Planning for the Elicitation of Students’ Ideas: A Lesson Study Approach With Preservice Science Teachers

ABSTRACT

In an effort to better prepare science teachers to engage in high-leverage practices, this study investigates the choices and rationales of preservice science teachers in planning elicitation strategies and describes how their understandings about the elicitation of students’ ideas changed over time. Four cohorts of preservice science teachers engaged in a cycle of modified lesson study focused on the elicitation of student ideas. Findings suggest that the participants focused on revising the elicitation task to achieve greater task clarity and student participation and to provide more opportunities for individual thinking. One notable outcome of the study is the need for a greater conceptual distinction in science teacher education between elicitation practices in which resources for student thinking are identified and assessment practices that seek students’ progress toward learning goals.

KEYWORDS:

• ambitious science teaching
• eliciting student ideas
• lesson study
• methods courses
• science teacher education

Notes

1. The term misconceptions carries a certain amount of historical baggage in science education research because of its more colloquial use to indicate an incorrect idea and even a certain ignorance on the part of the holder (Larkin, 2012). Nonetheless, the idea of a misconception still has currency among preservice science teachers as shorthand for a wide range of terms, including alternative frameworks, preconceptions, prior knowledge, student ideas, conceptions, or other cognitive labels among which it might be important to distinguish in a different context. From the perspective of model-based inquiry, it is simply more accurate to discuss ideas—even so-called misconceptions—as models to be tested and revised. In this article, I ask forbearance on the part of the reader and recognize the potential criticisms I invite by using such a problematic term.

2. In order to avoid issues of coercion by authority, I adhered strictly to institutional review board and human subject research guidelines.

3. Owing to programmatic realities, one of the students in the Year 4 cohort was seeking a mathematics certification but participated in all of the coursework completely and participated fully in the elicitation lesson study assignment with his middle school mathematics students.

4. Specifically, the first two planning tools, whose names have changed over time, which we referred to informally as The Big Idea Tool and the Eliciting Students’ Ideas Discourse Tool. Current versions of these tools may be found at http://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/.

5. Though they were instructed to elicit ideas about a specific phenomenon related to a topic currently under study, as the findings show, initially this proved challenging. In Years 3 and 4 of the study, the task instructions were clarified to ensure that ideas were being elicited about a puzzling phenomenon, and more time was devoted in class to the challenge of selecting appropriate phenomena.

6. Video clips of actual middle and high school classroom teaching were not collected as part of the data set for this study. In order to comply with human research subject protections under both institutional review board approvals for this study, I took care not to include any audio or video of the classrooms themselves in the video recordings taken during group discussions in the methods classes.

7. To be clear, the metric system is not a phenomenon because it is not an event or process requiring explanation. Much like the periodic table, Newton’s laws, or plate tectonics, the metric system is a human-developed set of conceptual tools used to investigate and make sense of phenomena. In this study, it was not uncommon for students to initially conflate phenomena with concepts, and in the class discussions on this point after Year 1 of the study this distinction was emphasized.

8. Maintaining public records of ideas over time is a key component of the ambitious science teaching approach (Windschitl & Calabrese Barton, 2016).