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Policy implementation and cognition: Reframing and refocusing implementation research
- Review of Educational Research
, 2002
"... Education policy faces a familiar public policy challenge: Local implementa-tion is difficult. In this article we develop a cognitive framework to character-ize sense-making in the implementation process that is especially relevant for recent education policy initiatives, such as standards-based ref ..."
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Cited by 147 (3 self)
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Education policy faces a familiar public policy challenge: Local implementa-tion is difficult. In this article we develop a cognitive framework to character-ize sense-making in the implementation process that is especially relevant for recent education policy initiatives, such as standards-based reforms that press for tremendous changes in classroom instruction. From a cognitive perspec-tive, a key dimension of the implementation process is whether, and in what ways, implementing agents come to understand their practice, potentially changing their beliefs and attitudes in the process. We draw on theoretical and empirical literature to develop a cognitive perspective on implementation. We review the contribution of cognitive science frames to implementation research and identify areas where cognitive science can make additional contributions.
Explanation-driven inquiry: Integrating conceptual and epistemic supports for science inquiry.
- Science Education,
, 2004
"... ABSTRACT: Science education reforms consistently maintain the goal that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, including both the nature of scientific knowledge and methods for making it. This paper articulates a framework for scaffolding epistemic aspects of inquiry that can h ..."
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Cited by 65 (3 self)
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ABSTRACT: Science education reforms consistently maintain the goal that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, including both the nature of scientific knowledge and methods for making it. This paper articulates a framework for scaffolding epistemic aspects of inquiry that can help students understand inquiry processes in relation to the kinds of knowledge such processes can produce. This framework underlies the design of a technology-supported inquiry curriculum for evolution and natural selection that focuses students on constructing and evaluating scientific explanations for natural phenomena. The design has been refined through cycles of implementation, analysis, and revision that have documented the epistemic practices students engage in during inquiry, indicate ways in which designed tools support students' work, and suggest necessary additional social scaffolds. These findings suggest that epistemic tools can play a unique role in supporting students' inquiry, and a fruitful means for studying students' scientific epistemologies.
Conceptual and epistemic aspects of students’ scientific explanations
- Journal of the Learning Sciences
, 2003
"... This article explores how students ’ epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-suppor ..."
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Cited by 60 (2 self)
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This article explores how students ’ epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum about evolution. Analyses intended to disentangle conceptual and epistemic aspects of explanation reveal that groups sought plausible causal accounts of observed data, and were sensitive to the need for causal coherence, while articulating explanations consistent with the theory of natural selection. Groups often failed to explicitly cite data to support key claims, however, both because of difficulty in interpreting data and because they did not seem to see explicit evidence as crucial to an explanation. These findings reveal that students have productive epistemic resources to bring to bear during inquiry, but highlight the need for an epistemic discourse around student-generated artifacts to deepen both the conceptual and epistemological understanding students may develop through inquiry. Inquiry-based approaches to science education emphasize processes of inquiry, such as asking questions, generating and interpreting data, and forming conclusions
Tapping epistemological resources for learning physics
- The Journal of the Learning Sciences
, 2003
"... Research on personal epistemologies has begun to consider ontology: Do naive epistemologies take the form of stable, unitary beliefs or of fine-grained, context-sensitive resources? Debates such as this regarding subtleties of cognitive theory, however, may be difficult to connect to everyday instru ..."
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Cited by 42 (1 self)
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Research on personal epistemologies has begun to consider ontology: Do naive epistemologies take the form of stable, unitary beliefs or of fine-grained, context-sensitive resources? Debates such as this regarding subtleties of cognitive theory, however, may be difficult to connect to everyday instructional practice. Our purpose in this article is to make that connection. We first review reasons for supporting the latter account, of naive epistemologies as made up of fine-grained, context-sensitive resources; as part of this argument we note that familiar strategies and curricula tacitly ascribe epistemological resources to students. We then present several strategies designed more explicitly to help students tap those resources for learning introductory physics. Finally, we reflect on this work as an example of interplay between two modes of inquiry into student thinking, that of instruction and that of formal research on learning. Hammer and Elby 3 STUDENT EPISTEMOLOGIES An extensive body of research addresses beliefs about knowledge and learning, or "epistemological beliefs " (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997), with much of this work
Understanding students’ practical epistemologies and their influence on learning through inquiry
- Science Education
, 2005
"... ABSTRACT: It has long been a goal of science education in the United States that students leave school with a robust understanding of the nature of science. Decades of research show that this does not happen. Inquiry-based instruction is advocated as a means for developing such understanding, althou ..."
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Cited by 35 (1 self)
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ABSTRACT: It has long been a goal of science education in the United States that students leave school with a robust understanding of the nature of science. Decades of research show that this does not happen. Inquiry-based instruction is advocated as a means for developing such understanding, although there is scant direct evidence that it does. There is a gap between what is known about students ’ inquiry practices and their epistemological beliefs about science. Studies of students ’ ideas about epistemological aspects of formal science are unlikely to shed any light on how they perceive their own inquiry efforts. Conversely, inquiry-based instruction that does not account for the epistemological beliefs that guide students ’ inquiry stands very little chance of helping students to understand professional science. This paper reviews largely independent lines of research into students ’ beliefs about the nature of science and their practices of inquiry to argue that students ’ inquiry is guided by practical epistemologies that are in need of study. An approach to studying practical epistemologies is proposed that has the potential to produce a better psychological theory of epistemological development, as well as to realize goals of a science education that
Resources, framing, and transfer
- In J. Mestre (Ed.), Transfer of
, 2005
"... As researchers studying student reasoning in introductory physics, and as instructors teaching courses, we often focus on whether and how students apply what they know in one context to their reasoning in another. But we do not speak in terms of “transfer.” The term connotes to us a unitary view of ..."
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Cited by 28 (1 self)
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As researchers studying student reasoning in introductory physics, and as instructors teaching courses, we often focus on whether and how students apply what they know in one context to their reasoning in another. But we do not speak in terms of “transfer.” The term connotes to us a unitary view of knowledge as a thing that is acquired in one context and carried (or not) to another. We speak, rather, in terms of activating resources, a language with an explicitly manifold view of cognitive structure. In this chapter, we describe this view and argue that it provides a more firm and generative basis for research. In particular, our resources-based perspective accounts for why it is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to draw a boundary around the notion of “transfer”; provides an analytical framework for exploring the differences between active transfer involving metacognition and passive transfer that “just happens”; helps to explain many results in the transfer literature, such as the rarity of certain kinds of transfer and the ubiquity of others; and provides an ontological underpinning for new views of transfer such as Bransford, Schwartz, and Sears ’ (this issue) “preparation for future learning.”
Multiple regression analysis of epistemological beliefs, learning approaches, and self-regulated learning.
- Electronic Journal Research in Education Psychology,
, 2008
"... Abstract Introduction. Recent research in educational psychology has explored student approaches to ..."
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Cited by 8 (2 self)
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Abstract Introduction. Recent research in educational psychology has explored student approaches to
Epistemological resources and framing: A cognitive framework for helping teachers interpret and respond to their students’ epistemologies
- In L. D. Bendixen & F. C. Feucht (Eds.), Personal
, 2010
"... Previously, we have argued that an account of personal epistemologies based on epistemological resources shows generativity and explanatory power, especially for understanding variability in a student's behavior. In this chapter, we argue that a resources framework is generative for instructio ..."
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Cited by 6 (1 self)
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Previously, we have argued that an account of personal epistemologies based on epistemological resources shows generativity and explanatory power, especially for understanding variability in a student's behavior. In this chapter, we argue that a resources framework is generative for instruction and is therefore worth teaching to teachers. Using for illustration a case study of middle-school Earth science students learning about the rock cycle, we argue that the resources framework (1) includes coherent networks of resources that correspond to what teachers can recognize, and what novice teachers can learn to recognize, in students' approaches to learning; (2) invites close attention to context when evaluating whether a given student utterance or behavior reflects a productive stance toward knowledge, leading to more nuanced assessments of the student's approach to learning; and (3) provides guidance about how to foster epistemological sophistication over both short and long time scales. To support these points, we first extend the resources framework to address a challenge it presents: epistemological resources are rarely apparent in isolation. Instead, the main observable grainsize of student epistemologies corresponds to an epistemological frame, a locally coherent activation of a network of resources that may look like a stable belief or theory. A particular
The inquiry paradox: why doing science doesn't necessarily change ideas about science
- In Z. C. Zacharia (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth Intl
, 2003
"... A long standing goal of science education in the United States has been that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, of what scientific knowledge is like and how it is constructed. Despite this interest, students continue to leave secondary schools with naïve views of the nature ..."
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Cited by 4 (0 self)
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A long standing goal of science education in the United States has been that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, of what scientific knowledge is like and how it is constructed. Despite this interest, students continue to leave secondary schools with naïve views of the nature of science. Current science education reforms advocate inquiry as a way for students to learn about the nature of science as well as scientific concepts. Inquiry engages students in their own efforts to construct scientific knowledge, and several efforts to use technology to support inquiry have been effective at helping students understand important scientific concepts and develop certain skills of scientific reasoning. Still, there is no evidence that doing inquiry in school develops students’ understanding of the nature of science. The reason for this is twofold. First, assessments of students ’ ideas of the nature of science universally target professional science, rather than students ’ own efforts to do science. Students’ views on the nature of their own inquiry may be “scientific, ” but not be related to their views of professional science. Second, helping students to draw such relationships may depend upon an explicitly epistemic discourse in the classroom, centered on what students know and how they know it, and that connects their work to professional science. Technology can support such a discourse by helping students to generate artifacts from their inquiry structured to highlight epistemic issues. These epistemic tools should represent important epistemic forms of scientific knowledge that link to practices for making them. Most importantly, research on epistemological development must link students ’ practices of inquiry to their expressed beliefs about professional science.
You have to count the squares’: Applying knowledge in pieces to learning rectangular area
- Journal of the Learning Sciences
, 2005
"... This article extends and strengthens the knowledge in pieces perspective (diSessa, 1988, 1993) by applying core components to analyze how 5th-grade students with computational knowledge of whole-number multiplication and connections between multiplication and discrete arrays constructed understandin ..."
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Cited by 3 (0 self)
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This article extends and strengthens the knowledge in pieces perspective (diSessa, 1988, 1993) by applying core components to analyze how 5th-grade students with computational knowledge of whole-number multiplication and connections between multiplication and discrete arrays constructed understandings of area and ways of us-ing representations to solve area problems. The results complement past research by demonstrating that important components of the knowledge in pieces perspective are not tied to physics, more advanced mathematics, or the learning of older students. Fur-thermore, the study elaborates the perspective in a particular context by proposing knowledge for selecting attributes, using representations, and evaluating representa-tions as analytic categories useful for highlighting some coordination and refinement processes that can arise when students learn to use external representations to solve problems. The results suggest, among other things, that explicitly identifying similari-ties and differences between students’past experiences using representations to solve problemsanddemandsofnewtaskscanbecentral tosuccessful instructionaldesign. This case study applies core components of an epistemological perspective re-ferred to as knowledge in pieces (diSessa, 1988, 1993) to answer an instance of the following research question: How can students coordinate their understandings of problem situations with those of external representations when learning to solve problems? DiSessa developed the knowledge in pieces perspective to explain emerging expertise in Newtonian mechanics. The perspective holds that knowl-edge elements are more diverse and smaller in grain size than those presented in
