Teacher views of experimentation in ecosystem science

ABSTRACT

Education reform calls for portraying science as a process of inquiry and argumentation grounded in the epistemic traditions of a domain. While experimentation is a core scientific investigation strategy, diverse approaches are represented across different domains of science. Ecosystem scientists use experiments as a core part of their investigations, yet also acknowledge limits to its applicability. They describe experimentation as one approach among investigative strategies – combining these into a ‘body of evidence’ (BOE) approach that triangulates sources of evidence to support causal claims. A study was conducted to explore how these epistemic assumptions in ecosystems science are understood by K-12 teachers. Ten teachers from across the United States were interviewed. The teachers expressed understandings of experimentation that did not fully align with a BOE approach but displayed knowledge of some approaches used by ecosystem scientists. This knowledge was less apparent in their descriptions of their ecosystems science unit pedagogy and curricula and teachers cited a number of obstacles to incorporating it. The results suggest that if a BOE approach were to be introduced in K-12 ecosystems science, teachers would need a fuller understanding of this perspective and support in overcoming obstacles to employing it in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecosystems science
• experimentation
• epistemologically authentic practices
• body f evidence approach
• teacher knowledge
• instructional practices

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Eva Shultis, Mahmoud Sayani, Kaley Curtis, Shari Metcalf, and Chris Dede. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DRL-1416781 to Tina Grotzer and Chris Dede. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The study was approved under the Committee on Use of Human Subjects Review, Registration, IRB00000109, Harvard University, Protocol 14-1066.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Teachers’ Characterisation of Experiments and Experimentation in Science Class

Experiments refer to a wide variety of activities. Teachers tended to use the word ‘experiment’ to refer to a wide variety of instructional activities and scientific practices that included demonstrations, hands-on activities, pre-determined lab activities, or conducting observations in the field. Some examples are provided below:

Interviewer: ‘Oh, you have a field trip tomorrow?’

Teacher 1: ‘A field trip yes. They will be exposed to experiments. One of the ones I’m gonna actually push my students towards is an exhibit where they can actually recreate natural disasters including a mudslide, to see how it impacts a different ecosystem that’s below where that mudslide would hit. And so they actually will add the water, they’ll add the mud, they’ll create the mudslide and watch it happen.’

Teacher 2: ‘Experiments? I think most of the experiments of sixth grade are not really experiments. They’re activities. Some things we have done with the kids is they get an organism like a cockroach or an earthworm or a mealworm, and they’re asked to design an experiment, and usually for sixth grade, it’s things like food preference, maze, some kind of a movement based on, maybe if they put a ramp … If they had a ramp or if they used a smooth surface or a rough textured surface. So their experiment, it would be first design it and then try it, and do it more than a couple of times so that they can compare and contrast the results.’

Interviewer: ‘Generally speaking, uh, have you used experiments in your science classroom?’

Teacher 3: ‘Yes, we have. The experiments we’ve done … . We’ve done the very basic, you know, like models where they cut out a mini-person, they put the kidneys, they show the blood flow, the veins, the arteries, the fake hearts … We have dissected earthworms, frogs … We tried to shoot for experiments or some kinds of hands-on activity every Friday. That’s our goal.’

It was difficult at times to discern whether the teachers were using ‘experiment’ as short-hand for any science-based activities, or if they truly see the variety of examples they lumped under the heading of ‘experiment’ as linked with the epistemological practice of experimentation, as it relates to authentic practices of science. Some teachers, such as Teacher 2 above, clearly recognised that things they call ‘experiments’ would be more suitably characterised as ‘activities.’ But others justified using the term ‘experiment’ to refer to a wide variety of activities as a way to push against narrow stereotypes about scientific practice that students may hold. For instance:

Teacher 4: ‘I think too often students think of an experiment as just mad scientists in a lab with chemicals smoking and beakers and all that. And an experiment can be just sitting in the woods and observing the different kinds of animals that come by and what their behaviours are. And that to students is not an experiment because that’s just not what is in their traditional view of what a scientist does. I try to tell them that science is really broad and diverse and that there are all kinds of experimentation and things that are going on that might not look like what they’re used to.’

When he says ‘And that to students is not an experiment because that’s just not what is in their traditional view of what a scientists does,’ he indicates that a ‘traditional view of what a scientist does’ is ‘experiments’ and that his students hold a narrow view of what this looks like and means. A practicing scientist is unlikely to characterise this kind of observational study as an ‘experiment,’ yet by broadening his definition of ‘experimentation,’ the teacher is trying to help his students’ consider the diversity of practices and approaches that are employed by scientists. In using the term ‘experiment,’ it cannot be assumed that this term has a single agreed upon meaning that is shared across science teachers.

Teachers’ motivation towards use of experiments in science class includes pedagogical factors. When prompted to describe why they do or do not use experiments in their science class, teachers brought up a number of pedagogical considerations (summarised below). Some provided justification for why they do use experiments as in the benefits of using inquiry-based or hands-on learning; that experiments are fun, engaging and appeal to students with different learning styles; and the idea that students need to get a sense of what real scientists do.

Teachers described inquiry-based and hands-on learning approaches as helping students develop understanding, memory and retention of the content they are covering. Eight teachers expressed experimentation as a component within this broader context of discovery and inquiry-based learning. They saw value in students performing experiments as a way of constructing their own conceptual understanding, for example:

Teacher 1: ‘I think that the experiment actually leads students to see it visually and can understand a lot better when they have that representation in front of them or when they’re actually performing it themselves. So it gives them a better grasp of what they’re doing in class.’

Six teachers spoke of experiments as something that is fun and engaging for students, and that can appeal to students with different learning styles.

Teacher 5: ‘There’s no question that the kids like to do experiments, there’s no question that the kids like to do hands on things more than any other thing they do.’

However, some teachers (n=3) pointed out that students may have fun with an activity without really understanding the science behind what they are doing, for example:

Teacher 6: ‘You’re like, “We’re going to do an experiment” and they’re [referring to students] like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” They want to do that. So I think they’re invested in it. But I don’t think they truly know what that means because I think the majority of science teachers don’t really truly know what that means, so we’re kind of all over the place when it comes to that.’

Teachers acknowledged a difference between instructional activities and epistemic experimentation. Others described a disconnect between the ‘inquiry-based’ activities that students are asked to do and what they perceive as the true purpose of experimentation ‘trying to find out the answers to something that we don’t know.’

Interviewer: ‘When you think about the phrase “experimentation in science,” what ideas come to mind?’

Teacher 7: ‘I don’t like this, but I think, “here’s the results they’re supposed to get.” The inquiry-based science activities that we do are more or less like a scavenger hunt to find the answer that I’m expecting them to get. I try to let students who get the wrong answer still write in their conclusions about what they found and why, and use their data to support what they think, and often times they don’t do that because they’re like, “Oh it didn’t work!” And I’m like, “Well, why? Why didn’t it work? Think about what happened.” The students think experiment and they think activity, and I think what they’re not thinking about is that experiment[ing] is you trying to find out the answers to something that we don’t know.’

‘At the beginning of the year I had this big spiel with the kids about how scientists are the people that find out the new stuff that nobody knows the answer to and ask these questions that we don’t know, and how you have to use all this deductive reasoning and observations to build what you think you know. And then we do all these experiments in class and it’s all like, “Here’s the instructions, make sure it turns blue.” You know?’

This underlines the tension between providing activities that are engaging for students and helping teachers and students to go beyond the surface level features of experimentation to help both understand how the activities relate to epistemological practices and reasoning that align with and illuminate how science works.

Experiments as entry points into authentic science practices. Teachers emphasised the link between experimentation and providing students with authentic views and experiences in science:

Teacher 2: [“Why do you use experiments in your classroom?] ‘Kids should get a look at what scientists do in the field and that’s what they do. So there has to be some part of their school that teaches them how to do things like what a real scientist does instead of just kind of talking about it.’

Teacher 1- ‘so the students are scientists in themselves and they are exploring new things.’

While teachers had multiple and varied motivations for using experiments in their science classrooms, it was notable that a number of teachers described a notion that by using experiments they hoped to engage students in work that mirrors authentic scientific practice, yet these same teachers also expressed ways in which this idealised link between the practices and epistemology of the field is difficult to realise during classroom instruction.

Teacher 7 expressed a tension between his idealised view of the kinds of experiments he would like to do in his science class, and the reality of what he is able to do. In the end, he says that experiments are primarily used as a form of engagement, assessment, and because they are dictated by the curriculum.

‘You’d imagine that in science class, you’re using experiments to give students the experience of testing their natural environments, and using scientific observations to draw their own conclusions, but I use lab experiments as fun activities to keep kids engaged in whatever topic we’re talking about, and I use them as assessments to report their progress towards the learning standards. I use them because they’re part of our curriculum.’

This suggests teachers are motivated to use experiments as means to help students understand and engage in authentic forms of scientific investigation. How do these ideas about experimentation in general, relate to domain specific practices, and specifically in ecosystem science? This leads to questions about how their notions of ‘authentic forms of ecosystem science investigation’ relate to the approaches described by real ecosystem scientists. It also begs the question of what are the hurdles or barriers that keep teachers from using experiments in the ways that they think are ideal.

Teachers’ Characterisation of Experimentation in Ecosystem Science

Knowledge of ecosystem science approaches. Most of the teachers held sophisticated knowledge of authentic approaches used in ecosystem science (as in Table 2 in the paper), and yet they mentioned only a subset of these approaches when describing the practices and approaches that students use during their ecosystem science unit (as in Table 3 in the paper).

Most teachers (n=7) described ecosystem scientists as using observation as well as measuring and monitoring ecosystems by collecting data or samples in the field. Similarly, they described engagement in long-term (“Consider time) or large-scale (‘Scale’) comparison (n =7), and some (n=4) noted the importance of collaboration in being able to collect large amounts of data or being able to monitor both biotic and abiotic aspects of the environment. Mentioned less frequently were the approaches of analysing data (n=4), using or building models and simulations (n=3), or conducting experiments (n=4). Teacher six did view experiments as integrated into ecosystem science practice:

‘I feel like ecosystem scientists are doing experimentation just as frequently as somebody who is working in the physics laboratory or the chemistry laboratory. It might look different because if you’re studying ecosystems, you’re probably going to be out in different ecosystems taking a lot of observational notes and things like that, but I still feel like there’s a large amount of experimentation that’s happening. I mean, I am not an ecosystem scientist, so I do not know, but I feel like a lot of their experimentation is happening on a larger scale, right?’

A few teachers showed aspects of, but not a fully articulated version of, BoE. While most teachers described ecosystem scientists as using a variety of approaches, fewer of them (n=3) explicitly described these approaches as integrated or complementary in the ‘body of evidence’ way that ecosystem scientists had. For example, when referring to her ecology unit, teacher 10 said,

“it’s our first real opportunity to have a data blowout … this is our real opportunity to say, ‘look, we really can be more confident in what’s going on, because we’re able to measure this so often and in so many ways and have a much clearer picture of what’s going on.’

Teacher 8 offered,

‘Isolating variables is interesting in ecosystem science. You have to figure out what’s causing what and oftentimes, it’s very multi-pronged … So you can see evidence in different ways.’

There were also teachers who pushed back against the idea that ecosystem scientists engage in experimentation. Teacher one talked for the first thirty minutes about his own perspectives and use of experimentation in science class and more generally in science, but when asked ‘how ecosystem scientists figure things out,’ he said they would not do experiments, briefly considered the possibility that they might do experiments in zoos, but then concluded that the primary approach they use is observation.

‘When I think of how ecosystem scientists find things out I think it’s based on [trails off] See, now I’m changing my mind. I think that, that would be based on a lot of the investigation, because scientists will go out and they’ll watch things, they’ll observe different environments. And I would say that there’s not a whole lot of experimentation because our ecosystems are kind of already [trails off] I guess if we recreated an ecosystem then that’s how they could figure things out possibly. Within a zoo unit, is I would say an experimentation of what the ecosystems are like … [They] are researching a lot more, and they’re going out, they’re actually observing different environments to discover what’s going on in those ecosystems … what abiotic factors are causing the biotic factors to increase or decrease. Is it the climate? Is there a lack of water? Things like that. And so I think it’s solely based on observation.’

Further prompting for clarification leads him to say,

‘The ecosystem is extremely balanced and fragile … when you remove one item or one animal or one organism from the food web, that can cause a major disruption in an entire ecosystem, and so they’re very fragile and difficult to recreate, and so I think observation is the key, because the ecosystems are already imbalanced and that’s why they function in that way. Wherein creating the experiment would be essentially to remove something from that ecosystem, you’d see what effects it could cause.’

Ethical considerations arise regarding ecosystem science experimentation. Six teachers brought up ethical considerations about experimentation in ecosystem science. Some spoke of these concerns in a global sense, suggesting that in general humans must be careful not to harm organisms or ecosystems. For example,

Teacher 1: ‘I think experimentation has to be careful what types of things you’re experimenting with. Certain animals, you don’t want to cause harm to them’

Teacher 3: ‘If you put a new animal there that eats the same thing as another animal, what effect is that gonna have? So I think that is some experimentation that’s out in the actual field. And I think that’s a big thing … . what about the side effects? You don’t know the side effects until you do it.’

Others spoke of these concerns specifically in relation to their students and considered the conceptual and developmental stage of their students when deciding what forms of experimentation are appropriate. Two teachers spoke of their goal of training students to be good citizens. Teacher 10 was the only one who described using an experiment that was embedded in the ecosystem as part of her ecosystem science curriculum, and she expressed this perspective about how she communicates with her students about the ethical considerations that arise when doing experiments that are embedded in real ecosystems.

‘I think that one of the tricky things to get across in that sense is … on the global citizen side, making sure before we do any experimentation that we understand that we are leaving an impact. That, if something we’re doing is not just for our learning, it’s going to have a short or a long term impact on a real area … and you know that we are not the only ones who use this land - it affects our neighbours, it affects everything downstream, everything is connected, and knowing that if we choose to experiment in a real-world environment, it’s going to have impacts that we might not predict. So getting that idea across to them before we do anything … and I feel like some kids kind of take that flippantly, they’re like “oh, can we try doing - can we try doing-” oh, no no no - sure, we could, but do we really want to? We have to be extra considerate in how we experiment with the big zone that belongs to everyone and that has long term impacts.’

In summary, teachers revealed that some held fairly sophisticated knowledge of the practices and approaches that real ecosystem scientists use and some felt a tension between their acknowledgement of experimentation as a legitimate and practiced method in ecosystem science and a judgement about whether and how experiments should be conducted in ecosystems. This tension is likely to have implications for how teachers use and portray experimentation within the context of their ecosystem science instruction.

Enactment of ecosystem science approaches in ecosystem science instruction. When describing the practices or approaches that students are exposed to in their ecosystem science unit, a majority of teachers’ descriptions focused on engaging their students in the approaches of observation (n=10) and measuring and monitoring ecosystems by collecting data or samples in the field (n=6). (See Table 3 in the paper.) Most teachers described the importance of going out into the environment, going on field trips, observing and identifying organisms, and collecting data or samples to bring back to the lab or classroom. Teachers who mentioned approaches aligned with the idea of large-scale or long-term comparisons (n=4) tended to focus on engaging their students in the temporal aspects of investigation, rather than scale-based aspects. Half mentioned engaging their students in data analysis as well as the use of models and simulations, while two teachers explicitly indicated that they don’t use models.

Finally, teachers’ descriptions of the use of experiments in their ecosystem science instruction offered some interesting findings. When asked generally about scientific practices students are exposed to during their ecosystem science units, no teachers offered experiments or described experimentation in their response. After a follow up question ‘Do experiments play a role in your ecosystem science unit?’ seven teachers stated that they do use experimentation in ecosystem science. As mentioned above, teachers’ descriptions of what was included as an ‘experiment’ in their ecosystem science unit fell under a broad definition of experimentation. For example,

Teacher 9: ‘For example we went out and we did the marsh study. We brought samples back and wanted to study a particular organism like Daphnia magna. We could study them more inside than we could out in the field—it’s pretty tough to bring the microscopes outside, so I guess that’s one example. And also, everyone can try to answer the same question so we could try and collect more data that way. If a student said, well what happens to this organism when the temperature drops, well, everyone could put the Daphnia under the microscope and watch the heart rate drop as the temperature drops, and try to form some conclusions and collect more data compared to not really being able to do that out in the field unless you had certain equipment which we don’t really have or don’t wanna bring, $400 microscopes in the marsh.’

Teacher 1: ‘They will be exposed to experiments. They’re gonna be able to recreate … One of the ones I’m gonna actually push my students towards is an exhibit where they can actually recreate natural disasters including like a mudslide, to see how it impacts a different ecosystem that’s like the below where that mudslide would hit. And so they actually will add the water, they’ll add the mud, they’ll create the mudslide and watch it happen.’

Interviewer: ‘Do you use any of the forms of experimentation that you mentioned above when you teach ecosystem science?’

Teacher 4: ‘Yeah, definitely. Well we’re gonna go from taxonomy, so how things are grouped, to where they live, and their environment. I’ll have them do some dissections of different species to see if there’s any different adaptations in their internal organs, that would allow them to be in that environment … I’m probably gonna do a lot of modelling too, at the kind of atomic level and cellular level. We kind of do skits. I’m probably gonna do a lot of that for ecosystems, just to get this concept of communities, since they all have their own communities, and you can really make an analogy to their communities or their neighbourhoods or what they see in Las Vegas, and then what a wildlife community might be like.’

Thus, some teachers asserted that ‘yes’ they use experiments in their ecosystem science unit, but considering more closely how these teachers described their use of experimentation, the activities they include are diverse and while some align with the ideas about experimentation expressed by practicing scientists, many don’t match how a practicing ecosystem scientist would characterise experimentation. For instance, teacher one above describes an apparatus in a museum setting that recreates a natural phenomenon for the students to witness, but the students have no agency in asking questions, designing the experiment, or analysing variable outcomes, as it seems that the outcomes are predetermined. Teacher four outlines activities that do align with a number of the varied approaches that ecosystems scientists outlined (natural history, modelling and comparison), but none of these is a form of experimentation.

Only teacher ten explicitly described using a form of experimentation that was embedded in the context of the real environment, an approach that ecosystem scientists identified, as follows:

‘We have a little stream - well, ha ha, we had an experiment that started off great, and then we had a massive thunderstorm last week and it kind of threw it off, but we do have a stream behind some construction that’s going on on our campus that kind of opened up that was never there before. And, um, we were looking on the impact of “what if we dammed it up?” What if we, you know, what if we changed the water flow throughout it, what was that going to affect, the, the number of, uh, microorganisms we saw living in the water when we took samples, what was it going to change, and it was, it was actually, even if I didn’t think the data was that interesting, the kids loved being able to make a change. They loved being able to, uh, implement the change itself in a real-life situation, and it was going really well and then the whole thing washed away about three days ago. But, that’s - I mean that’s a learning experience too! And so, um, but experimentation in terms of the “I’m going to set this up in a very specific way and see the cause and effect of that?” Um, that’s one opportunity we had this year.’

She is also the only teacher who describes trying to help her students think about how a model, experiment or activity she does in the classroom during her ecosystem science unit generalises to the real world. Thinking about scale and generalisability are key to how ecosystem scientists described how they think about experiments.

“How is this going to be different in the real world, can you imagine how this would be different here? … in Life Science there is a lot you can do and see the real thing on your desk under a microscope. And I feel like once we’ve expanded and expanded and expanded our systems and gotten to the ecosystem we’ve gotten to a point where we have to say, ‘think about what it’s like out there as opposed to in here.’

Three teachers explicitly said that they do not use experimentation during their ecosystem science unit, although two of these indicated they had in the past, and teacher two described an activity that could be categorised as a form of experimentation that is authentic to ecosystem science practice (bottle biology, in which students created mesocosms of pond or terrestrial ecosystems and may perform small experiments within the context of these mini-ecosystems).

Teacher 1: I think it would be too hard to not recreate, because in ecosystems … If you have an ocean ecosystem, how do you change just a certain area to be able to experiment? I guess you could introduce something into a certain area to see if it had a difference in that based on where they are, but … I guess you could do that.”

Teacher 5: ‘I used to do more of it, when the resources were close by, I used to do more. We used to do turbidity studies and things like that, and not so much anymore. Also part of the curriculum–the standards are more food webs now, but we should be looking towards more performance-based, next-generation science standards and things like that. But right now, I’m just trying to think. I’m really drawing a blank.’

Teacher 2: ‘I had a little of my own little shame about my lack of ecosystem experiences for the kids. But, that being said, I think, it is important. If I were gonna do it, it would literally be like Ms. Frizzle on the bus [referencing a children’s science TV show] … We’re goin’ out there and they’re gonna collect and they’re gonna do it … I did it a tiny bit last year when I … For the bottle biology, I had three different water … I got water from [X] Lake, water from [Y] Creek and water from Lake [Z], so I had three different types of water. But still it was a contrived ecosystem. It’s not even an ecosystem. It’s kind of just a little model of an ecosystem.’

In the case of the responses offered by teacher two, it is clear that she holds an apprehension about her own ecosystem science knowledge, and perhaps this is why she downplays the bottle biology activity, which is quite closely aligned with the kind of activity an practicing ecosystem science might consider as a legitimate form of ecosystem science experimentation.

Some teachers (n = 3) expressed a desire to do more as they described their use of experimentation during ecosystem science.

Interviewer: Do experiments play a role in your ecosystem science unit?

Teacher 3: Yeah, uh, and I really … I think the one kind of downer … I’m in a portable [classroom], so I don’t have the equipment and all the resources that I need, like, I don’t have – there’s a plant tray that you plug in, and you bring out, and I don’t have all those things. Those things are in the building, and I think that’s a downfall. I’m able to modify it, you know, little bit, and do a slower scale of it, but I’m a big ‘Go big, or go home’ man. I would love to be able to just do, like, coffee tins of plants and talk about overcrowding. So, I do it, but not the capability of what I feel I could if I had the classroom, or the space.

It seems that teachers need more support in bridging between their knowledge of the diversity of approaches that are used in ecosystem science investigations, and the current language of ‘experimentation’ and ‘inquiry’ that are common waypoints in instructional materials.

Affective Dimensions

Ecosystems scientists also speak of affective dimensions that influence how they approach their work (authors, 2019). These include: failing forward; persistent flexibility; embracing creativity; and humility. Teachers also mentioned some of these dimensions when describing their students’ experience in science class. The specifically focused on aspects of failing forward, persistent flexibility and embracing creativity as follows, but did not mention a need or orientation towards humility.

Failing forward. Ecosystem scientists described the failure of an experiment as almost expected and as a good outcome – calling it ‘an opportunity to learn more.’ Some teachers also spoke of experimental failures as a positive outcome:

Teacher 6: ‘If you disprove your hypothesis, well great, you have another jumping off point from where you want to go next.’

Teacher 9: ‘When I first started teaching I felt it was me that screwed up. I always want it to work and the kids can learn something from it, but actually what I’ve learned is its okay and I tell it to the kids at the beginning of the year a lot of the things we do may not work and were gonna learn from that and move forward.’

‘You can learn something from every single failure, even if you think you haven’t gotten a result, you know what I’ve learned? I learned that milk makes my plant stink. You know? And it makes you learn that you can try something else next time. I think that’s really hard to get into perfectionist kids who are afraid that they’ve done it wrong. And breaking them on that idea is something that I think I’ve actually had a lot more success with this year than I have in years past, just hit them early and often with the idea of - and that’s what I like about not having a prescribed analysis and conclusion part of the lab, the fact that they have to write it out every time, they have to type out their ideas - what did I get out of this? The fact that they have to articulate that every time, and I can help them come up with that if they’re, you know, if they have no idea what they learned from nothing happening in their experiment, but the idea that it’s not over, the idea that it’s not a flat failure, helps them with that. The idea that they can turn that into what could be done differently.’

Teachers also spoke about how they have to recalibrate their students, parents, and sometimes their own feelings about failure. They described this aversion to failure as a difficulty in helping students adopt epistemological strategies aligned with science. It was particularly linked to cases of students being overly concerned about grades, about getting the right answer, and about their progress in relation to peers.

Teacher 6: ‘It’s uncomfortable, right? And like I just said, you’re going to get to points where they’re like hitting their heads against a wall, ‘cause they’re like, “What do you– like, what? Just tell me what to do.” And you’re like, “I’m not gonna tell you what to do.” So I think at times it gets frustrating for them.’

Teacher 8: ‘especially at my school where there is a lot of grade inflation and parents are looking for As, that, how to translate a failed experiment to success and building success in the classroom, and also having the time to fail, is also very hard, because not only do you need the time to fail, but you need the time to pick it back up, and we do a lot with standards-based … This year I’ve been working really hard on standards-based teaching, so I have different tasks instead of a test at the end, so kids have multiple tries to be able to prove their knowledge. And I think that will be able to help me build in more experimental failure because they are able to figure out and look without the fear of failing a test … ’

Teacher 4: ‘I think students just wait to see what someone else has done, and then they just change their ideas even if their hypothesis was different. They think they did something wrong, they change everything, so that they’re all getting the same result at the end, and then they think that’s science.’

Teachers described students’ deep discomfort with failure, and in some cases the worries of students were associated with expectations that seems to be set or reinforced by interaction with peers, school culture and parent expectations around grades. Given these external pressures, it may be particularly challenging for teachers to engage students in processes that emphasise experimental failure as a productive part of science, even when they know this perspective is authentic to scientific practice.

Persistent flexibility. A related dimension expressed by ecosystem scientists is called ‘persistent flexibility’— the importance and value of patience and persistence. Five teachers offered comments revealing that they try to instil these values in their students.

Teacher 2: ‘You see the end result, but you don’t always see what went into it and science is really similar that way. I pretty much start out like that. I started out with kind of the wonder of science but then sort of the hard, grueling work that it is.’

Teacher 5: ‘you have to give the kids multiple opportunities to try again’

Embracing creativity. Two teachers offered descriptions of how they encourage their own students to embrace creativity in their science class.

Teacher 4: ‘I think the most relevant to my students is this idea of curiosity. Any scientist is curious about something. Why something acts the way it does. Or why things are happening. Taking that curiosity and try to glean some more information. So I want my students to think in that manner, be curious and try to be creative about how they’re getting to new ideas.’

Teacher 6: ‘It takes a lot of creativity to be a scientist. It’s probably one of the more creative disciplines. It’s up there with, ''Can you compose a piece of music? Great. Can you design a fantastic experiment?” Probably equally as creative. But are we bringing that creativity into a K-12 science classroom? From my experience, not most of the time … I need to prepare them to think in that way, to start thinking through using critical thinking, the creativity that you need to actually design a strong science experiment.”

Given that only two of the teachers expressed a focus on supporting creativity or curiosity in the context of science investigation, this may be an area for development.

The initial lens for the study was focused on cognitive and systemic factors related to teachers’ perspectives towards and use of experimentation in their science classrooms, but the analysis revealed affective dimensions that parallel how practicing ecosystem scientists approach their work, and in how teachers encourage student in the adoption of scientific practices and habits of mind. These contribute to a more holistic view of what it takes to support novices in participating in authentic forms of scientific practice.

Limitations to Actualising What They Know about Ecosystems Science Epistemology in their Classrooms

Teachers spontaneously expressed limitations that keep them from doing more with experimentation in ecosystem science. This included limits at the district or government/standards level in the curriculum that they saw as requiring a heavy focus on content and recall:

Teacher 6: Um, so I think a lot of times at schools, we’re emphasising sort of like what I said before: content. We’re emphasising factual recall, observation. We’re emphasising, you know, just like what we’re being told to emphasise by standards. And I think a lot of times that’s not what scientists do.

It also included a focus on time, supplies, money, outdoor spaces, access to technology and the danger of some experiments:

Teacher 2: So that’s a difference that I think is unfortunately we can’t take the time to do. And then maybe, comparing interesting results with people in other places, not just in our class. I think that’s something that scientists do that we don’t do.

Teacher 2: I think the types of experiments that scientists do might be a lot more engaging, but due to either resources or not enough planning time, I haven’t really come up with a ton of really compelling things, so we’re still doing sort of the small organisms that we’ve done, that are predictable and cheap, easy to find, not dangerous.

Teacher 5: The more technology used, I think, the better off that they are. So that’s my frustration with that, not that we lack a technology, but that we’re all scrambling for the laptops, I’d love to have more laptops.

Teacher 3: And, um, as much as I hate to do it, I have no problem taking away a lab if they can’t be … We are, that we’re talking about. When I say they can’t handle it–their behaviour, it’s disrespectful, they are, uh, goofing around. If they’re going to be cutting things open. I told them before that, you know, if we can’t be trusted, it won’t be done.

It also included a focus on perfectionism, concern with grades, and student frustration:

Teacher 3: And so, if they don’t have that background knowledge for that, it’s just going to be quote unquote fun. I want them to get something out of it. It needs to … it needs to complement the teaching. And if I feel that they’re still struggling, and don’t grasp it, then I need to go back and go over it a different way, so that I can have more on-board so they can, you know, more of those ah-ha moments.

Teacher 8: And it is very hard, especially at my school where there is a lot of grade inflation and parents are looking for As, that, how to translate a failed experiment to success and building success in the classroom, and also having the time to fail, is also very hard, because not only do you need the time to fail, but you need the time to pick it back up …

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [DRL-1416781].