James H. Wandersee

Preventing Plant Blindness

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Assessing understanding in biology

This paper discusses several new assessment strategies that encourage meaningful learning and conceptual understanding in the biological sciences. Our purpose is to introduce a handful of evaluation and measurement techniques that help students assimilate well-integrated, strongly cohesive frameworks of interrelated concepts as a way of facilitating ‘real understanding’ of natural phenomena. Among these methods are concept maps, V diagrams, SemNet software, image-based test items, clinical interviews, portfolios, written products, performance measures, and conceptual diagnostic tests. Evidence suggests that these methods are most useful at highlighting ‘alternative conceptions’ and assisting students who wish to ‘learn how to learn’.

Reform and Innovation in Science Teaching: A Human Constructivist View

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the origins of a human constructivist model of science teaching that can serve as an alternative to the hunches, guesses, and folklore that have guided the teaching profession for over 100 years. The final report of the Committee of Ten is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of American education. It represents for the first time that university-based scientists contributed substantially to the emerging debate on what schools teach and how they teach it. Recognizing that conceptual change often involves the extremely time-consuming process of negotiation has significant implications for curriculum and instruction. For one thing, it means that fewer topics can be covered in the course of a typical school year, and that great care needs to be taken in selecting and sequencing the concepts in a science curriculum. Increasingly, talented science teachers are being asked to take an active part in the selection of curricula, textbooks, and instructional materials. Rather than passive recipients of district-mandated curriculum guides and teacher-proof kits, these teachers are playing a central role in important decisions about curriculum and instruction.

Theory-Driven Graphic Organizers

Publisher Summary The development of semantic networking and concept mapping has interesting parallels and important distinctions. They both have a substantial research base demonstrating their effectiveness as research and metacognitive tools. While grid systems for drawing structures may be familiar to the engineer and the artist, they have also been demonstrated to be useful in biology education. Roundhouse diagrams are named after the circular buildings with central turntables that are used by railroads for housing and switching locomotives. Another graphic metacognitive tool is Gowins epistemological vee. Otherwise known as a vee diagram, this graphic allows one to view the actual activities of science as it moves from events to data collection to data transformations to knowledge claims to values claims as a research project is being planned or completed. Concept mapping requires an understanding of what a concept entails and promotes the ability to use concepts as the basis of scientific language. Concept mapping requires the map designer to prioritize and make judicious use of selected concepts when mapping. This may well serve proponents of science education reform who advocate.

Humor as a Teaching Strategy

I N THE PAST, the use of humor in the formal presentation of biology lessons was considered both inappropriate and counterproductive. Few serious scholars would stoop to using humor as a teaching strategy! The subject matter alone was supposed to keep students interested in what the instructor had to say. Fortunately, the social norms of schools have changed to recognize the value of an instructor who has a sense of humor. It is accepted that humor, if judiciously used, can enhance classroom learning. However, humor is like a stick of dynamite. In an experts hands it can blast away obstructions between subject matterand student. But in a novices grasp, it may destroy a lesson just as easily. The problem is to discover the types of humor which are most productive in the science classroom and then to apply them in the proper way. This is not an easy task. Much of the research on the use of humor has failed to produce unequivocal results (Bryant, Comisky, and Zillmann 1979). Recently, however, some powerful concepts about humor and its use in the classroom have begun to emerge. What follows is an attempt to systematize isolated concepts of humor so that the classroom teacher can use humor more effectively as an instructional strategy.

Research in Science Teaching and Learning: A Human Constructivist View

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the nature of research efforts in science education and how research can contribute to the improvement of classroom practice. The 20-year period following the launch of Sputnik saw remarkable change in research activities of science educators. The establishment of the first journal that was entirely devoted to research reports in the field and the rapid expansion of graduate programs producing M.S. and Ph.D. recipients with the research skills necessary to tackle significant problems in science teaching and learning were among the most important events in 1963. After reviewing the research reports of this era, one is struck by the extent to which empirical work was driven by the demands of curriculum reform and instructional innovation. These in turn reflected the national commitment to “catch up”with Soviet advances in the military, technological, and scientific arenas. In contrast to the assumptions of many science teachers, it is now clear that learners develop a set of well-defined ideas about natural objects and events even before they arrive at the classroom door.

Learning, teaching, and assessment: A human constructivist perspective

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the concepts of learning and teaching, and the role of assessment in making them effective. Learning may proceed in two different ways. Rote learning occurs when the learner makes no effort to relate new concepts and propositions to prior relevant knowledge he/she possesses. Meaningful learning occurs when the learner seeks to relate new concepts and propositions to relevant existing concepts and propositions in his/her cognitive structure. Another reason students resort to rote learning is that they often possess many invalid notions or misconceptions in virtually every domain of knowledge. One threat to assessment validity is that information learned in one context may not be transferred and utilized in a different context. Test items that require use of knowledge only in the same context in which it was learned do not assess higher levels of meaningful learning. Teachers must learn ways to plan their own curriculum, they must be able to sequence topics in such a way that new knowledge is more easily built on previous learning, and they must master a set of strategies that aim at helping learners restructure their scientific understandings.

Interactive Historical Vignettes

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the role of the nature of science in contemporary science teaching. A major component of science education reform is teaching the nature of science. If teachers are to actualize the reform goals, they must understand not only what scientists know, but also how science works. They ought to use research-tested instructional tools appropriate for this new task. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) proposes that scientific enterprise may be best illustrated by using historical examples of exceptional significance in the development of science. The imagination of research design and the excitement of discovery are also diminished by science teachers who offer mindless, step-by-step, failure-free laboratory activities that are intended to verify the lectures of the teachers. The science education literature has established the need for development of curriculum materials to facilitate the balanced inclusion of histories of science in existing science courses for non-science majors in order to teach the nature of science.

Struggling To Understand Abstract Science Topics: A Roundhouse Diagram-Based Study.

This study explored the effects of Roundhouse diagram construction on a previously low-performing middle school science students struggles to understand abstract science concepts and principles. It is based on a metacognition-based visual learning model proposed by Wandersee in 1994. Ward and Wandersee introduced the Roundhouse diagram strategy and showed how it could be applied in science education. This article aims at elucidating the process by which Roundhouse diagramming helps learners bootstrap their current understandings to reach the intended meaningful understanding of complex science topics. The main findings of this study are that (a) it is crucial that relevant prior knowledge and dysfunctional alternative conceptions not be ignored during new learning if low-performing science students are to understand science well; (b) as the students mastery of the Roundhouse diagram construction improved, so did science achievement; and (c) the students apt choice of concept-related visual icons aided progress toward meaningful understanding of complex science concepts.

Can Teachers Learn in an Online Environment

Abstract Through anonymous surveys, teachers enrolled in online science courses reflected on the activities and methods they encountered.