Ενεργοί
The Social Construction of Intentionality: Two-Year-Olds' and Adults' Participation at a Preschool Writing Center
Είναι υπεύθυνος απέναντι στον εαυτό του
Rowe (2008)
Research Design
Dickinson & Porche (2011)
Research Design
Sample
Strand one: What kinds of local literacy practices were enacted in the literacy events occurring at a preschool writing table? Specifically, how were talk, materials, space, and participants' bodies coordinated in writing events?
Site Selection
Data Collection
Principal Proposition:
Conclusions
Data Analysis
Sample
Hypothesis: The support that children receive for language in the preschool years has lasting effects on later reading comprehension.
Specifically, the quantity and content of preschool children's classroom interactions with teachers should predict their language ability in kindergarten. Their kindergarten language ability should predict Grade 4 reading comprehension.
Principal Proposition:
Things that should enhance language growth:
- Teachers
- Tuned in and responsive
- Extend topics of conversation
- Use sophisticated vocabulary
- Group settings
- With sophisticated vocabulary
- Analytic discussion of books
- Requested attention
- Emphasize correct content
Data Collection/Filtering
Selection
- Walker Preschool
- Early-childhood program serving Euro-American, middle class children
- Classroom teachers
- Collaborated to incorporate more writing/literacy in the classroom
- Students
- 18 children, age 23 to 27 months
- Attend the same class one or two days per week
- Most had experience with writing materials, books, etc.
- Writing table
- Low table with writing materials--markers, crayons, paper, scissors, hole punch, etc.
- Child-child interactions: "parallel play with mutual awareness" (399)
- Adult-child interactions: adults initiate talk, facilitate access to materials, demonstrate writing (399-400)
Data Analysis
Conclusions
Ways of participating at the writing table
- Review field notes
- When and where do writing events happen?
- Means-end analysis
- What are the ways of working at the writing table?
- Inventory
- What are the types of child and teacher participation?
- What are the typical characteristics of these events?
- Researcher as a participant/observer
- Two full days per week from Sept-May
- Assistant/collaborator to the teachers
- Field notes and audio tapes from
- Writing center
- Book center
- Large-group time
- Videotape
- Writing center (after establishing rapport)
- Other sources
- Graphic products collected and photocopied
- Informal talk with children during writing events
- Interviews and open-ended survey with parents
- Strand one: comb all data
- Strands two, three, four: select one typical videotaped event from each month (Dec-April)
- "Typical" events involve creating text, establishing content, and using text-objects
- Activities mostly focused on exploration and experimentation.
- Participation was voluntary.
- "Early in the school year, children were not particularly interested in the products they constructed. However, adults focused attention on their texts by engaging them in conversation about message content and text-production processes." (407) Teachers tried to use out-of-school experiences as the basis for writing.
- Social purposes--mail, signing names, writing stories, etc.
- Modeling real-world activities; also linked to play.
Literate performances of young children (3-5 years) are influenced by previous writing experiences
- Teacher interviews for professional histories
- Classroom observations--1 day
- Audiotapes
- Each child during large group, book reading, small group, meal time, and free play
- Teachers taped, as well
- Field notes
- Transcribed 15 minutes of conversations from free play, large group time, and book reading (~50 hours total)
- Filtered out common words to generate "sophisticated" word list
- No distinction between individual students' utterances; focused on the nature of teacher-child interactions
Language ability is key for reading comprehension
Teacher talk in Pre-K is predictive of Kindergarten and Grade 4 language and literacy outcomes:
This may be because exposure to such teacher talk is beneficial for students, or such talk may be highly correlated with other features of instruction that is beneficial for students.
Recruitment
- Sent home letters to preschool students, describing eligibility requirements
- Students come from low-income homes, as defined by Head Start eligibility or state vouchers
83 students (4 years old)
- Distributed across 65 classrooms
- Not randomly selected
- Some attrition in kindergarten (n = 74) and Grade 4 (n = 57).
Using the qualities of teacher talk in Pre-K classrooms, predict the language and literacy outcomes for students in Kindergarten and Grade 4.
- Measure language and literacy through
- K: Narrative production
- K: Emergent literacy test
- K: Receptive vocabulary
- 4: Reading comprehension
- 4: Receptive vocabulary
- 4: Word recognition
- Multiple mediation analysis for Pre-K to K and K to Grade 4.
Strand four: How did children and their teachers construct textual intentions and literate identities through participation in everyday events at the preschool writing table?
Strand two: What kinds of local literacy practices were enacted in the literacy events occurring at a preschool writing table? Specifically, how were talk, materials, space, and participants' bodies coordinated in writing events?
Strand three: What kinds of local literacy practices were enacted in the literacy events occurring at a preschool writing table? Specifically, how were talk, materials, space, and participants' bodies coordinated in writing events?
Data Analysis
Conclusions
Data Analysis
Conclusions
Data Analysis
Interacting Proposition:
Warrant
Find boundaries for interactional units
- Smallest units of joint social activity
- Includes proposals, recognitions, acknowledgments, and contests
Ethnographic knowledge and understanding required for coding--not always straightforward
- Units could be coded in multiple ways (e.g., as recognition and proposal)
What are the social consequences of participation?
- Defining appropriate textual intentions
- Defining literate roles
- Writing table reflects and shapes practice
- 3-4 children and an adult
- Storage space for materials
- New materials introduced periodically
- Play-based; lack of letter-tracing worksheets
- Located away from other classroom materials--this limited connections to other activities, but reinforced the focus of the writing table
- Children and adults typically at same level
Adults and children jointly negotiate textual intentions and roles
- Back and forth: What are you doing? What did you make? Tell me about it.
- Adults ask for more: Write you name.
Adults shape appropriate intentions for the writing table
- Adults reinforce and recognize writing
- Children then take on role of writer
Participation evolves over time
- Gradual shift from drawing to linguistic messages
Select still images from video of the five focal events
- Beginning and end of event
- Major changes in activity type
How are arrangements of space, bodies, and objects produced by and productive of writing practices?
- Spatial: location, furniture, built spaces
- Material: objects present and accessible
- Embodied: gesture, movement, arrangement
- Silent and speaking participants included
What are the affordances of spaces, materials, and embodied practices?
Talk largely shaped by adults
- Explicitly articulated beliefs about EC literacy learning
- Tacit cultural expectations for activity and childrearing
Functions of adult talk:
- Elicit information about intentions
- Guide participation in writing
- Demonstrate adult writing
Functions of child talk:
- Signifying intention (verbal and gesture)
- Responding to adults
- Often spent time observing
How does participants' talk establish and negotiate intentions?
- Transcripts from video of the five focal events
- Gestures recorded if not accompanied by talk
Talk divided into message units by cues:
- Verbal (register shifts)
- Nonverbal (gesture, artifacts)
- Prosodic (stress, volume, tone)
How does each message unit function to establish participants' intentions for texts/text-production?
- Code message units
- Re-code as more codes identified
- Generate relative frequencies of the functions of adult and child talk
We know very little about the writing experiences of children younger than 3 years
Early reading skill determines later success; early reading skill can come from high-quality preschool experiences
- Compared original sample to analytic samples--so even though students were not randomly selected and there was attrition, the sample is similar to the population.
- Many variables were considered and accounted for
Warrant
Specifying/Speculative Proposition:
Weaknesses
- Ethnographic study--spent a great deal of time in class with students. This helped interpret potentially ambiguous student actions/responses.
- Used many data sources--artifacts, video, audio, etc.
- Transparent about data analysis; re-coded data when categories were finalized
- Not randomly selected
- 15 minutes of teacher talk may not be stable
- Correlational--cannot establish causation
This study addresses the gap in the literature by looking at a group of Euro-American middle-class two-year-olds at a preschool writing table. It focuses on how they formed basic understandings about writing, particularly intentionality. It also looks at the cultural basis for preschool writing.
We know little about the specific features of preschool classrooms that contribute to language acquisition.
- Hypothesis: Strategies that enhance language learning at home will help language learning in school.
Πολίτες
Logic of Inquiry
Weaknesses
So what?
- Some child speech/actions potentially ambiguous--how do we know that's what they meant?
- Limited to the cultural setting of one classroom
There is potentially a connection between the teacher talk that students are exposed to in Pre-K and their later language and literacy success. By capturing 15 minutes of teacher talk (which we assume to be representative of the teacher's language) and coding it for various features (vocabulary, extending thoughts, etc), we can correlate that with students' language and literacy outcomes in Kindergarten and Grade 4, while controlling for other factors.
So what?
Further Study
- It would be interesting to examine the cultural implications for other classroom situations (e.g., low-SES, ESL, etc.)
By examining students' interactions with their teachers during writing events, we can learn about students' writing development before they are able to fully articulate intentionality. Furthermore, by studying Euro-American middle-class children from a sociocultural perspective, we can learn about the cultural values, beliefs, and practices that influence early writing experiences.
Further Study
In our current educational climate, we have many students who are reading behind grade level. We also have a large push for preschool education. Both of these issues particularly affect low-SES and ESL students. To maximize the effects of our efforts, we should ensure that preschool education is as effective as it can be. This study is attempting to show what will have lasting impacts on students' knowledge.
- "Intervention studies are needed to disentangle the complex correlated web of cognitive, linguistic, and environmental variables" (p. 884).
- How can we help teachers develop the habits of teacher talk that are predictive of later student success?
Evaluation of the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program: Kindergarten and First Grade Follow-up Results from the Randomized Control DesignΒασίλης
Design Research with Educational Systems: Investigating and Supporting Improvements in the Quality of Mathematics Teaching and Learning at Scale
Research Design
Cobb, Jackson, Smith, Sorum, & Henrick (in press)
Lipsey, Hofer, Dong, Farran, and Bilbrey (2013)
A Meta-Analysis of Morphological Interventions in English: Effects on Literacy Outcomes for School-Age Children
Sample
Research Design
Does participation in TN-VPK have effects on children's cognitive achievement outcomes that are evident at the end of the kindergarten and first grade years? (p. 18)
Who?
Groups
Data Collection
- Woodcock Johnson III Achievement Battery
- Administered at beginning of Pre-K, end of Pre-K, end of Kindergarten, and end of Grade 1
- Assesses literacy, language, and math; combined to a composite score
- ~3,000 PreK students participating in the TN-VPK
- Academic performance and status collected and tracked by the state education database until Grade 3
- ~1,000 of these students involved in the Intensive Substudy
- Directly assessed by research team each year until Grade 3
- Rated by teachers each year until Grade 3
Conclusions
Data Analysis
Selection
Premise:
Though there were differences between the achievement scores of the experimental and control groups at the end of Pre-K, those differences were closed by the end of Grade 1.
- Experimental
- Students who were randomly admitted to pre-k
- Attended Pre-K
- Control group
- Students who were not admitted (on waiting list)
- Did something else during Pre-K year--most stayed at home with family, some attended other daycare
- All students had parents who wanted them to be in TN-VPK; randomly assigned to receive Pre-K instruction or not
- Thus the Experimental and Control groups are as similar as possible
Principal Proposition:
How do we improve mathematics instruction at scale?
- Multilevel regression models
- Children grouped to the schools to which their parents wanted them to attend
- Schools grouped to the district
- Propensity scores
- Adjust for baseline differences in the Intensified Substudy sample
- Incorporate many variables:
- Separate propensity scores created for each cohort
- Students more than .25 standard deviations outside the overlap of the cohorts were dropped from the analysis (only 2 students).
- Child age at pretest
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Native language
- Home library card use
- Newspaper subscriptions
- Maternal education
- Number of working parents
- Pretest W-J scores
- Time lag from beginning of school year to pretest
- Program had to meet standards set by State Board of Education
- Licensed teacher
- Adult-student ratio of no less than 1:10
- Max class size of 20
- Approved curriculum
- Program had to have a waiting list and agree to randomly grant students admission
- Also had to appropriately manage admissions (per PRI's instructions
Analysis
Data
Iteration
Research Design
Goodwin and Ahn (2013)
Classrooms
- Student achievement data
- Teacher observations
Teachers/Coaches/Principals
- Surveys
- Interviews
- Knowledge for teaching
- Video of collaborative time
District Leaders
- Interviews
- Theory of action
Scope
- 4 (or 2) Districts
- 6 schools per district
- 5 teachers per school
- 8 years of data
Does participation in TN-VPK have effects on children's non-cognitive academic outcomes that are evident at the end of the kindergarten and first grade years? (p. 18)
Each year:
- Develop conjectures and hypotheses based on existing research and prior experience
- Interview district leadership
- Create district theory of action
- Member-check with leadership
- Interview school leadership, teachers, etc
- Collect other data--surveys, observations, knowledge for teaching, etc.
- Generate feedback and recommendations for the district
- District (hopefully) uses feedback and recommendations to plan for the following year
- Revise conjectures and hypotheses
What are the characteristics of the children who show the largest effects of participation in TN-VPK at the end of the kindergarten and first grade years? (p. 18)
Levels:
- Pragmatic
- How are districts' strategies playing out in schools?
- Retrospective
- Develop an empirically grounded theory of action for instructional improvement
Various strands of questioning:
- Teacher Learning
- Networks
- Teacher Workgroups
- Measures of Change
- School Leadership
- Coaching
- Professional Development
- District Leadership
- Student Learning
Data Collection
What are the effects of morphological instruction on language and literacy outcomes?
- Cooper-Faran Behavioral Rating Scales
- Teachers rate students on work-related skills and social behavior
- Academic and Behavior Record
- Teachers rate students on readiness for grade level work, liking for school, behavior problems, and peer relations
- State database
- State tracks grade retention, attendance, disciplinary action, and special education services
Conclusions
Data Analysis
Students from low-income families are less likely than their higher-income peers to score well on state-wide assessments, to graduate high school, to go to college, etc. A common assumption is that they are not initially prepared for school--they start off behind and cannot catch up, thus the achievement gap persists
Here are some conclusions
Data Analysis
Principal Proposition:
Data Collection
Conclusions
Here are some conclusions
- Synthesizing findings from 30 independent studies
- Searched databases for various terms (morph*, intervention, instruction, vocab*, etc.)
- Criteria for inclusion:
- Study has a control/comparison group compared to a morphological intervention group.
- Intervention includes a morphological component with an emphasis on morphemes as units of meaning.
- Participants are school-aged (e.g., preschool–12th grade).
- Intervention and outcome assessments occur in English.
- Study is reported in English.
- Study provides information for computing effect sizes.
- If the same participants are used in multiple literatures (e.g., Henry, 1987, 1989; Henry et al., 1989), independent effect sizes were obtained from the most comprehensive dataset with the most participants.
- Study is published after 1980.
Warrant
Data Analysis
- Largest effects for decoding, phonological awareness, and morphological knowledge
- Likely due to relationship between morphology and phonology, as well as between morphology and meaning/decoding
- Moderate effects for vocabulary and spelling
- Likely because identifying component morphemes helps identify the meaning of a word
- Confirms previous findings about the morphophonemic nature of English
- Limited effects on fluency and reading comprehension
- Fluency and comprehension require the most transfer--focusing on the relationship among many words, not just one
- No single instructional setting (group/individual, time, scope, delivery) stood out among the rest
- These variations likely stemmed from differences in goals
- Larger effects for younger students than older
- Quasi-experimental studies more effective than experimental
- Studies were coded (by two independent coders) for:
- Design characteristics
- Participant characteristics
- Morphological instruction characteristics
- Literacy achievement
- Calculated standardized mean difference between comparison and treatment group
- Calculated overall effect size
- Averaging effect sizes from each of the studies
- Weighting average by the inverse of the variance for each study
- Used a random-effects model as well as a mixed-effects model
- Averaged dependent effect sizes
Through morphological instruction, students learn how to identify and analyze morphemes within words to support literacy
- Triangulation of many measures
- Iterative design, with ongoing analysis and revision
- Member checking with district leaders
Strengths
Existing research on teaching and learning in mathematics focuses on improving classroom instruction without considering the demands of a real school environment.
Recommendations for instruction are not helpful if they are at odds with the demands of school and district leadership.
Existing research on school leadership and policy treats the classroom as a "black box" and does not consider what counts as high-quality instruction.
School and district policies may reinforce poor instruction or make quality instruction more difficult.
MIST seeks to bridge these two areas by creating a theory of action for improving mathematics instruction at scale.
Interacting Proposition:
Warrant
Interacting Proposition:
- LARGE number of students
- Sample is distributed across the state--including rural and urban areas
- True experimental design
Most states (including TN) offer Pre-K programs targeted at students from low-income families to help prepare them for elementary school.
Weaknesses
Recently, different reviews have examined the relationship between morphological instruction and literacy achievement.
- Very little student data collected
- Longitudinal data on individual teachers not possible--focus is on the aggregate
- Considers variance in effect sizes and moderating variables
- Also includes studies from a variety of settings
- However, the validity of the meta-analysis rests in part on the validity of the individual studies. Presumably, since these are peer-reviewed studies, they are valid and their results are warranted.
Specifying/Speculative Proposition:
Logic of Inquiry
Specifying/Speculative Proposition:
We do not (yet) have evidence that these Pre-K programs work. Though model programs exist, we do not have evidence that they scale up effectively. TN has a large-scale program (TN-VPK); does it yield academic and social benefits for students who participate?
So what?
These recent reviews have tackled different interventions, which have different effects. "Unraveling how differences in study features link to effectiveness can guide future designs" (1).
Strengths
Based on existing research, we can propose ideas for how to improve mathematics instruction in districts. We can work with the districts to help them build capacity for better instruction, and then provide feedback on how those efforts went. We can then use that information to make new suggestions and recommendations for how to improve instruction, and continue iterating for multiple years.
In parallel, we can use this cycle of iteration to develop an overall theory of action for how districts can improve mathematics instruction at scale. Though each district is different, there are principles that should carry over to new contexts.
So what?
- Examines many studies, drawing on a broad research basis
So what?
The government--at both the state and federal levels--spends a great deal of money on these Pre-K programs. We need some sort of evaluation to determine whether or not they work. Furthermore, determining their effectiveness is the first step to improving them (if, indeed, they are not effective) and ultimately improving outcomes for students.
Weaknesses
Our current educational climate necessitates school reform, but so far most reform efforts have not been successful. Most efforts to improve student outcomes have either focused on accountability measures that reinforce teaching to the test or on instructional improvements that are difficult to implement in actual classrooms.
If MIST can develop a coherent theory of action for improving mathematics instruction at scale, districts can begin to break out of this cycle of unsuccessful reform and make real progress.
Further Study
- Use MIST conjectures to design smaller-scale empirical studies
Literacy is obviously very important for students to learn. Morphological instruction is also potentially promising: "After third grade, 60 to 80% of words in text are derived words (Nagy & Anderson, 1984)" (2). It helps students draw connections across words with similar roots (theocracy, theology, etc.) and similar categories (running, swimming, jumping). This helps students develop a richer understanding of language.
- Each study is very different, with different goals--these differences could make comparison of effect sizes difficult
- Effects not always based on the same literacy outcomes
- Few high school studies included
- Large variations in effect sizes
Minding morphology: How morphological awareness relates to reading for English language learners
Longitudinal conceptual change in students' understanding of thermal equilibrium: An examination of the process of conceptual restructuring
Goodwin, Huggins, Carlo, August, Calderon (2013)
Modeling science as an aesthetic experience: A Deweyean perspective on learning using generative computational learning technologies
"You would not believe what I have to go through to prove my intellectual value!" Stereotype management among academically successful Black mathematics and engineering students
Research Design
Douglas Clark (2006)
Sample
Analysis
Principal Proposition:
Selection
Data Collection
Method
Sengupta & Farris (under review)
Research Design
Structural Equation Modeling
- Three models were created to show the influence of phonological decoding and morphological awareness in second language reading, as measured by the seven tests.
Research Design
McGee & Martin (2011)
157 students
- 5th Grade
- Spanish-speaking ELLs
- Identified as ELL in first grade
Prior knowledge (in both languages):
- Average word readers
- Poor vocabulary knowledge
- Poor comprehension skills
Prior instruction
- Varies greatly across sample
Seven measures:
- WLPB word attack
- CAAS nonword accuracy
- ETB no orthographic change
- ETB orthographic change
- WLPB letter-word
- WLBP reading vocabulary
- WLPB passage comprehension
Data collected at the end of fourth grade and fifth grade by research assistants who speak English and Spanish fluently.
Research Design
Premise:
How do successful Black STEM students develop success-oriented belief systems and identities? How are their experiences racialzied? How do they respond to and manage stereotypes? What factors influence their resiliency?
There is a large literacy gap between students who are native English speakers and those who are learning English Language Learners--particularly when it comes to comprehension and vocabulary tasks
How do students use personal excursions and multi-modality as they engage in open-ended, agent-based computational programming and modeling tasks?
Students
Interviews
Data Reduction and Analysis
How do students' conceptual understanding of thermal equilibrium change over time?
Premise
Big study
Explanation maps
Element maps
Premise
Students
Multi-Modality
Personal excursions
23 participants from 4 Universities
- 14 males, 9 females
- Ages 19 to 45
- 6 graduate
- BS in math or engineering
- Graduate-level math or engineering degrees
- 17 undergraduate
- Junior or senior in math or engineering
- 2.9+ GPA
- Completed 10+ math/engineering courses, with A or B in 5+ courses
Videotaped recorded interviews
- Average 86 minutes
- 6 students for follow-up interviews
- Students brought documents attesting to their STEM experiences and success
- Demographic questionnaire
Semi-structured, open-ended questions
- Accounts of students' experiences in their home, school, neighborhood, and math class
- Emerging identities--esp racial and mathematical--and the interconnections therein
- Coding around students' beliefs and actions, e.g.:
- B: Defiance of stereotypes
- A: High achievement
- B: Need for safe space
- A: Join organizations for STEM students, Blacks, or both
- B: Desire to protect next generation
- A: Mentor youth
- Coding around strategies students developed to legitimize themselves as high achievers in STEM
- Data reviewed for common and contrasting themes:
- Attempt to prove stereotypes wrong
- Always being on point
- Critical perceptions of Black behavior
- Cultural code-switching/fronting
- Excel in STEM to be perceived as smart
- Constructing self-directed/determined identity
4 Case studies:
- 2 higher-achieving students
- 2 lower-achieving students
- Explanation maps show the range of explanations for each student
Commonalities:
- Multiple contradictory ideas
- Disruptive experientially supported ideas
- Difficulties productively connecting normative ideas
- Pursuing idiosyncratic explanations
Same 4 case studies
- Code the explanations in the explanation maps by individual elements
- Codes show topic area, sophistication, and strength
- Show connections of ideas in element maps
Conclusions
- Adding is easy; normatively connecting is hard
- Appearance of normative ideas in context doesn't coincide with disappearance of nonnormative ideas in another context
- Multiple contradictory ideas
- Increasing ability to connect topic areas
- Disruptive experientially supported ideas persisted
- Multiple student paths
50-student cohort (8th grade)
- Interviewed at 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12 weeks and 10th and 12th grades
Interview themes
- Thermal equilibrium
- Heat and temperature
- Insulation and conduction
- Heat flow
Responses coded as
- Nonnormative
- Transitional
- Normative
- Nuanced
Students developed conceptual understanding, but it took time, wasn't binary, and occurred in different sequences for different students
Case studies: Ariana and Matt
- Unique, illustrative
- Initially did not like programming, but ultimately engaged in activities that were different from those they were directed to do
Participating in a two-week summer course for agent-based computer modeling with the following goals:
- Develop fluency with agent-based programming and modeling motion as change
- Develop conceptual understandings of kinematics
- Task: Represent how the speed of a roller coaster car changes.
- Ariana focused on visual elements--color, spacing of dots, etc--to explain and represent the movement of the car.
- Matt embodied the changing speed through snapping fingers, etc.
- They used multiple modalities to communicate their scientific ideas
- Task: Write a program to draw a letter using Logo turtles
- Ariana decided to write a program to draw an entire name--one that is meaningful to her
- Took assigned task and made it meaningful to her
- Worked on the task in her spare time (since it took longer than the original task)
- Named the turtle and made up personal details for it
- Matt used Ariana's excursion as a way to incorporate humor and acting into the class
Warrant
Interacting Proposition:
Warrant
- Multiple measures of phonological decoding and morphological awareness, which enables identification of contributions to various aspects of literacy
Warrant
Interventions using morphological awareness may help improve reading comprehension by helping students get more bang for their buck--as they learn one morpheme, it can help them understand and learn many new words. However, little research has been done in this area.
Research has shown that when students find ways to personally connect to scientific investigations, they engage in ways that increase their opportunities for learning. Recently, technology--particularly agent-based programming--has been shared with students to make science (and other subjects) more engaging. However, we lack a theoretical understanding of how students' interests and personal histories can connect with their use of technology to increase learning opportunities.
The underlying concepts of thermodynamics and thermal equilibrium are difficult for students to learn
- Intuitions stemming from common experiences are often at odds with scientific concepts
- It is difficult for students to reconcile these differences.
How do students develop coherent, normative understandings of thermodynamics over time?
- Students maintain conceptual ecologies; students' knowledge is like a repertoire of independent elements.
- "Learning occurs through a process of restructuring and reorganizing these ideas" (471).
- Specific selection of students--high-achieving Blacks in STEM fields--but with a wide array of other qualities (gender, age, previous experiences, class, etc.)
- Member checking with participants
- Iteratively refined coding structure
- Theoretically guided sampling (though the underlying theory isn't made clear in this version of the paper)
- Uses students' explanations to make claims
- High to fairly high inter-rater reliability
- Shares examples, codes, etc. to give a clearer view of the analysis process
Research has shown that stereotype threat--being primed to recognize negative stereotypes about one's identity--can negatively effect student performance on intellectual tasks. Research has also shown that stereotype lift--being primed to recognize negative stereotypes about others' identity--can positively effect the performance of students from dominant cultures.
This research, however, does not account for instances of stereotype management, which occurs when students exhibit academic resilience and success in spite of (or perhaps because of) negative stereotypes. "This management is rooted in students' developing understandings of racism and their developing senses of, negotiations of, and assertions of what it means to be Black" (1349).
Weaknesses
Logic of Inquiry
Specifying/Speculative Proposition:
Logic of Inquiry
- No first language measures
- Only Spanish-speaking students included
- Only two indicators for each of the latent variables
Morphological awareness may contribute to improved reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking ELLs.
By interviewing academically successful Black students, we can start to identify common themes and traits of stereotype management. Though each individual has unique experiences as they develop their racial and academic identities, there are common (and contrasting) themes that emerge within a group. Unpacking these themes--particularly in a context (STEM classes) that is frequently seen as culturally neutral--can help us understand how racial stereotypes influence students' experiences and shape their identities.
So what?
By observing students' interactions with technology and interviewing them about their activities, Sengupta and Farris were able to gain insight into the ways in which students appropriate tasks for their own use and engage in multi-modal representations of scientific content. This helps develop theory on how students could engage with technology to increase learning opportunities.
So what?
Logic of Inquiry
By interviewing students about topics within thermodynamics, we can examine their understanding of each topic and determine whether they have nuanced, nonnormative, transitional, or normative views. Multiple interviews conducted over time will give us an idea of how their understanding changes.
Case studies are useful to explore conceptual change in greater depth. Finding the elements of explanation and showing how students relate these elements gives us greater insight into what they understand and how it changes.
So what?
Weaknesses
So what?
By using multiple measures of literacy and word knowledge, the researchers were able to develop models of how phonological decoding and morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension. These models show that morphological awareness and phonological decoding both contribute to reading comprehension, which indicates that students should ultimately be instructed in both areas.
- This study focuses on Black students; students from other backgrounds may have different experiences
- This study focuses on racial identity to the exclusion of other elements of identity, including gender, class, sexuality, etc.
- This study lacks rich descriptions of the context that the students are situated in; are they unique? Are they representative?
- The relationship of these cases to the field is kind of fuzzy--why do we care about these students and the practices in which they're engaging?
Understanding how students develop conceptual understanding in areas like thermodynamics will have very important implications for classroom instruction. For instance, the students in this study showed great (and lasting) improvement in understanding thermodynamics--a topic that many adults struggle to explain coherently and normatively--but were able to work with the content for many weeks. Findings like this could influence instruction to make it more effective for more students.
This is a particularly important study for many reasons. Most programs for ELL students have focused on developing phonological awareness. And yet reading comprehension for ELL students still lags far behind their English-speaking peers. Many school districts, with large populations of ELLs, struggle to close this gap. Since English and Spanish share many Latinate morphemes, morphological interventions may help them improve reading comprehension more than phonological interventions alone.
This was not made very clear in the paper itself, but our conversation with Pratim brought out some interesting ideas: the students featured in this paper were not interested in programming initially. By engaging in the tasks personally and using them as vehicles for expression, they found value in programming and experienced a transformation. If students are given the freedom to express themselves through programming, more students (who may otherwise be turned off from the domain) may be able to follow similar trajectories. This re-frames the point of computer education to include more aesthetics and less rote learning. Students shouldn't have to study for many years to find the beauty in computation; they should be able to engage in its aesthetic qualities from early on.
Further Study
Racism and stereotypes are omnipresent. The achievement gap between Black and White students and the underrepresentation of Blacks in STEM fields have been widely documented. Much has been written about why Black students don't achieve; this research examines why some do. Unpacking the ways in which stereotyping affects Black students and the ways in which they manage such stereotyping can help us discover how to ameliorate the racial issues that have plagued our society
Further Study
- This study has many implications for curriculum design--allowing for multiple conceptual paths, allowing sufficient time, considering the effect of context on explanations, etc.
- More work should be done on students of other racial/ethnic backgrounds
- More work should be done at the intersection of race and other elements of identity--and how that relates to STEM fields
- I'd like to see more work on the implications of this research for curriculum and instruction
- Intervention studies that investigate the effect of morphology training for ELLs
- Explore morphology training for ELLs with other heritage languages
- Work should be done to show why these sorts of experiences are important for students to have. For instance, do students who engage in agent-based modeling have some sort of long-term benefits?
Mesoamerican literacies: Indigenous writing systems and contemporary possibilities
When does an opportunity become an opportunity? Unpacking classroom practice through the lens of ecological psychology
Jimenez & Smith (2008)
Research Design
Gresalfi, Barnes, & Cross (2011)
Research Design
What were Mesoamerican writing systems? How are they a form of literacy? To what extent are they visible in modern Mexican culture?
Findings
Theory
Data
Premise
How do the affordances of teacher moves during classroom discussion influence students' engagement in tasks?
Premise
- Percentage of teacher prompts in each category
- Correlation between category of teacher prompt and student responses
- Percentage of student responses in same/different category as teacher prompt (parsed by teacher)
Context
Comparisons
Coding
- Percentage of teacher prompts in each category
- Correlation between category of teacher prompt and student responses
- Percentage of student responses in same/different category as teacher prompt (parsed by teacher)
- Coded teacher utterances for:
- Category of required engagement (procedural, conceptual, consequential, critical)
- Content of expected response (math, story, both, unspecified)
- Strength of affordance (strong, weak)
- [Later] Accountability and personalizing
- Coded student utterances for:
- Category
- Content
Two middle-school mathematics teachers
- Ms. Gibson, an experienced PBL teacher
- Mr. Pauley, a relatively new PBL teacher
Data
- Video data of whole-class conversations about 3 tasks in a researcher-designed PBL unit
- Three cameras:
- Teacher/whole group
- Consistent student group
- Varying student groups
- Transcripts, field notes
Contemporary considerations of literacy focus on understandings of only two types of writing systems--those of Egypt/Sumeria and China. Other literacies, such as that of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, do exist, but they have been largely ignored by educators. This greatly limits our understanding of literacy. Incorporating other forms of literacy--particularly those of Mesoamerica--would also honor nondominant, marginalized cultures.
Warrant
From a ecological psychology perspective, everything that happens in a classroom is a joint accomplishment among the students, the teacher, and the tools they have available to them (and, of course, the affordances of those tools). Furthermore, the teacher's moves (particularly discursive moves) seem to provide particular affordances/constraints for students to engage with mathematics content in different ways. Until now, though, there has not been a theoretical framework in which to examine HOW teacher moves and student engagement are related.
- Using a variety of primary sources
- Comparing prehistoric literacy practices to current literacy practices in modern-day Mexico
- Contrasting cases
- Teachers using the same curriculum
- Students with comparable levels of pre-knowledge
- A priori coding based on previous research
- Phenomenon of interest based on previous research
Logic of Inquiry
So what?
By observing two teachers and looking closely at what happens during their whole-group instruction (through a lens of ecological psychology and the affordances, effectivities, and dynamic intentions at play), we can find patterns for how teacher moves influence students' engagement with tasks. For instance, providing certain kinds of scaffolds (e.g., specifying the intended type of response) afforded higher levels of engagement.
So what?
Weaknesses
Our contemporary understanding of literacy is limited to forms that have been developed
This is also a multi-modal version of literacy, which i
Literacy is a social practice; elements of Mesoamerican literacy persist in modern Mexcian culture.
Weaknesses
- Very small n, which (for some), could call into question the generalizability
- Individual student learning was not considered
We know that teachers influence the way that tasks are enacted in classrooms--sometimes they can maintain the level of demand and engagement, sometimes they lower the level of demand and engagement. This study helps to build a theoretical framework for analyzing the various affordances of teacher moves and discourse patterns. It helps the reader understand how subtle changes in task implementation can greatly affect the ways in which students engage with the task. Research like this has meaningful implications for how teachers conduct classroom discussions, even across subject areas.
Further Study
- Work should be done to explore how the affordances of teacher moves influence student learning
- Results from this (and similar) studies could be used to make recommendations for practicing teachers
- It would be interesting to examine how the affordances of teacher moves influence the level of cognitive demand of tasks (cf. Stein).