Learning Sciences Research On How Students Investigate In The Lab
Janice Gobert highlighted in Education Week.
Moving toward argument-driven lab models could mean a shift in how students experience science, other researchers said.
Real laboratory work is messy: Theories fall apart during experiments, teammates disagree over interpreting the results, and data don't always neatly answer the question.
By contrast, students often avoid intellectual messiness in traditional school science labs, according to another analysis presented at the conference by researchers Janice Gobert and Juelaila J. Raziuddin of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and Kenneth R. Koedinger, a computer science psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
They found that middle and early high school students often avoid setting a hypothesis that could be rejected, try to design and conduct experiments that would confirm biases they already hold, and reject evidence from an experiment that contradicts what they thought going into it.
October 8, 2013