Roth, W.-M. (1995). Authentic school science: Knowing and learning in open-inquiry science
laboratories. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Overview
[Preface] [Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV]
Preface
There are at least three purposes
for this book. First, it intends to be a first-hand report of knowing
and learning by individuals and groups in complex open-inquiry
learning environments in science. As such, this book contributes to
the emerging literature in this field. Second, it exemplifies
research methods for studying such complex learning environments.
Thus, the reader is encouraged not only to take the research findings
as such, but to reflect on the process of arriving at these findings.
Third, this book is also an example of knowledge constructed by a
teacher-researcher, and thus a model for teacher-researcher
activity.
Open-inquiry, the environment that
we tried to create here, is not simply any complex learning
situation. We expected it to provide for the authenticity which
educational thinkers such as John Dewey, Seymour Papert, Donald
Schön, and Allan Collins envision for classroom activities.
School activities, to be authentic, need to share key features with
those worlds about which they teach. More specifically, for school
science to be authentic, students should experience scientific
inquiry which bears at least five aspects in common with scientists'
activities: (1) participants learn in contexts constituted in part by
ill-defined problems; (2) participants experience uncertainties,
ambiguities, and the social nature of scientific work and knowledge;
(3) participants' learning (curriculum) is predicated on, and driven
by, their current knowledge state (wherever that might be); (4)
participants experience themselves as part of communities of inquiry
in which knowledge, practices, resources, and discourses are shared;
and (5) in these communities, members can draw on the expertise of
more knowledgeable others whether they are peers, advisors, or
teachers. Both "open-inquiry" and "authentic" imply these five
aspects of our learning environment which it shares with the
scientific community.
Specifically and more practically,
open inquiry implies that students (a) identify problems and
solutions, and test these solutions, (b) design their own procedures
and data analyses, (c) formulate new questions based on their
previous claims and solutions, (d) develop questions based on their
prior knowledge, (e) link their experience to activities, science
concepts, and science principles, and (f) share and discuss
procedures, products, and solutions (Pizzini, Shepardson, &
Abell, 1991). The studies reported in this book were all conducted in
classrooms where students had the freedom and the associated
responsibilities implied by the determining conditions a-f.
The book is divided into four
parts, Background, Individual and Collaborative Learning, Framing and
Solving Problems, and Interactions. Each of the four parts is further
divided into sections which deal with issues such as theory, setting
of a specific study, data analysis or development of a theoretical
framework. In the following paragraphs I outline each of the five
parts.
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Part I
Part I provides a background for
the studies reported later. The Introduction provides a personal
context which allows the reader to situate my approach to teaching
and my work as a teacher-researcher. I outline Habermas' theory of
cognitive interests which helped me understand classroom research
from a teacher-researcher perspective and the research methodologies
associated with each interest. I also outline the notion of teacher
as a reflective practioner which was important in understanding my
teaching and research practice.
I provide a general theoretical
grounding in the context of which the present work developed in
General Theoretical Grounding. It is only a general introduction to
provide a context for much of what is coming. More specific details
on research background and past research are provided in each
chapter. Although it is often difficult to discern all the influences
on one's work, certain ideas were more important than others.
Important for the genesis of my research agenda were the movements of
radical constructivism (von Glasersfeld and Goodman) and social
constructivism which developed from the work of Vygotsky and was
taken up by North American psychology, cognitive science,
anthropology and linguistics. Besides this influence of
psychological/epistemological origin, the present work was strongly
influenced by research in ethnomethodology and sociology of
scientific knowledge of scientists at work. Ethnomethodology, as its
name implies, is mainly concerned with the methods people use to
achieve coherence in everyday life and how they make sense of their
world so that the stable and recurrent features of everyday life
emerge. The sociology of scientific knowledge focuses on the social
construction of science and scientific facts, concepts and theories.
This construction operates not only at a societal level in that
funding agencies determine what is to be researched and what counts
as a finding, but also at the level of institutions, laboratories,
and individuals. Although ethnomethodology and sociology of
scientific knowledge may be considered as subdomains of sociology,
some of their basic assumptions are in conflict with mainstream
sociology which is still by and large driven by structuralist
interests. A final major influence was research on human cognition in
everyday contexts conducted from a cross-cultural perspective.
The Setting constitutes the
opening to a series of studies on students interacting and knowing.
It introduces readers to the setting in which the research was
conducted. This setting had its own particular constraints which are
important for understanding the kind of teaching investigated and the
conditions under which students learned and teachers taught. While
there were aspects of this learning environment which favored
students' learning, there were other aspects which made innovation
difficult and even dangerous for teachers for whom there was no job
security at the school. Knowledge of the particular setting is also
important to situate the research itself and the conditions under
which research in this complex learning environment was possible at
all.
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Part II
Part II deals with the individual
and social construction of knowledge in my high school physics
classrooms. I show how we can make sense of one student's efforts as
he tried to come to grips with the motion of an oscillating cart. In
this investigation, he moved between various mental representations
of the phenomenon which took on symbolic mathematical, descriptive,
experimental, phenomenal and conceptual forms. I develop and use an
environmental metaphor for knowing and learning to help understand
learning and making sense by an individual. This metaphor also helps
us later to understand learning in social settings and problem
solving in complex environments. The chapter closes with a look
forward at the interface of this environmental metaphor with
socio-cultural perspectives of learning.
The purpose of sections II.4
though II.6 is to illustrate what I mean by social constructions. The
reader encounters the efforts of one group of students engaged in
constructing the "Compton effect." My analysis shows that to know the
Compton effect, it takes more than rote learning of a definition or
just reading a story in a physics textbook. Rather, in a complex web
of interactions, the three students involved developed their ideas
about this phenomenon through a conversation in the context of
building a concept map that included COMPTON EFFECT as one of the
concept labels. We follow the same students in their attempt to build
a new connection, that is, to make a connection between two concepts
which had not been previously made by me or the textbook. Thus, the
students were engaged in an activity that teachers often take for
granted, i.e., linking previously disconnected pieces of information
and formulating new connections. The analysis shows that such
connections are far from obvious. Finally, I try to answer the
question of how much students appropriate from collaborative
achievements so that they can claim this knowledge as personally
meaningful. The chapter provides a first answer for the group of
students which was the focus of the previous analyses. I conclude the
section with a discussion of the concept map's function in
collaborative sense making, its nature as an inscription and
conscription device, as well as its reflexive nature.
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Part III
Part III deals with problem
framing and solving, and concrete modes of thinking in open-inquiry
learning environments. Of central concern are (1) the differences
between students' approaches to traditional word problems and (2) the
processes they engage in when working on problems that they framed on
their own, supported by their physical and social settings. I present
past research and conceptualizations of problem solving which are
distinguished according to the setting in which it was conducted: in
psychological laboratories ("indoors"), in complex business
environments ("garbage cans"), and in everyday settings of just plain
folks (JPF's) and scientists (outdoors). Following the theoretical
context, the reader finds analyses of the types of students' research
questions, the processes by which these questions were framed, the
processes by which questions developed into research programs and
diffused throughout the classroom community, and the framing and
resolution of blind alleys, that is, experiments with unexpected or
null outcomes. I then turn to teacher-effects in problem setting and
to students' efforts in recontextualizing problems to make them
meaningful in their own terms. My description includes problem
framing which continues even after students have started solving
their research problems; during their resolution phase, new,
situationally contingent troubles emerged which they needed to frame
and solve as problems before they could continue with their overall
task. The students' learning during problem solving, and cycles of
error detection are other aspects of learning in the open-inquiry
environment. The chapter concludes with a comparison of students and
scientists.
Concrete Modes of Thinking is an
attempt to recognize modes of thought other than those that were
traditionally accorded to scientists. Narratives, concrete modeling
and exploring, and concrete mediators of meaning play a central role
in scientific thinking but have not received the recognition they
deserve from cognitive scientists or science educators. I provide
evidence for the existence of these modes of thought in the problem
solving of my students. I conclude with a revaluation of the concrete
in the discussion of thought processes. The central argument proposed
here is that concrete thinking is not inferior to, but a valuable and
often indispensable alternative to hypothetico-deductive/abstract
reasoning.
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Part IV
Part IV deals with the dynamics of
the interactions in a science classroom dominated by open-inquiry
activities. Although it is impossible to completely separate
student-student from teacher-student interactions, these two topics
are dealt with in consecutive chapters. I begin with a macro
description of student-student interaction followed by detailed
analyses of student-student conversations. At issue are patterns of
interactions, the processes by which students organize their group
activities, and how they arrive at shared understandings either
collaboratively or through negotiations and adversarial exchanges.
Section IV.3 deals with the management of student-student
conversations. Some of the central questions addressed here are (1)
how do students negotiate turn-taking and contribute to joint
products? and (2) how do students maintain the conversation itself
and the topic of the conversation? In section IV.4, I present
evidence that our classrooms were communities of knowing in which
knowledge was socially constructed at the classroom level and in
which information diffused through networks of communication.
The final two sections, IV.5 and
IV.6, focus on the dynamics of teacher-student interactions. While
there are similar concerns for the structuring and maintenance of
conversations as in student-student interactions, this section
primarily concerns the implications of the apprenticeship metaphor
that we used to understand our teaching. Here the reader encounters
various modes of teacher-student interactions that depended on their
differences in the level of guidance; in some instances, when we
teachers modeled new skills in context, the interactions were more
asymmetrical than in other contexts when we collaboratively
investigated phenomena with students, working on problems to which we
did not already have answers.
In the Conclusion, I summarize the
findings largely by tying all studies together with the environmental
metaphor of knowing before providing two visions. The first vision
reconceptualizes the teaching of science by focusing on and providing
a rationale for authentic, that is open-inquiry learning. The second
vision is one of the teacher as a reflective practitioner who engages
in research with peers in a community of learners. In this vision,
teachers are producers of knowledge rather than consumers and
distributors of information.
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