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This paper describes the work done by sixth grade students to achieve and sustain productive and personally meaningful lines of inquiry with computational models. The capacity to frame interactions with tools as dialogic exchanges with co-participants is a productive practice for disciplinary engagement in science and for computational thinking (Chandrasekharan and Nersessian 2015; Dennet 1989; Latour 1993; Pickering 1995). We propose that computational models have unique affordances for dialogic interaction because they are probabilistic and iteratively executable, features that provide an entry point for students to adopt stances that treat computational models as participants. Our analysis reveals that existing patterns in students’ social interactions are resources for interacting flexibly with computational tools as participants. In particular, we found that students treated computational models as participants in three ways: (1) as conversational peers, (2) as co-constructors of lines of inquiry, and (3) as projections of students’ agency and identity. Our data also demonstrate that students take on flexible, rather than fixed, stances toward computational participants. These stances parallel scientists’ interactions with non-human entities, which often involve treating tools as agentive participants in inquiry (Latour 1999; Pickering 1995), affording students a pathway to practices at the intersection of disciplinary engagement and computational thinking.

Despite the increasing use of portable tablets in learning, their impact has received little attention in research. In five different projects, this media-ethnographic and design-based analysis of the use of portable tablets as a learning resource in science museums investigates how young people’s learning with portable tablets matches the intentions of the museums. By applying media and information literacy (MIL) components as analytical dimensions, a pattern of discrepancies between young people’s expectations, their actual learning and the museums’ approaches to framing such learning is identified. It is argued that, paradoxically, museums’ decisions to innovate by introducing new technologies, such as portable tablets, and new pedagogies to support them conflict with many young people’s traditional ideas of museums and learning. The assessment of the implications of museums’ integration of portable tablets indicates that in making pedagogical transformations to accommodate new technologies, museums risk opposing didactic intention if pedagogies do not sufficiently attend to young learners’ systemic expectations to learning and to their expectations to the digital experience influenced by their leisure use.

Mục tiêu của nghiên cứu này là khám phá sự hiểu biết khái niệm của một nhóm giáo viên tiềm năng về sự khuếch tán và thẩm thấu khi họ áp dụng mô hình xây dựng 5E cùng với các tài liệu liên quan trong khóa học phương pháp khoa học. Ý tưởng của năm mươi giáo viên tiềm năng đã được thu thập thông qua khảo sát trước và sau, cùng với khảo sát sau một thời gian trì hoãn, bao gồm mười câu hỏi hai tầng mà phần giải thích là phần không thể thiếu. Các cuộc phỏng vấn cá nhân đã được tiến hành với sáu giáo viên tiềm năng sau khi triển khai đơn vị bằng bốn câu hỏi. Điểm kiểm tra đã được phân tích cả định lượng và định tính. Các cuộc phỏng vấn sau giảng dạy đã được phân tích định tính. Phân tích thống kê bằng cách sử dụng ANOVA một chiều đối với điểm kiểm tra của sinh viên chỉ ra sự khác biệt có ý nghĩa thống kê giữa điểm trước và sau khi kiểm tra cũng như điểm sau một thời gian trì hoãn (p < 0.05). Phân tích định tính về giải thích của các giáo viên tiềm năng trong các câu hỏi hai tầng cho thấy sự thay đổi trong ý tưởng của họ theo thời gian. Cả hai phân tích định lượng và định tính đều cho thấy các hoạt động giảng dạy đã thúc đẩy sự hiểu biết khái niệm của sinh viên. Không phát hiện sự khác biệt có ý nghĩa thống kê nào giữa điểm sau kiểm tra và điểm kiểm tra sau một thời gian trì hoãn, cho thấy các hoạt động giảng dạy dựa trên mô hình 5E đã giúp sinh viên duy trì sự hiểu biết khái niệm mới của mình.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of case-based learning instruction over traditionally designed chemistry instruction on eleventh grade students’ epistemological beliefs and their attitudes toward chemistry as a school subject. The subjects of this study consisted of 63 eleventh grade students from two intact classes of an urban high school instructed with same teacher. Each teaching method was randomly assigned to one class. The experimental group received case-based learning and the control group received traditional instruction. At the experimental group, life cases were presented with small group format; at the control group, lecturing and discussion was carried out. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control group with respect to their epistemological beliefs and attitudes toward chemistry as a school subject in favor of case-based learning method group. Thus, case base learning is helpful for development of students’ epistemological beliefs and attitudes toward chemistry.

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of contextualization: (a) expository textbook condition, (b) simplistic framing condition, (c) immersive world condition, and (d) a single-user immersive world condition. Results indicated that the immersive-world dyad and immersive-world single user conditions performed significantly better than the electronic textbook group on standardized items. The immersive-world dyad condition also performed significantly better than either the expository textbook or the descriptive framing condition on a performance-based transfer task, and performed significantly better than the expository textbook condition on standardized test items. Implications for science education, and consistent with the goals of this special issue, are that immersive game-based learning environments provide a powerful new form of curriculum for teaching and learning science.

The World Wide Web contains a number of collections of data files for molecules with limited usability and utility for users. We describe the design of a Common Molecules collection that provides interactive tools for 3-D visualization of molecules. Our organizational design is intuitive and our collection is large, growing, and provides not only structural information, but also historical and/or key information on the properties of the molecules in the collection. The use of the collection by students and the role of students in the development of the collection are also described.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a model-based introductory physics curriculum on conceptual learning in a Physics First (PF) Initiative. This is the first comparative study in physics education that applies the Rasch modeling approach to examine the effects of a model-based curriculum program combined with PF in the United States. Five teachers and 301 students (in grades 9 through 12) in two mid-Atlantic high schools participated in the study. The students’ conceptual learning was measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). It was found that the ninth-graders enrolled in the model-based program in a PF initiative achieved substantially greater conceptual understanding of the physics content than those 11th-/12th-graders enrolled in the conventional non-modeling, non-PF program (Honors strand). For the 11th-/12th-graders enrolled in the non-PF, non-honors strands, the modeling classes also outperformed the conventional non-modeling classes. The instructional activity reports by students indicated that the model-based approach was generally implemented in modeling classrooms. A closer examination of the field notes and the classroom observation profiles revealed that the greatest inconsistencies in model-based teaching practices observed were related to classroom interactions or discourse. Implications and recommendations for future studies are also discussed.