Navigating student uncertainty for productive struggle: Establishing the importance for and distinguishing types, sources, and desirability of scientific uncertainties
Ying-Chih Chen, Michelle Jordan, Jongchan Park, Emily Starrett
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
An essential aspect of scientific practice involves grappling with the generation of predictions, representations, interpretations, investigations, and communications related to scientific phenomena, all of which are inherently permeated with uncertainty. Transferring this practice from expert settings to the classroom is invaluable yet challenging. Teachers often perceive struggles as incidental, negative, and uncomfortable, assuming they stem from students' deficiencies in knowledge or understanding, which they feel compelled to promptly address to progress. While some empirical research has explored the role of scientific uncertainties in driving productive student struggle, few studies have explicitly examined or provided a framework to unpack scientific uncertainty as it manifests in the classroom, including the sources that lead to student struggle and how teachers can manage it effectively. In this position paper, we elucidate the importance of incorporating scientific uncertainties as pedagogical resources to foster student struggles through uncertainty from three perspectives: scientific literacy, student agency, and coherent trajectories of sensemaking. To develop a theoretical framework, we consider scientific uncertainty as a resource for productive struggle in the sensemaking process. We delve into two types (e.g., conceptual, epistemic), four sources (e.g., insufficiency, ambiguity, incoherence, conflict), and three desirability considerations (e.g., relevance, timing, complexity) of scientific uncertainties in student struggles to provide a theoretical foundation for understanding what students struggle with, why they struggle, and how scientific uncertainties can be effectively managed by teachers. With this framework, researchers and teachers can examine the (mis)alignments between uncertainty-in-design, uncertainty-in-practice, and uncertainty-in-reflection.
期刊介绍:
Science Education publishes original articles on the latest issues and trends occurring internationally in science curriculum, instruction, learning, policy and preparation of science teachers with the aim to advance our knowledge of science education theory and practice. In addition to original articles, the journal features the following special sections: -Learning : consisting of theoretical and empirical research studies on learning of science. We invite manuscripts that investigate learning and its change and growth from various lenses, including psychological, social, cognitive, sociohistorical, and affective. Studies examining the relationship of learning to teaching, the science knowledge and practices, the learners themselves, and the contexts (social, political, physical, ideological, institutional, epistemological, and cultural) are similarly welcome. -Issues and Trends : consisting primarily of analytical, interpretive, or persuasive essays on current educational, social, or philosophical issues and trends relevant to the teaching of science. This special section particularly seeks to promote informed dialogues about current issues in science education, and carefully reasoned papers representing disparate viewpoints are welcomed. Manuscripts submitted for this section may be in the form of a position paper, a polemical piece, or a creative commentary. -Science Learning in Everyday Life : consisting of analytical, interpretative, or philosophical papers regarding learning science outside of the formal classroom. Papers should investigate experiences in settings such as community, home, the Internet, after school settings, museums, and other opportunities that develop science interest, knowledge or practices across the life span. Attention to issues and factors relating to equity in science learning are especially encouraged.. -Science Teacher Education [...]