One of the major challenges to bringing mathematics, as well as most emerging science, into the classroom is their interdisciplinary nature. However, students often have difficulty making connections between different scientific concepts and ideas. For instance, students often have difficulty applying knowledge from one part of the particulate model of matter to another (Renström, Andersson, & Marton,1990). In addition, students often use models of different levels to describe different concepts related to the structure and behavior of matter. (Harrison & Treagust, 2000).
The integration of knowledge is made more difficult by typical large-scale and classroom assessments ostensibly based on the standards. Such assessments commonly focus on targeted, isolated topics that do not require students to connect currently taught concepts with concepts from other science areas that were previously learned (NRC, 2005; Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001). Instead, these assessments encourage teachers to focus on isolated bodies of knowledge that ultimately results in compartmentalized application of science concepts. As a result, the traditional curriculum often compartmentalizes the various aspects of the study of matter (e.g. structure of matter, conservation of matter, chemical reactions, phase changes). The authors of documents such as Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) suggested connections between key concepts among multiple disciplines in the sciences. However, these connections have not been borne out in most science curricula nor are they a part of typical assessment practices. Thus, in order to generate literacy in emerging sciences, school curricula must begin to emphasize not only the learning of individual topics, but also the connections between them and assessments must be developed to support such a curriculum.
This study describes work towards developing and validating the sequence and assumptions behind a learning progression. The processes of assessment that we use might ultimately be translated into both classroom and large-scale assessment strategies/materials. In addition, the work informs both the curricular structure and instruction by providing insight into how students connect ideas from other science disciplines with a core scientific concept. Thus, this approach might provide a method for identifying the connections that are required to obtain a deep conceptual understanding of an interdisciplinary field such as nano science. A learning progression describes what it means to move towards more expert understanding in an area and gauges students’ increased competence related to a core concept or a scientific practice (Smith et al., 2004). They consist of a sequence of successively more complex ways of thinking about an idea that might reasonably follow one another in the process of students developing understanding about that idea. However, as we address interdisciplinary subject matter, we can no longer consider learning progressions in a linear fashion. Rather, learning progressions may be viewed as strategic sequencing that promotes both branching out and forming connections between ideas related to a core scientific concept. We can better assess students’ conceptual understanding by designing items that assess the connections between
related science topics and ideas.
In order to provide a conceptual explanation of most nano scale phenomena, a deep and thorough understanding about the nature of matter is required. This includes the structure and properties of matter and how it behaves under a variety of conditions. To make progress on how students’ understanding about the nature of matter develops, we need to construct a learning progression. However, this progression is only theoretical as it is does not represent the curriculum that is followed in the classroom nor do we have much empirical evidence to support this progression. Therefore, although the suggested progression is consistent with national standards, it requires collection of empirical evidence to verify a possible learning progression that can be applied to describe the learning of our target populations. This study is directed towards assessing and characterizing how and when students make the connections between the ideas as they progress towards a deep conceptual understanding. It affords practical guideline to develop test items for measuring students’ learning progression. As we study student learning of the nature of matter, we explore these questions:
1. How do students’ ideas about concepts regarding the nature of matter develop over time?
2. How can we assess the requisite connections between concepts that traditionally have been compartmentalized in instruction?
In this article I try to present how we can develop and validate a potential learning progression to use for the development of assessing student learning in nano science, specifically in the topic areas involving the structure, properties and behavior of matter. Our work is a case study that illustrates the design of assessments based on a learning progression through research and development cycles. Our principles include (a) elaborating standards and Benchmarks to create a hypothetical learning progression, (b) collecting various data to validate the learning progression, (c) revising the learning progression based on the collected data, and (d) developing items for assessing student’s placement on the learning progression. The difficulties that we have identified in students’ conceptual understanding of the nature of matter are not necessarily because the material is developmentally inappropriate. As more learning progressions are developed and validated, they can be used to guide teaching and curriculum development. If students were presented with an exemplary curriculum that helped to foster their understanding and facilitate the connections they must make between ideas to have a deep understanding of a science topic, the problems we observed might not occur.
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