Bruce Sherin

What changes in conceptual change

This paper has two aims. First, it reviews literature about conceptual change and about the study of concepts more broadly. The principal claim is that much prior work has suffered from inexplicitness and imprecision in terms of what constitutes a concept. Second, we introduce a theory of one particular type of concept. A coordination class is a systematic collection of strategies for reading a certain type of information out from the world. We identify both structural components and performance properties of coordination classes. Using this theory, we analyse protocol data from a student with respect to the difficult concept of force in Newtonian mechanics.

Conducting Video Research in the Learning Sciences: Guidance on Selection, Analysis, Technology, and Ethics

Focusing on expanding technical capabilities and new collaborative possibilities, we address 4 challenges for scientists who collect and use video records to conduct research in and on complex learning environments: (a) Selection: How can researchers be systematic in deciding which elements of a complex environment or extensive video corpus to select for study? (b) Analysis: What analytical frameworks and practices are appropriate for given research problems? (c) Technology: What technologies are available and what new tools must be developed to support collecting, archiving, analyzing, reporting, and collaboratively sharing video? and (d) Ethics: How can research protocols encourage broad video sharing and reuse while adequately protecting the rights of research participants who are recorded?

How Students Understand Physics Equations

What does it mean to understand a physics equation? The use of formal expressions in physics is not just a matter of the rigorous and routinized application of principles, followed by the formal manipulation of expressions to obtain an answer. Rather, successful students learn to understand what equations say in a fundamental sense; they have a feel for expressions, and this guides their work. More specifically, students learn to understand physics equations in terms of a vocabulary of elements that I call symbolic forms. Each symbolic form associates a simple conceptual schema with a pattern of symbols in an equation. This hypothesis has implications for how we should understand what must be taught and learned in physics classrooms. From the point of view of improving instruction, it is absolutely critical to acknowledge that physics expertise involves this more flexible and generative understanding of equations, and our instruction should be geared toward helping students to acquire this understanding. The work described here is based on an analysis of a corpus of videotapes in which university students solve physics problems.

Meta-representation: an introduction

Abstract This paper presents an introduction to Project MaRC. The goal of Project MaRC is to study, in very broad terms, what students know about scientific representations and what is possible for them to learn. We use the term meta-representational competence (MRC) to describe the full range of capabilities that students (and others) have concerning the construction and use of external representations. As part of our project, we are engaging in an analysis of the nature of MRC, and we have begun to explore instructional implications. This introductory paper provides an overview of that work, including its goals and results, and it also provides an introduction to the four following papers in the issue.

Dynaturtle Revisited: Learning Physics Through Collaborative Design of a Computer Model

Abstract We investigate two related issues. In what ways can we support student inquiry in the classroom? How can innovative representational systems support learning? In the first case, we advocate collaborative designas a form of activity particularly suited for supporting student inquiry in physics. Students can easily understand and engage in activities that are framed in terms of design, and the task of design also provides a context in which idealized worlds can be considered naturally. With respect to representations for learning, we explore the use of a programming languageto mediate design and inquiry in physics. Programming provides students with an alternative means of expression that is precise and compact. Because a computer language contains certain commands and structures, and not others, it both constrains and enables. In addition, programming can easily capture causal relations and time development, features central to physics. We make our points by displaying and analyzing a teacher‐led ...

Exploring diverse accounts of teacher knowledge

Abstract This article explores the nature of teacher knowledge as it is portrayed by Schoenfelds model of teaching. We attempt to situate Schoenfelds work in the field of teacher knowledge and to elucidate the contribution that he makes to the growing body of research in this area. Towards this end, we explore two related issues. First, we distinguish between claims about the form of teacher knowledge and claims about the content of teacher knowledge. Second, we propose two families of theories of teacher knowledge, where each family shares common phenomena, methods, and theoretical forms. We argue that these two families capture much of the diversity that exists in the literature on teacher knowledge today. Our goal is to begin to develop a theoretical approach that will not only allow us to situate Schoenfelds research, but that will also help us to compare existing theories with each other.

VModel: a visual qualitative modeling environment for middle-school students

Learning how to create, test, and revise models is a central skill in scientific reasoning. We argue that qualitative modeling provides an appropriate level of representation for helping middle-school students learn to become modelers. We describe Vmodel, a system we have created that uses visual representations that enables middle-school students to create qualitative models. Software coaches use simple analyses of model structure plus qualitative simulation to provide feedback and explanations. This system has been used in several studies in Chicago Public School classrooms, using curricula developed in collaboration with teachers. We discuss the design of the visual representation language, how Vmodel works, and evidence from school studies that indicate it is successful in helping students.

Learning Analytics and Computational Techniques for Detecting and Evaluating Patterns in Learning: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The learning sciences community’s interest in learning analytics (LA) has been growing steadily over the past several years. Three recent symposia on the theme (at the American Educational Research Association 2011 and 2012 annual conferences, and the International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2012), organized by Paulo Blikstein, led to the meeting of learning scientists working in this area and ultimately generated the proposal for this special issue. In the two years that we have worked on putting together this special issue, the task of writing an introduction has become both much simpler and significantly more difficult. On the one hand, many of the trends that are driving the increasing attention to LA— big data, the Cloud—have become so prominent that we can count on readers to have some familiarity with them. Thus, we do not need to start at the beginning in our discussion of LA for the Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS) audience. On the other hand, the scope of the field and the potential applications have grown tremendously in this short time. The result is that, if anything, we have fallen further behind. Although the educational data mining and LA communities have produced a steady stream of interesting results, work in education has far to go in

Images of Expertise in Mathematics Teaching

In this chapter we present a brief portrait of how researchers engaged in the study of mathematics teaching have understood teaching expertise, a portrait that is attentive to the diversity that has existed and continues to exist in the field. To do so we first adopt a historical perspective and attempt to capture some of the trends in how teaching expertise has been conceptualized, with an emphasis on how these trends were driven by broader changes in educational research. In particular, we trace the study of mathematics teaching through the traditions of process-product research, cognitive research, subject-specific cognitive research, situated cognition research, and design research. We then provide some sense for the diversity of perspectives and approaches to mathematics teaching that are currently prominent by presenting four images of mathematics teaching practice. We describe how researchers have tacitly conceived of mathematics teachers as either diagnosticians of students’ thinking, conductors of classroom discourse, architects of curriculum, or river guides who are flexible in the moments of teaching. An awareness of these images of expertise will help the field both recognize and situate new images, allowing us to use them in productive ways to further understand the work of mathematics teaching.

The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning: Multimedia Learning with Video

This chapter reviews the literature on comprehension of media-based presentations to develop mental models of physical systems. It examines the representations and cognitive processes involved in understanding media-based presentations, the abilities and skills on which this understanding depends, and the effectiveness of different media for communicating different types of content. In reviewing how people construct mental models from media, it considers how people learn about the structure and functioning of physical systems from visual-spatial representations alone, including static and animated diagrams, and later reviews how they learn from combinations of visual-spatial and verbal representations. Iconic static diagrams can be effective for communicating the static structure of a system and can also be the basis for mental animation. Traditional print media, that is, static diagrams accompanied by text, can provide highly effective external representations to aid the development of mental models of dynamic systems.