H.B. Westbroek

A research approach to designing chemistry education using authentic practices as contexts

We discuss how to reduce the incongruence between the outcomes (both cognitive and affective) of the conventional secondary chemistry curriculum and what is to be attained: the meaningful connection of students’ learning to daily life and societal issues. This problem is addressed by a design study with one curriculum unit about “Water Quality”. With several research cycles using developmental research, we developed an emergent understanding about an instructional framework for curriculum units that embodies a coherent “need‐to‐know” principle and is based on authentic practices. Using this framework we show with some other examples how a context‐based chemistry curriculum can be constructed based on the developed “need‐to‐know” principle.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MEANINGFUL CHEMISTRY EDUCATION

In this paper we elaborate on three potential strategies to promote meaningful chemistry education: using relevant contexts, offering content on a need-to-know basis, and making students feel that their input matters. We illustrate that it is educationally worthwhile to incorporate these characteristics, through our work on a particular chemistry module. Such emphasis leads to concrete, empirically based designs of modules and to heuristic guidelines for educational design decisions. It also productively informs further theorizing, such as an improved conceptualisation of the relations between the three characteristics. We therefore suggest that the type of investigation discussed in this paper, and the scenario-based design method which goes along with it, deserves a more prominent place in science education research.

The Practical Turn in Teacher Education: Designing a Preparation Sequence for Core Practice Frames

Amid calls for more practice-based teacher education, this article presents a concrete illustration of a practice-based bridging strategy for preparing high school biology teachers to enact open-inquiry labs. Open-inquiry labs were considered a core practice frame that served as a context for identifying core practices and for giving coherence to separate components of the approach to labs. A bridging model was developed in which the teaching practices, understandings, and intentions of 31 biology student teachers were elicited with respect to their current lab segments, and these were compared with the concrete segments of the core practice frame. From this analysis, a progression was developed to support prospective teachers in moving from existing conceptions of appropriate practice to a realization of the new practice frame as a better way to achieve valued goals.

Providing students with a sense of purpose by adapting a professional practice.

This article reports on a design study aimed at achieving that students experience their learning as meaningful. Two conditions for meaningful activities were identified: (1) students should be motivated to attain a certain goal and (2) they should have rudimentary conceptual and procedural knowledge of how to attain that goal. Together, these were expected to serve as an advance organizer for functional activities. In a professional practice, professionals know more or less how the activities they perform are going to contribute to the objective they want to achieve. We expected that this structure of means‐end relationships could be adapted to yield advance organizers for educational use. This idea emerged from two previous research cycles. To explore the idea we chose to design and evaluate an instructional version of the practice of monitoring water quality for 14‐ to 15‐year‐old students doing pre‐university education. The evaluation results show that we succeeded in designing a proof of principle. This is only a first step in exploring the idea of designing instructional versions of professional practices. We conclude with a discussion on more theoretical implications of this idea.

Practicality Studies: How to Move From What Works in Principle to What Works in Practice

In his article “Principled Practical Knowledge: Not a Bridge but a Ladder,” Carl Bereiter (2014) argues that theoretical knowledge is too shallow to support the generation of innovative learning activities. He makes a case for principled practical knowledge (PPK)—“principled know-how and know-why”—to fulfill this practical generative role. We argue and illustrate in this commentary that PPK as portrayed by Bereiter does not offer much practical guidance for 2 potential users: professional designers and teachers. For professional designers PPK should be further specified in order to fulfill its generative role. But even this enriched form of PPK still does not suffice to address the challenging issues of practicality teachers face. We explain the magnitude and dimensions that underlie practicality in the everyday work of teachers and suggest how recent work on fast and frugal heuristics can contribute to helping teachers to make instructional innovations practical.