The Purpose and Variation of Students' Explanations in Scientific Modeling

Abstract

<p>Scientific practices are the disciplinary practices of scientists as they construct, evaluate, communicate, and apply scientific knowledge. We focus on two practices, scientific modeling and developing explanations, for elementary students. Scientific models are simplified, theoretical representations focusing on key concepts to explain and predict natural phenomena. Students engage in model-based inquiry to enhance their understanding of science content, develop metamodeling knowledge, generate parallel predictions, and communicate their knowledge with others. Students construct a model by taking their internal thoughts of how a process occurs and externalizing them into a representation. As students learn new material and listen to peer input, they revise their representations to fit new understandings. Since models are purposeful for explaining phenomena, it is important to analyze students' explanations in its basic fundamental units: claim, evidence, and reasoning. Claim answers the question at hand, evidence supports the claim with quantitative or qualitative data, and reasoning bridges claim and evidence to form a complete explanation. These explanations can be further classified based upon levels of complexity: association, process, or mechanism. Association is the most basic and describes interactions between components in a phenomenon. Process is more complex by showing that a phenomenon occurs in a series of steps or over time. Mechanism represents the highest complexity and explains the how's and why's of a phenomenon. The MoDelS project research team developed an evaporation/condensation unit with student book exercises and pre/post written test assessments. Approximately sixty 4th graders from a Midwestern elementary school completed the assessments. These assessments were coded by the fundamental explanation units and levels of complexity. Over time, some students showed stronger explanatory skills by incorporating more reasoning into their models, and most students showed an increased level of understanding. Although advancements varied among students, the results suggest that modeling can improve students' knowledge of phenomena.</p><p>This presentation occurred at the Wright State University Campus-Wide Celebration of Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities on April 8, 2011</p>