We dedicate this chapter to the memory of our colleague and fellow author Professor Bruce Waldrip, who was a pioneer in the use of representational reasoning.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
• recognise a range of potential ways to represent scientific ideas which you can use with students and recognise the strengths and limitations of each form
• develop a strategy to incorporate representational reasoning in your teaching using student-generated representations (SGRs) to explore students’ thinking about a concept
• consider how to interact with students, what questioning you might use to promote thinking and encourage reasoning and argument based on evidence
• plan to engage your students in generating their own representations of a scientific idea and the evidence you will collect at each phase for formative and summative purposes.
Introduction
The Chief Scientist in Australia emphasised the importance of engaging students in productive science learning for the knowledge economy (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2013) and called for sustainable and equitable support systems to develop teachers’ professional knowledge and capabilities (Chubb, 2014). The number of students who are taking STEM subjects in secondary and tertiary education is declining both worldwide (Marginson et al., 2013) and in Australia (Kennedy et al., 2014). Furthermore, students are being ‘turned off’ science due to their experience in schools, so there is a need to explore how teachers can improve student engagement in science (Keys, 2005 ; Lyons, 2006).
Acknowledging this situation recognises that teacher professional knowledge and capabilities are at the heart of improving science learning for students. However, we need to be clear about what knowledge and capabilities are pertinent for teaching science and to also be mindful that teaching and learning in a classroom occurs through a complex interaction between students, the resources used and their teacher.
This chapter examines an approach to teaching science that has emerged from contemporary education research and which aims to address the problem of engaging students’ interest in science by providing more authentic learning experiences that emulate the way science knowledge is generated and how it actually works.
OPENING VIGNETTE
The two drawings in Figure 1.7.1 show a student's idea of what she thinks is the difference between the way the particles are arranged in metal and wool.
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