Rick Duschl and I are working on a National Science Foundation entitled “Promoting Conceptual Change in Reasoning.” Our goal is to work with schools and teachers to co-develop and investigate new methods for promoting scientific reasoning among students. Our project is based on the idea that students may find it difficult to learn to reason because their ideas about good reasoning are often fundamentally different from scientists’ reasoning. Learning to reason scientifically often means that students must fundamentally change some of their basic ideas about reasoning, just as learning physics means that students must fundamentally change some of their everyday ideas about motion and forces.
In our previous research, we have worked with teachers in middle schools to develop instructional materials and methods that have been very effective in promoting scientific reasoning. We have focused on activities and procedures that foster high-quality scientific discussions in small groups and in whole-class settings. We call these discussions reasoning seminars, and we have modeled them on the reasoning seminars that play such a large role in fostering scientific thinking among graduate students in the sciences. Our idea is to recreate the dynamism of graduate level seminars in seventh grade with materials and activities that are age-appropriate. Pilot work has been extremely encouraging. In some of my previous work, I have found that seventh graders eagerly engage in the reasoning seminars developed so far, and the students’ reasoning has been very impressive.
We are recruiting a doctoral student to work with us as a graduate assistant on this project beginning in the summer of 2006. We would like to include prospective applicants to our doctoral programs in our search. If you would like to find out more about the project, please contact me.
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