Collaborative Research: Scaffolding middle and high school students’ scientific evaluations of sources and alternative claims in Earth and environmental sciences

合作研究：为中学生和高中生提供对地球和环境科学来源和替代主张的科学评估

• 批准号: 2346657
• 负责人: Carla McAuliffe
• 金额: $ 30.97万
• 依托单位: Institute for Global Environmental Strategies
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-11-01 至 2026-10-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2346657&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Scaffolding; middle; students

Contemporary scientific and social issues, such as water security or climate change, are often complex and interrelated. This requires reasoned and scientific evaluations to determine appropriate responses. Although reasoned and scientific evaluations may be challenging for students, well-designed instructional materials may facilitate the teaching and learning of contemporary scientific and social issues. Students learning about these socioscientific issues encounter both scientific sources that represent current consensus and understanding as well as everyday information sources that may not be consistent with current science. This project addresses tools to support students in reading and evaluating a variety of sources to compare various claims addressing socioscientific issues. It draws on literacy concepts from science education and social studies to develop and implement scaffolding tools that can support students' understanding of the links among data, evidence, and claims while considering the trustworthiness and plausibility of sources. The project will design and test such instructional scaffolds with the goal of helping middle and high school science and social studies students to deepen their evaluation skills as they make reasoned evaluations as expected of citizens in a functional democratic society.The project's fundamental research questions are: (1) What are the features of instructional scaffolds that support middle and high school students to develop more critical source trustworthiness and claim plausibility evaluations? (2) When engaging in these instructional scaffolds, how do students' evaluations relate to their shifts in trustworthiness and plausibility judgments toward justifiable understandings (e.g., based on evidence and reasoning)? (3) How do these evaluations and judgments relate to changes in students’ core disciplinary knowledge of social, civic, and scientific concepts related to socioscientific issues? The project will develop complementary instructional scaffolds to support source and claim evaluation and conduct professional development sessions with pairs of middle and high school science and social studies teachers to enable them to implement these scaffolds in their classrooms effectively. Furthermore, the project team will conduct rigorous classroom-based tests to gauge students' engagement, reasoning, and understanding of the fundamental scientific, social, and civic phenomena underlying these topics. The project team anticipates that these scaffolds will support students' reasoning and deepening understanding of socioscientific phenomena. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

当代的科学和社会问题，例如水安全或气候变化，通常是复杂且相互关联的。这需要进行理性和科学评估以确定适当的回答。尽管可能对学生挑战有理由和科学评估，但精心设计的教学材料可能有助于学习当代科学和社会问题的教学和学习。学习这些社会科学问题的学生遇到了代表当前共识和理解的科学资源，以及每天可能与当前科学一致的信息来源。该项目介绍了支持学生阅读和评估各种来源的工具，以比较解决社会科学问题的各种主张。它借鉴了科学教育和社会研究的扫盲概念，以开发和实施脚手架工具，这些工具可以支持学生对数据，证据和主张之间的联系，同时考虑来源的可信度和合理性。该项目将设计和测试此类教学脚手架，目的是帮助中学和高中的科学和社会研究学生加深他们的评估能力，因为他们在功能民主社会中对公民的预期进行了合理的评估，该项目的基本研究问题是：（1）支持中学生和高中生的教学能力以及更重要的评估能力的教学特征，并具有什么？ （2）当参与这些教学脚手架时，学生的评估与他们在可信赖性和合理性法官向合理理解（例如，基于证据和推理）方面的转变有何关系？ （3）这些评估和法官与学生对与社会科学问题有关的社会，公民和科学概念的核心学科知识的变化有何关系？该项目将开发完整的教学脚手架，以支持来源和要求评估并通过成对的中学科学和社会研究教师进行专业发展，以使他们能够在课堂上有效地实施这些脚手架。此外，项目团队将进行严格的基于课堂的测试，以评估学生对这些主题基本的基本科学，社会和公民现象的参与，推理和理解。项目团队预计，这些脚手架将支持学生对社会科学现象的推理并加深理解。 Discovery Research Prek-12计划（DRK-12）试图通过研究和开发创新资源，模型和工具来显着增强PreK-12学生和教师的科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）的学习和教学。 DRK-12计划中的项目基于STEM教育和先前的研发工作的基础研究，为拟议项目提供了理论和经验的理由。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响来通过评估来支持的珍贵支持。