Empowerment in Science Curriculum Development: A microdevelopmental approach

Abstract

This study characterizes how learning and teaching differs as the responsibility for choosing curriculum goals and the strategies to reach those goals shifts between teacher and the students. Three different pedagogical approaches were used with 125 seventh‐grade and eighth‐grade students. All three curricula focus on electromagnetism, and were taught by two teachers in different schools over a two‐week period. When students had control over the strategies employed to reach goals, their engagement stayed high. All three curricula advanced student understanding to some degree; however, large and significant gains were seen only for the pedagogy in which teachers set the specific learning goals and students had control over how to achieve them. Microdevelopment, a principle by which short‐term learning recapitulates the stages seen in long‐term developmental growth, is found to be a useful framework for curriculum development and for analyzing changes in student understanding. In general, initial “tinkering” activities are best followed by attempts at representing phenomena, only then to be followed by abstract conceptualization. On balance, we find that students benefit most from freedom to control the procedures that they generate in response to well‐structured goals presented by the teacher.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (ESI‐9452767 and ESI‐9730469) with thanks to Gerhard Salinger and Irwin Shapiro for their feedback and constructive ideas. Additionally, the authors are grateful to Kurt Fischer, Bruce Gregory, and Cary Sneider who carefully read and commented on earlier drafts. Both authors extend their deep appreciation to the DESIGNS team, especially Mary Ann Picard‐Guerin, Laura Kretschmar, and Cynthia Crockett. The quality of this work rests on their professionalism and hard work.

Notes

1. DESIGNS are challenge‐based activities developed at the Harvard‐Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and funded by the National Science Foundation.

2. The reader should remain conscious of the double meaning intended each time the verb “re‐present” is used in this article. Re‐presenting implies not only an ability to demonstrate an understanding, but, more importantly, an individual’s ability to demonstrate the same understanding at a later time.

3. Readers who wish to inspect in further detail the teacher notes for each activity in each curriculum should contact the lead author.

4. We observed the same reluctance to use controls with graduate students in science education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The student’s strategy to improving their electromagnets was to try a variety of possible variables in any ad hoc manner (much as middle‐school students do). They described their strategy as an attempt to discover the impact of variables (as do middle‐school students). Thus the need for controls may still be unconvincing, or using controls is too hard to orchestrate in unsupported contexts.

5. The descriptor “hands‐on” is used to characterize activities in each of the three curricula where students are involved in a “laboratory” experience. In this case “hands‐on” only means that students are working with materials in a setting that looks like a laboratory, not how they are working with the materials, or to what end.