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Preliminary Findings - Student Data
- The simulator fosters student engagement in sustained inquiry-based activities
and scientific reasoning through the use of various features and educational
activities. For example, the students are actively involved in searching for
information on the WQS by using multiple representations to answer questions.
- Students engage in both scientific reasoning and argumentation, and
collaborative problem solving in order to understand the underlying causes and
relationships between indicators and land use.
- A preliminary analysis of the discourse between student pairs engaging in
various science activities related to RiverWeb indicates that students may need
additional types of scaffolding.
- Overall, Students exhibited the following difficulties:
- inability to establish whether the differences observed between indicators is due
to cause-and-effect or is based on a relationship between variables;
- lack of understanding of definitions and concepts that are required to solve problems
(e.g., run-off, mandated, pH, heavy metals, BOD, total flow);
- difficulty reading graphs since they're not always on the same scale;
- difficulty reading and comparing (both quantitatively and qualitatively)
two graphs and inferring their underlying meaning.
- The preliminary data suggested that there is a tremendous amount of
variability in students' qualitative categorizations of graphical data
(e.g., "it goes up",
"it's higher", "it decreases", "that's
more").
- Qualitative comparison of indicators (e.g., "it goes up and down, like, at the same
time", "it has a direct relationship", "pH got much more acidic when rain
got higher", "when precipitation increased, acidic levels got a little higher"
;).
- Other difficulties associated with reading graphs included the relationship between min.,
max., averages, and days.
- Prolonged use with RiverWeb leads students to engage in high-order cognitive skills
(e.g., reasoning and argumentation) by automating low-level skills (e.g., finding different
RiverWeb features by scanning the interface).
- Students engage in long reasoning chains as they jointly solve problems presented in the
work sheets and notebook by accessing multiple representations and other WQS features.
- Teachers play an extremely crucial role during collaborative problem solving by providing
different levels of scaffolding. This can take the form of modeling (e.g., showing student how
to set up the interface to facilitate the viewing of various RiverWeb features needed to
answer particular questions), articulating (e.g., teachers make their thinking visible to students),
coaching (e.g., teachers provide hints and feedback based on students' progress), and
fading (e.g., teacher silently watches students' progress).
- Students are sometimes unclear about how to define the task/problem. In some cases, this
is still an issue even after a teacher has provided clear objectives and presented the features
of RiverWeb. In other cases, students spend several conversational turns trying to figure
out what to do next!
- Students create incorrect analogies and/or use incorrect visual representations of complex
concepts. This situation often leads to prolonged reasoning chains, as students jointly attempt
to understand the complex concept. For example, a pristine forest is a river.
- Students often summarize their problem solving performance.
- Students often hypothesize about factors which affect runoff.
- Students seldom raise new hypotheses regarding the effect of or relationship between
indicators. This also leads some students to provide extensive explanations about the
data they've collected and how it is related to their present task.
- Engaged students generate very complex argument structures as they attempt to understand
unexpected findings (e.g., "....toxins didn't increase or decrease at all,
toxins didn't change. No relation at all. So there's no relation at all. I don't
know why" ;). They have difficulty in understanding unexpected findings,
especially if the teacher is not available to provide scaffolding.
- Students lack basic understanding of science concepts (e.g., "nitrogen and sediments
are examples of heavy metals"), and they also have plenty of misconceptions which may
be difficult to eradicate (e.g., "I know that toxins are an example of nitrogen, phosphorous,
and sediments. Is heavy metals part of toxins?"). This is also related
to students' literal interpretation of concepts (e.g., "....because wetlands
they have nowhere to run off to"), (e.g., "a wetland is a marsh").
- Engaged students discuss the assumptions underlying certain aspects of the
simulation. For example, they assume that wetlands didn't have any heavy metals unless humans put
them there. A pair of students stated, "I guess we're supposed to assume that
man hasn't been there".
- Students were not sure how to complete the concept maps, which were supposed to
be used to depict how the factors influence water quality. This is a problem
because their general lack of understanding between cause-and-effect and
relationships interfered with their ability to properly represent which factors
influenced water quality. For example, "the factors have the little circles,
..., with the little things coming off it".
- Students sometimes made incorrect inferences based on their naïve interpretation
of the graphs and were not sure how to resolve them vis-à-vis the task. For example
, "pH didn't vary at all, so it's just isolated, so just write isolated
[on the concept map]"). So, the students decided that the factor should be isolated in the concept
map based on the fact that the graphs showed no variation.
- Engaged students are metacognitively aware of their performance and will address deficiencies
by reviewing what they know, reviewing their arguments, reviewing their problem solving
steps, revisiting graphs generated by RiverWeb, reflecting on the quality of their answers, and
seeking scaffolding from peers and/or teachers.
Last Modified: October 2000
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