Instructional Science最新文献

The retention of fundamental mathematical skills is imperative to provide a foundation on which new skills are developed. Educators often lament about student retention. Cognitive scientists and educators have explored teaching methods that produce learning which endures over time. We wanted to know if using spaced recall quizzes would prevent our students from forgetting fundamental mathematical concepts at a post high school preparatory school where students attend for 1 year preparing to enter the United States Military Academy (USMA). This approach was implemented in a Precalculus course to determine if it would improve students’ long-term retention. Our goal was to identify an effective classroom strategy that led to student recall of fundamental mathematical concepts through the end of the academic year. The concepts that were considered for long-term retention were 12 concepts identified by USMA’s mathematics department as being fundamental for entering students. These concepts are taught during quarter one of the Precalculus with Introduction to Calculus course at the United States Military Academy Preparatory School. It is expected that students will remember the concepts when they take the post-test 6 months later. Our research shows that spaced recall in the form of quizzing had a statistically significant impact on reducing the forgetting of the fundamental concepts while not adversely effecting performance on current instructional concepts. Additionally, these results persisted across multiple sections of the course taught at different times of the day by six instructors with varying teaching styles and years of teaching experience.

Research has shown that, in general, students are treated differently on the basis of their achievement levels and ethnicity. Such differential treatment might also result in the administration of different learning materials, and so far, not much is known about how teachers choose these materials for different students. In two vignette studies, we investigated which student factors influence teachers’ choice of materials. In Study 1, preservice teachers were asked to choose between an easy or difficult instructional video with the same content in response to vignettes that differed by students’ ethnic minority or majority background. In Study 2, preservice teachers could choose between text or video materials with the same content. The student descriptions varied systematically in achievement (high vs. low) and ethnic background (minority vs. majority). The results of Study 1 showed that ethnic minority background students were significantly more often given the easy video than ethnic majority background students. In Study 2, the results showed that student achievement was the crucial factor. Low-achieving students were given the video significantly more often, whereas high-achieving students were more often given the text. Both studies provide initial insights into how teachers’ material choice might be influenced by student characteristics.

Discourse analysis, as a mainstream research method in classroom teaching, has gained widespread attention in education. Educators believe that children's thinking development requires support from interactive discourse. In this study, four primary school mathematics classes were segmented based on the form, frequency, content, and purpose of teacher-student interactions. A total of 73 dialogue segments were selected for coding, resulting in 338 codes. The coding process was based on the turn of talk and assigned corresponding coding numbers to the content of teacher-student discourse in the fragments according to the Bloom-Turney teaching questioning code list and the Hierarchical Framework of Student Thinking Level based on Biggs-Collis Structure of the observed learning outcome. The results show that Knowledge level question (Q1), Understanding level question (Q2), Application level question (Q3), Synthesis level question (Q5), and Evaluation level question (Q6) are related to students' low-level thinking. The questions of Analysis level (Q4), Synthesis level (Q5), and Evaluation level (Q6) are related to students' high-level thinking. We found that there are variety of interactive structures between teachers and students in the question and answer session, among which three interaction structures show significant performance, namely Q2 → M (Multiple-point structural level) → Q4 → C (Correlational structural level), Q3 → M → Q4 → C, Q3 → M → Q6 → A (Abstract-extension level), these structures can show how teachers timely adjust the types of questions according to students' answers to improve students' thinking level.

This study investigated the role of co-teaching in the development of students’ mathematics motivation and achievement. More specifically, we examined how sixth-grade students’ (N = 146) mathematics self-concept and individual interest changed over one school year, how these changes were related to each other and to mathematics achievement, and, most importantly, whether they differed between co-teaching and solo-teaching conditions. The co-teaching condition included 70 students in three classes with mathematics taught by pairs of teachers, while the solo-teaching condition included 76 students in four classes with mathematics taught by individual class teachers. The design included three repeated measures of mathematics self-concept and interest as well as pre- and post-measures of mathematics test performance and teacher-rated mathematics grades. A series of latent growth curve analyses showed both self-concept and individual interest to decline over time, and these changes to be strongly correlated: as self-concept decreased, so did interest, and vice versa. The changes in self-concept and interest were independent of prior achievement and did not predict later achievement either. Students in the co-taught group received better grades at the end of the year, but no differences in the development of self-concept and individual interest were found between the teaching conditions. That is, co-teaching contributed to improvement in mathematics achievement, but this was not mediated by changes in mathematics motivation.

Digital learning games have been increasingly adopted in classrooms to facilitate learning and to promote learning outcomes. Contrary to common beliefs, many digital learning games can be more effective for female students than male students in terms of learning and affective outcomes. However, the in-game learning mechanisms that explain these differences remain unclear. In the current study, we re-analyze three retrospective data sets drawn from three studies conducted in different years. These data sets, which involved 213, 197, and 287 students, were collected from a digital learning game that teaches late elementary and middle school students decimal concepts. We re-analyzed these data sets to understand how female and male students differ in the rates of gaming the system, a behavioral measure that reflects a form of disengagement while playing the game. Rates of gaming the system are compared between female and male students within each of the game’s two core instructional activities (i.e. problem-solving and self-explanation) as well as tested in a game vs. non-game condition. We found that female students game the system significantly less than male students in the self-explanation step in the game condition, in all three studies. This difference in the rates of gaming mediates the relationship between gender and learning outcomes, a pattern in which female students tend to learn more than male students, across all three studies. These results suggest that future design iterations of the game could focus on reducing gaming behaviors for male students, which might improve learning outcomes for female students as well. Understanding gender-based differences in game behaviors can inform future game design to promote better learning outcomes for all students.

Transfer of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner has been considered the final aim of successful scaffolding. Despite this importance, few studies have been conducted in this area. The present conversation analytic study examined the scaffolding interactions of a sample of Iranian English language teachers to identify how responsibility for learning was transferred in scaffolding interactions. The teachers were divided into two groups of novice and experienced based on the criteria proposed in the extant literature. The results showed that the novice and experienced language teachers enacted transfer differently. The novice teachers used more high-support moves, like models and questions with scarce use of low-support moves, thereby mostly curbing the transfer process. However, the experienced teachers used a wider range of scaffolding strategies especially low-support moves to encourage learners to use their learning potentials. The novice teachers mismanaged repair-initiations while experienced teachers mainly ended repair-initiations in self-repairs. The study suggests that the teachers’ experience level can significantly impact their scaffolding interactions with students. Further, it highlights the significance of providing ongoing professional development and training opportunities for language teachers to improve their ability to provide effective scaffolding. Overall, the study highlights the need for continued research in this domain.

In learning journals, prompts were shown to increase self-regulated learning processes effectively. As studies on effects of long-term prompting are sparse, this study investigates the effects of prompting cognitive and metacognitive self-regulation strategies short-term and long-term in learning journals on learners’ strategy use, self-efficacy, and learning outcome. Therefore, 74 university students kept a weekly learning journal as follow-up course work over a period of eight weeks. All students’ learning journals included prompts for a short-term period, half of the students were prompted long-term. While self-efficacy was assessed via self-reports, strategy use was measured with self-reports and qualitative data from the learning journals. Learning outcomes were assessed via course exams. Short-term prompting increased self-reported cognitive and metacognitive strategy use, and the quantity of cognitive strategy use. Yet, it did not affect self-efficacy, which predicted the learning outcome. Irrespective whether prompting continued or not, self-reported cognitive and metacognitive strategy use, and self-efficacy decreased. Qualitative data indicate that the quantity of learners’ cognitive strategy use kept stable irrespective of the condition. The results indicate that short-term prompting activates cognitive and metacognitive strategy use. Long-term prompting in learning journals had no effect on strategy use, self-efficacy, and performance. Future research should investigate possible enhancers of long-term prompting like feedback, adaptive prompts or additional support.

In this paper, we examine how researchers and teachers in a multi-year professional development program shifted their conceptualizations of equity. Following (Grapin et al (2023) Sci Educ 107:999–1032), we ground our analysis in two conceptualizations of equity that exist across fields: equity-as-access (learners should have access to disciplinary knowledge, practices, and career paths) and equity-as-transformation (learners should transform what it means to learn and participate in disciplines). In this study, we describe a professional development (PD) design initially intended to support equitable science teaching and learning by focusing on representations. This initial framing did not distinguish between conceptions of equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation. As a result, the PD did not provide facilitators or teachers with resources for ideological sensemaking towards equity-as-transformation. Catalyzed by teachers’ request for PD focused on multilingual learners (MLs), we noticed aspects of our design that offered only images of equity-as-access. In response, we designed activities for teachers that offered space and resources for considering equity-as-transformation. As a case study (Yin (2014) Case study research: design and methods, SAGE) using interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson (1995) J Learn Sci 4:39–103) of PD videos, we describe how we PD activities and facilitation strategies to integrate transformative conceptualizations of equity. These findings have implications for both research and practice. In terms of research, they demonstrate the importance of using multiple lenses to consider equity in science classrooms. In terms of practice, they underscore the importance of providing teachers with opportunities to explicitly connect new perspectives of equity with day-to-day experiences of classroom teaching.

Advances in graphing technologies and learning sciences pedagogy have the potential to equitably support students when exploring complex systems depicting dynamic relationships across multiple disciplinary topics in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). We report on the cumulative impact of science units designed in a Research Practice Partnership (RPP) that leveraged Knowledge Integration (KI) pedagogy to support middle school students to generalize insights to new graph representations and science topics. Teachers across 11 schools incorporated the graph-science units into their curriculum plans. We analyzed ~ 8000 responses to validated and reliable graph-science KI assessment items administered before the first year and after one, two, or three years of instruction aligned with KI pedagogy. With random coefficient, multi-level, mixed-effect regression modeling, we analyzed performance after one-, two-, and three-years of graph-science KI instruction. We also analyzed the growth trajectories of subgroups, i.e., multilingual learners. Data suggest two years of graph-science KI instruction is needed to make significant impacts on student learning and ameliorated the disparity between students with different native language fluencies. These results illustrate the value of technology-enhanced, pedagogically aligned K-12 science instruction that is designed to support connecting diverse graph data and science knowledge comprehensively and cumulatively.

The composite instructional design PS-I combines an initial problem-solving phase (PS) with a subsequent explicit instruction phase (I). PS-I has proven effective for conceptual learning in comparison to instructional designs with the reverse order (I-PS), especially when the explicit instruction phase productively builds on students’ erroneous or incomplete (i.e., failed) solution attempts. Building on student solutions during explicit instruction may support students to integrate their intermediate knowledge (acquired during problem solving) with the newly introduced knowledge components. While these effects have been shown for learning the concept of variance in multiple studies, it remains unclear whether these effects generalize to other situations. We conducted a conceptual replication study of Loibl and Rummel (Loibl and Rummel, Learning and Instruction 34:74–85, 2014a) choosing Bayesian reasoning as target knowledge. 75 students were assigned to four conditions in a 2 × 2 design (factor 1: PS-I vs. I-PS; factor 2: instruction phase with vs. without typical student solutions). In contrast to Loibl and Rummel (2014a), we did neither find a main effect for PS-I vs. I-PS, nor for building on typical student solutions. The missing effect of PS-I can be explained by the fact that students merely activated their prior knowledge on probabilities without exploring the problem-solving space and without becoming aware of their knowledge gaps. The missing effect of building on typical student solutions can be explained by a mismatch of the solutions generated and the ones included in the explicit instruction. Therefore, building on typical student solutions did not foster an integration of students’ intermediate knowledge and the introduced knowledge components.