Goal of the Project: Design and iteratively refine and improve curriculum materials for elementary students that support them to develop a mathematical model of water runoff such that rainfall = water absorbed by the surface + water that runs off the surface. Students will then use that mathematical model to code a computational model that will allow them to test the amount of water runoff associated with different design solutions.
Problem Identification (From Generative Case Study)
Key science ideas were missing! Attending to the conservation of matter was an important aspect of what students were learning and a requirement for expressing the mathematical relationship, so we revised the task to support students to develop their understanding of this aspect of the concept.
Things that could be changed:
- Create supports for teachers to verbally support students’ learning of this concept during class
- Develop curricular supports for students to use during the lesson
We made both of these changes, but in particular, we made specific changes to the supports that students received during the curricular unit and developed a design experiment that was conducted during the next iteration of the curriculum materials.
Developing a Solution (Fick et al., in preparation)
Revised Goal:
Develop a tool for students that will support students to pay attention to the conservation of matter so they are better prepared to be able to represent the equation.
Research Question:
- What kinds of support can be added to the modeling activity to assist students to attend to the conservation of matter when showing their understanding of absorption and runoff processes?
Revision Process: As we were considering potential ways to modify the task to support students to attend to the conservation of matter (water) in their drawings, we came up with two ideas:
Support #1: Provide students with numerical values for the amounts of rainfall and water that can be absorbed by the surface that they need to represent within their model (in the question prompt).
Support #2: Add boxes in which the students should represent how much of the water is flowing to that destination. Thereby forcing students to make decisions about where the water goes.
Setup of the Solutions Test: We provided all students with support #1. For #2, we did an comparison test where two sections of the grade had the boxes for one question out of four and the other two sections had the boxes for all of the questions. The students were unevenly split across 2 teachers (75 students vs 25 students), so in order to make the experiment more equivalent we removed the second teacher, focusing on the one teacher who had three sections. The figure below left has the boxes showing possible places the water could go, the figure to the right has the boxes removed.
Analysis and Results: We qualitatively analyzed the student generated models using a similar coding rubric as for the initial analysis. This analysis found that students seemed to benefit most from support #1. Most students using this version of the curriculum did better at attending to the conservation of matter through a numerical representation of the amount of water that flowed to each destination. The students who had the boxes (support #2) for only the first question were more likely to represent the processes of water flow than the students who had them for more questions. We also found that the inclusion of the boxes seemed to limit the creativity of the students’ responses, they were much less likely to include the processes that they were representing in their model. (Findings from Fick et al., in preparation)
Solution:
Too much structure limited creativity, but simply providing students with numerical values that they needed to incorporate and make sense of supported students to attend to the conservation of matter within their models. Therefore, tasks need to be structured to provide students with the opportunity to use the information they have available to them.