Charles W. Anderson

Relationships Between Classroom Behaviors and Student Outcomes in Junior High Mathematics and English Classes

Sixty-eight teachers (39 English and 29 mathematics) were observed in two of their class sections with a low-inference coding system designed to record context, teacher, and student behaviors. Relationships among teaching behaviors and student outcomes in mathematics classes suggest that elements of both the direct instruction model and indirect influence model are supported. Results in English classes are less clear.

Task Engagement and Conceptual Change in Middle School Science Classrooms

Science educators have long been concerned that many students fail to engage in academic tasks with the goal of achieving better understanding of science. This study examined two research questions. First, what patterns of students’ task engagement emerge as they work on science classroom tasks? Second, how are patterns of students’ task engagement related to factors involving their cognition (i.e., knowledge and achievement), motivation (e.g., goals in science class), and affect (i.e., attitudes toward science)? The study involved 12 sixth-grade students in two classrooms where the teachers and instructional materials provided students with extensive support to understand science better. The results indicated that some students recognized the value of science learning and demonstrated high quality of cognitive engagement, whereas others pursued alternative agendas. The results are used to explore two research traditions that offer different explanations for the failure of students’ task engagement: (a) cognitive science or conceptual change research and (b) motivation research.

Canonical and Sociocultural Approaches to Research and Reform in Science Education: The Story of Juan and His Group

Recent reforms have emphasized scientific literacy for all Americans as a key goal of science education. In this article we compare 2 approaches to defining functional scientific literacy and helping students to achieve it. The first, which we label a canonical approach, focuses on the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind of literate individuals. The second, which we label a sociocultural approach, focuses on language, values, personal identity, and other factors that affect an individuals participation in the activities of a community. Both canonical and sociocultural approaches can play a useful role in analyzing events in science classrooms. It has been helpful to us to think of the students as orchestrating the complex interplay among 3 types of foci for their attention: interpersonal relationships, scientific activity, and task requirements. We show with a case study of a group of 5 sixth graders from our research how the interplay of these factors can subvert the scientific intentions of a group activity. In this case, interpersonal relationships among students and their interpretations of the task requirements led to the scientific activity being appropriated largely by the most academically successful member of the group. Further progress in science education will require new approaches to teaching and curriculum that combine tools and insights from canonical and sociocultural traditions. The resource needs of classrooms that engage all students in authentic scientific activity will be substantial. However, the costs to society of failing to make these investments will also be substantial. Without them we see little hope of achieving functional scientific literacy for all Americans.

Appropriating Scientific Practices and Discourses with Future Elementary Teachers.

We describe a physics course designed to engage preservice elementary teachers in the practices and discourses of science through activities they would later use with children. Formerly successful science students encountered considerable barriers in giving up prior conceptions of science as an enterprise practiced alone, with quick and certain answers that were obvious to everyone, and external authority as the preferred grounds for knowing. Other students, who deemed themselves unsuccessful in previous science learning, came to the course with a value for personal understanding-something they had not accomplished in earlier science courses. We describe how both sets of students made progress in inventing and testing models, working with empirical data, critically evaluating and using authoritative sources, and talking and thinking within a community of validators.

Curriculum materials, teacher talk and student learning: case studies in fifth grade science teaching∗

∗ This is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, Symposium on Teacher Explanatory Talk, Austin, Texas, December 1983.

Reasoning about Data in Middle School Science.

This case study illustrates instruction in an urban 6th-grade classroom in which students were learning about mass, volume, and density by attempting to layer (stack) three miscible solutions with differing densities atop one another. The study examines classroom discourse and interaction on the basis of four teaching goals: (a) reaching consensus about which stacks were possible, (b) developing persuasive arguments that separated data from noise, (c) establishing social norms for collective inquiry, and (d) appreciating the epistemological status of scientific knowledge. The study traces the fate of three stacks that students claimed were possible after initial investigations with the solutions. These claims underwent a process of collective validation in which consensus without coercion was the goal, which illustrates emergent standards for backing claims with evidence, as well as for replicability, among the students. Students were successful in achieving three of the four goals, with some qualifications. In relation to Goal 3, which required generalization to other situations, somewhat less success is reported. Limitations in the current standards, difficulties of time allotment in current curricula, and establishing classroom cultures of inquiry are discussed.

Addressing Challenges in Developing Learning Progressions For Environmental Science Literacy

In a world where human actions increasingly affect the natural systems on which all life depends, we need educated citizens who can participate in personal and public decisions about environmental issues. The effects of global warming have widereaching ramifications. No longer can policy decisions be made by a select few. For example, decisions about how to distribute water so that urban, agricultural, and natural ecosystems have adequate water supplies or about whether to tax carbon emissions require that citizens understand scientific arguments about the effects of their actions.

Conservation of Energy: An Analytical Tool for Student Accounts of Carbon-Transforming Processes

Energy and energy conservation are powerful concepts for understanding biological systems, but helping students use these concepts as tools for analysis of these complex systems poses special challenges. This chapter focuses on three issues that arise in teaching about energy in biological systems: 1. Understanding the purpose of the concept of energy. Students often use energy in cause-effect stories related to vitality or animation (“energy is what makes things happen”), rather than treating energy as an enduring entity that can be used as a tool for analysis. In instruction, we treat the principles of energy conservation as “rules to be followed.” Students use these rules to trace energy through processes and observe how energy constrains these processes. 2. Identifying forms of energy in living systems. Students often associate energy with cause, vitality, or growth in ways that do not align with scientific conceptions of energy. In our instruction, we make simplifications we feel are important for helping students develop a working discourse about energy in science classrooms: we describe energy in different forms, one of which is chemical energy that is associated with bonds of molecules. 3. Tracing energy separately from matter. Students often lack a sense of necessity for distinguishing between matter and energy (“glucose is energy”). We use physical representations of energy (twist ties) and a framework for scaffolding distinct accounts of matter and energy to help students focus on explaining matter and energy as separate entities.

Connections between Student Explanations and Arguments from Evidence about Plant Growth

In an analysis of 22 middle and high school student interviews, we found that many students reinterpret the hypotheses and results of standard investigations of plant growth to match their own understandings. Students may benefit from instructional strategies that scaffold their explanations and inquiry about how plants grow.

What learning progressions on carbon-transforming processes tell us about how students learn to use the laws of conservation of matter and energy

AbstrAct We report on learning progression research that tracks how students develop an understand-ing of matter and energy conservation as they pertain to the carbon-transforming processes of combustion, photosynthesis, cellular respiration, digestion, and biosynthesis. We find that typically only 10% of students in American high schools develop scientific explanations of these processes where they successfully conserve matter and energy (atoms in the inputs match those in the outputs and chemical energy is accurately associated with changes in chemical bonds). Students with confused explanations do not use the conservation laws to monitor their ideas. We present data that indicate that explicit instruction and consistent assessment on the use of the conservation laws as tools for understanding the carbon-trans-forming processes can advance students’ understanding. Keywords: carbon-transforming processes, learning, learning progressions, teaching Em Erg nt topics on ch mistry ducation[LEarning progrEssions in chEmistry]