Joshua A. Danish

Applying an Activity Theory Lens to Designing Instruction for Learning About the Structure, Behavior, and Function of a Honeybee System

This article reports on a study in which activity theory was used to design, implement, and analyze a 10-week curriculum unit about how honeybees collect nectar with a particular focus on complex systems concepts. Students (n = 42) in a multi-year kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom participated in this study as part of their 10 regular classroom activity. The curricular unit was composed of 4 specific activity types, each of which was intended to focus students on a particular dimension of the content: (a) Inquiry with BeeSign software was intended to help students explore the benefit of individual nectar-collecting behaviors for the hive as a whole; (b) traditional drawing activities were intended to help students learn the structures of 15 the bees; (c) participatory representation activities, in which students enacted the behavior of the bees as they collect nectar, were intended to help students link bee structures to individual behaviors; and (d) an embodied nectar-gathering game was intended to help the students recognize the challenges of finding nectar for individual bees. Pre- and posttest interviews reveal a shift in individual student understanding 20 as students progressed from discussing the superficial structures of the system to discussing both behaviors and functions.

Constructing Liminal Blends in a Collaborative Augmented-Reality Learning Environment

In vision-based augmented-reality (AR) environments, users view the physical world through a video feed or device that augments the display with a graphical or informational overlay. Our goal in this manuscript is to ask how and why these new technologies create opportunities for learning. We suggest that AR is uniquely positioned to support learning through its ability to support students in developing “conceptual blends”—which we propose extend beyond cognitive spaces to include the layering of multiple ideas and physical materials, often supplied by different conversation participants. We document one case study and trace how the narrative structure of a board game, the physical floor materials (e.g. linoleum), a student’s first-person embodied experiences, the third-person live camera feed, and the augmented-reality symbols become integrated in the activity. As a result, students’ conceptualization of force and friction become fused with a diverse set of intellectual resources. We conclude by suggesting that the framework of liminal blends may inform the design of future AR learning environments and in particular help generate predictions about the ways in which the juxtaposition of certain resources may otherwise produce unexpected results.

Representational Practices by the Numbers: How kindergarten and first‐grade students create, evaluate, and modify their science representations

A productive approach to studying the role of representations in supporting students’ learning of science content is to examine their actions from a practice perspective. The current study examines kindergarten and first‐grade students’ representational practices across a consistent context—the creation of storyboards—both before and after a curricular intervention in order to highlight those aspects of their practices that changed regardless of a superficially similar task. Analysis of the students’ storyboards reveals considerable improvement in the number of included features after the intervention. Analysis of the students’ practices as they changed over time is also presented by examining the students’ discourse, with a focus on their discussions of the science content and the representations themselves. We demonstrate an increase in accuracy and relevance of the features being discussed, as well as an increase in requesting and providing assessments of students’ representations, particularly between students and their peers.

Negotiating the “Relevant” in Culturally Relevant Mathematics

One approach to promoting successful engagement of underrepresented groups in mathematics classrooms is culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). However, it has been argued that CRP risks essentializing students or watering down academic content. We report our analysis of a case study of a group of three sixth-grade students who took part in a 6-week mathematics curriculum. This curriculum used geographical information system (GIS) maps to engage students in designing personally meaningful research projects while learning about measures of central tendency (i.e., learning statistics). The case study was chosen as representative of how students (47 total) in this urban classroom successfully navigated the curriculum. While successful, the intervention highlights the kinds of negotiations that students engaged in with each other, the teacher, and the curriculum as they co-constructed their own meaning of relevance. The goal of our analysis is to illustrate the importance of recognizing multiple forms of relevance and supporting ongoing negotiations of these multiple forms.RésuméLa pédagogie culturellement pertinente (CRP) est une approche qui permet de promouvoir la participation active des groupes qui sont sous-représentés dans les cours de mathématiques. Toutefois, certains craignent que la pédagogie culturellement pertinente puisse être réductive sur le plan des contenus d’apprentissage. Nous présentons ici l’analyse d’une étude de cas portant sur trois élèves de 6e année qui ont pris part à un programme de mathématiques d’une durée de six semaines. Ce programme se sert de cartes provenant d’un système d’informations géographiques pour stimuler les étudiants à concevoir eux-mêmes des projets de recherche pertinents tout en faisant l’apprentissage des moyennes (c’est-à-dire des statistiques). Nous avons choisi cette étude de cas parce qu’elle constitue un exemple représentatif de la façon dont les étudiants de cette classe en milieu urbain (47 élèves en tout) ont réussi à compléter le programme avec succès. L’intervention s’est avérée un succès, et elle montre bien comment les étudiants négocient entre eux, avec l’enseignant et avec le programme, tout en apportant leur propre contribution à la notion même de pertinence. Le but de notre analyse est d’illustrer l’importance de reconnaître qu’il existe de multiples formes de pertinence, et de soutenir toutes les façons de les négocier.

Collaborative Gaming: Teaching Children About Complex Systems and Collective Behavior

Although games—including board games, video games, and Massive Multiplayer Online Games—have garnered significant attention in recent years for their impact on educational outcomes, a primary focus of this interest is the transfer of knowledge from game to nongame settings. Building on this literature, our research explores how game designs that promote either competitive or collaborative play may lead to differential outcomes including dramatically different and social dynamics. Using video transcribed for speech and gesture, we developed a grounded coding scheme to compare the experiences of a group of 40 early elementary students engaged in a uniquely designed board game, called HIVEMIND, to teach advanced science content to young children ages 6 to 9, which were organized around either (a) individual or (b) collective play. Findings indicate that, in collaborative mode, players were significantly more likely to make positive comments to others, talk on-topic, read instructions to other players, gaze toward the board as well as other players, and take shorter turns among other findings. Implications of this work for designing games and promoting collaborative and positive learning experiences are discussed.

What Are Students Doing during Lecture? Evidence from New Technologies to Capture Student Activity.

Engaging students in class is paramount if they are to gain a deep understanding of class content. Student engagement is manifested by attention to the various components of instruction. However, there is little research at the tertiary level focusing on what aspects of instruction are related to changes in student attention during class. To address this gap, we collected multiple streams of data that provide a measure of student attention during instruction. We had students in an organic chemistry course who wear hats with a camera mounted on the brim, to provide a record of student gaze (i.e. looking at the board, notes, and friends). We also had students who use electronic pens that allowed us to record what information students transferred into their notes (pencasts). Based on our initial results, we believe the data provided by the point-of-view cameras and electronic pens hold great promise for using these technologies as viable research tools in educational settings to address various research questions.

Social Affordances of Mixed Reality Learning Environments: A case from the Science through Technology Enhanced Play project (STEP)

We describe the design of the Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) project. In STEP, we explore the potential for dramatic play—a form of activity that is particularly familiar to early elementary students—to promote meaningful inquiry about scientific concepts. We report on the first round of design experiments conducted with 120 first and second grade students who investigated how and why different states of matter have different properties. Prepost analyses indicate that the majority of students learned the content and demonstrate how the affordances of the socio-technical system promoted the transition from individual observation to collective inquiry, how play as the root activity provided agency within that inquiry, and how the teacher and the social norms of the classroom reinforced these productive social processes.

BeeSign: designing to support mediated group inquiry of complex science by early elementary students

All too often, designers assume that complex science and cycles of inquiry are beyond the capabilities of young children (5--8 years old). However, with carefully designed mediators, we argue that such concepts are well within their grasp. In this paper we describe two design iterations of the BeeSign simulation software that was designed to help young children learn about honeybees collect nectar from a complex systems perspective. We summarize findings from two studies that suggest that this design has been successful in teaching and motivating these young children and demonstrates how activity theory can guide design.