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Learning to Interpret Measurement and Motion in Fourth Grade Computational Modeling

  • SI: scientific practices
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Abstract

Studies of scientific practice demonstrate that the development of scientific models is an enactive and emergent process (e.g., Pickering 1995; Chandrasekharan and Nersessian 2017). Scientists make meaning through processes such as perspective taking, finding patterns, and following intuitions. In this paper, we focus on how a group of fourth grade learners and their teacher engaged in interpretation in ways that align with core ideas and practices in kinematics and computing. Cycles of measuring and modeling––including computer programming––helped to support classroom interactions that highlighted the interpretive nature of modeling and participation in model construction as a knowledge-building process. We draw on literature from the history and philosophy of science in order to analyze the students’ interpretive actions as forms of epistemic and representational agency, constituting a construct we term disciplined interpretation. We demonstrate how students’ disciplined interpretative moves help to position them as owners of their own design decisions and their rights to interpret the phenomena they were modeling, data collected from those phenomena, and the scientific and computational models themselves. We present four extended episodes that characterize the nature of activity in the classroom and the development of students’ disciplined interpretations in terms of learning to recognize scientific patterns amid complex perceptual fields, and to represent them in ways that support sensemaking.

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Rich Lehrer, Philip Bell, and six anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback. We gratefully acknowledge the teacher and students as the generous and lively originators of the collective experience that we are attempting to share here.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under a CAREER Grant awarded to Pratim Sengupta (NSF CAREER OCI #1150230).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Pennsylvania State University, 173B Chambers Building, University Park, PA, 16802-3205, USA

    Amy Voss Farris

  2. Harvard Graduate School of Education, Longfellow Hall, 4th floor; 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Amanda C. Dickes

  3. University of Calgary - Werklund School of Education, Education Tower 836, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada

    Pratim Sengupta

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  1. Amy Voss Farris
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Correspondence to Amy Voss Farris.

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An earlier version of this paper appeared in Farris, A. V. & Dickes, A. C., & Sengupta, P. (2016). Development of disciplined interpretation using computational modeling in the elementary science classroom. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Singapore. The International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) owns the copyright and the proceedings paper.

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Farris, A.V., Dickes, A.C. & Sengupta, P. Learning to Interpret Measurement and Motion in Fourth Grade Computational Modeling. Sci & Educ 28, 927–956 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00069-7

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