling, ; Pellegrino et al, ), and there is emerging published work that addresses curriculum, professional development, and assessment (Wyner & Doherty, ).…”

“…Every PE also comes with evidence statements that give details on the observable student actions that would indicate a student has met the PE (NGSS Lead States, ). The importance of combining all three dimensions from the Framework has led to widespread discussion of three‐dimensional learning (Fick, ; Krajcik, ) and assessment (Furtak, ; Pellegrino, Wilson, Koenig, & Beatty, ).…”

Multidimensional trajectories for understanding ecosystems

“…Multiple paths may lead to the same outcome. Much learning research has documented what students learn after participating in instruction about systems (Ben Zvi Assaraf & Orion, 2010; Fick, 2018; Yoon, 2008) and identified the challenges of potential nonlinearity in learning. Few research studies have documented the learning trajectories that students take to understanding ecosystems.…”

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

“…Therefore, in our study, we looked for times when students were discussing core ideas, engaging in science practices, and making use of crosscutting concepts. The most difficult of the dimensions for teachers to implement and for us to identify was CCCs, which have received less attention in both science education research and curriculum design (Fick, 2018). Fick has demonstrated that CCCs can be present both implicitly and explicitly in classroom instruction, but we are concerned that it might be too easy for curriculum developers to claim the crosscutting concepts are implicit when in fact they were not considered in the design in the first place.…”