ABSTRACT
This paper contrasts performances overall and by gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES) for middle school students learning science through traditional scripted inquiry versus a design-based, systems approach. Students designed and built electrical alarm systems to learn electricity concepts over a fourweek period using authentic engineering design methods. The contrast study took place in the eighth grade of an urban, public school district, with the systems approach implemented in 26 science classes (10 teachers and 587 students) and the scripted inquiry approach implemented in inquiry groups of 20 science classes (five teachers and 466 students). The results suggest that a systems design approach for teaching science concepts has superior performance in terms of knowledge gain achievements in core science concepts, engagement, and retention when compared to a scripted inquiry approach. The systems design approach was most helpful to low-achieving African American students.
Keywords: design-based learning, K-12 education, systems design
I. Introduction
What does student performance look like using an authentic design task to teach science concepts? In particular, how does it compare to the performance found with a scripted inquiry approach to do the same? For this project, the authors developed, disseminated, implemented, and evaluated a module for building electrical alarm systems in order to teach students electricity concepts in science classes. The task is described as authentic because students followed the same design process that a systems designer typically uses to propose, investigate, and construct embodied solutions to meet actual needs. The authors chose a design-based approach because of the promising results that learning science has demonstrated in previous research efforts in the areas of Learning by Design (Kolodner et al., 2003), project-based learning (Prince, 2004; Thomas, 2000) and problem-based learning (Barrows, 1985). The current approach differs from these previous efforts in that the authors have adopted a systems design approach (Blanchard and Fabrycky, 1998; Gibson, 1968) as the organizing sequence of design activities. This systems design-based approach adds a unique dimension by having students articulate their own needs for a particular design, in this case alarm systems, and then by having students develop requirements, which become design specifications that guide their design process. In other words, the design process proceeds by having the students articulate their needs for the design first, rather than having the design and its specifications proposed by the teacher or the curriculum. In this way, the design process that the students used was similar to the process that systems designers use when having clients articulate their needs in most types of commercial and governmental designrelated activities. Table 1 summarizes some of the differences between a systems design approach and a scripted inquiry approach. It is the hypothesis of the authors that by having students begin with their own needs, it is possible to increase student motivation and engagement, as the process begins by circumventing one of students' most pertinent questions in science classes, "Why do I need to learn tiiis?" If students cannot answer this question for themselves or do not get a convincing answer from the teacher or curriculum, the lack of perceived relevance of the instructional task can create a barrier to learning at the very beginning of the entire learning process.
The authors have built upon several approaches that have demonstrated promise in the area of using design as a method to support learning. Kolodner et al. (2003) extensively described an approach called Learning by Design (LBD). This approach consisted of marrying the promising results of models of how learning from experience happens, as suggested by case-based reasoning research (Kolodner, 1993, 2002) and from problem-based learning (Barrows, 1985). Case-based reasoning refers to the ability to use past solutions and experience to guide the solutions to future problems. Problem-based learning is an approach that provides guidance on how classroom activities can be organized from a classroom management perspective. Both of these perspectives embraced the constructivist approach towards learning, as advanced by Harel and Papert (1991) and Kafai (1996). Another key feature of the LBD approach was that learning followed a cognitive apprenticeship method (Roth and Bowen, 1995) for which the key feature was that learning occurred often by observing and learning the language, behavior, and framing of events the way that members of a cultural group do. These combined approaches have been chosen because together they have shown that transferable learning (Klahr and Carver, 1988) is possible using them.
Learning about design and engineering is an intended positive outcome of this approach. It is important for students to learn that engineers design and create devices and systems. It is also important for students to begin to learn that design and discovery are both important thinking processes (International Technology Education Association, 2000). Design tasks create a challenge for students that increase their level of engagement and also serve the added benefit of opening the doors to possible science and engineering careers at a young age (Sadler, Coyle, and Schwartz, 2000).
Other primary objectives of this learning experience are to help students learn fundamental scientific principles about electricity, to improve their skills in reasoning like scientists, and to help students learn the skills for conducting authentic scientific inquiry. Such skills are fundamental for the future construction of expertise, competency, and heuristic style (Von der Weth and Frankenberger, 1995). National Science Education Standards identify as the fundamental skills necessary in order to conduct scientific inquiry as the abilities to:
1. Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigations;
2. Design and conduct a scientific investigation;
3. Use techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data;
4. Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence;
5. Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations;
6. Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions;
7. Communicate scientific procedures and explanations;
8. Use mathematics in all aspects of scientific inquiry (National Research Council, 1996)
Typically, as was the case in the subject school district, electricity (and science in general) is taught using a scripted/guided inquiry approach to learning (Their, 2000). Students are given materials and procedural scaffolding (i.e., instructional guidance that can range from explicit written, verbal, and visual directions to more subtie cues or hints) depending upon the philosophy of the curriculum designers' views of what they think students need in order to accomplish a learning goal. The materials and scaffolding are intended to help students "discover" properties of electricity and electrical (scientific) principles, such as voltage, resistance, and current in different electronic components using multimeters. By scripted inquiry, we refer to curricula that, in order to allow students to "experience" fundamental concepts in science, provide heavy scaffolding in a cookbook-style, step-by-step approach, that directs the sequencing of how an experiment is put together, run, and is used as a way to gather data (Nagle, Hariani, and Siegel, 2006). In other words, scripted inquiry imposes large limitations on steps 1 and 2 of the scientific inquiry process, the ability for students to identify questions and the ability to design and propose scientific investigations. (Such curricula, on the other hand, typically do support learning for the other stages of the inquiry process.) This may be because of classroom time constraints (staying focused on learning important scientific principles), teacher concerns (the ability to manage a classroom), or other reasons.
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