Thanks for these questions, Patrick! From a research perspective, I see the goal of identifying "seeds of science" as an alternative to the goal of identifying common misconceptions -- it involves looking for what is awesome about students' ideas, rather than looking for the ways students struggle. From an instructional perspective, our project proposes that instructors prioritize noticing and building on the "seeds," rather than confronting misconceptions. So it's an alternative in the sense of what goal is prioritized. However, in my experience these can work together: students have "seeds of science" that can help them move past common misconceptions, and it is helpful to be aware of both. Sometimes even common misconceptions can be seeds of scientific thinking that aren't "all the way there" yet. 

An example of leveraging a "seed of science" from my own recent experience: when we're talking about electric circuits, my students tend to buy into the idea that charges move around inside a conductor until the electric field is zero. When they come across various questions or observations that "don't make sense," I find it helpful to remind them of the "charges move around until field is zero" idea and ask how it would apply in the situation they are currently confused about. Hopefully this provides a sensible illustration!

This all makes sense. As a classroom teacher and instructional coach I'm often thinking (and talking with other teachers) about the difference between finding what's right in student thinking and finding what's wrong. It's a seemingly small change in approach that has a big impact on culture in the classroom.

I guess I was thinking about confronting not necessarily student deficiencies, but misguided intuition based on experiences in the physical world. For example, I seem to recall that a common misconception is that when a ball is thrown up in the air, the force on the ball is at first acting upwards, and then later downwards. This isn't necessarily a result of a student "struggling" with anything, but rather seeing the world through an incorrect model of their experience. Perhaps there is no distinction between this example and the one you provided, but I have no absolutely no intuition about electricity!

Hi Patrick!  These are such great questions, thank you!  Yes, that idea of an impetus force is something the literature reports as a common misconception, and we definitely see this idea in our data too.  I agree with you that this idea is not canonically correct, in that physics would see it a different way.  Building from what Lisa said, part of the work of our project is to imagine ways in which we might build from ideas like impetus force, instructionally -- often trying to find a way that the idea is continuous with formal physics.  In the case of the impetus force, for example, we might see resources like "forces affect the motion of objects" or "an imbalance of forces changes their motion."  These are ways in which the impetus force *aligns* with accepted physics knowledge, even though the idea is technically incorrect; from this lens, these ideas need not be confronted but can instead be explored, refined, connected, etc.

Let's keep the conversation going!

Thanks for the additional explanation, Amy! That definitely helps me better understand your project and goals.

Thank you for watching and commenting on our video! I definitely agree it would have been nice to have more discussion about students’ ideas; thank you for your feedback! If you’re interested, I’ll share some links at the end of this post to papers we have written about the types of resources we’ve found in students' responses. These resources have helped guide the development of ACORN tutorials in a few ways; for example, we usually start a tutorial with a conceptual “priming” question that we expect to elicit a lot of resourceful ideas that can be scaffolded and built on throughout the rest of the worksheet. Students’ resources have also informed the goals and format of ACORN tutorials; for example, we’ve found students have lots of great ideas that form the basis of models for physical phenomena, so some of our tutorials aim to help students formalize those ideas. In response to data about the effectiveness of materials: the short answer is yes, we are in the process of measuring this.  We still have some open questions about how to best effectiveness. Right now, we’re focussing on video analysis of students doing ACORN tutorials and revising our materials based off of these observations. We’re also in the process of developing and investigating other forms of data, like survey responses, that could help measure things like students affective experience, conceptual gains, and mechanistic reasoning skills.

Thank you so much for your questions, Rebecca!

In terms of how our tutorials are similar to or different from these other curricula, my own sense is that we are trying to systematically elicit particular (research-identified) resources, and then support students in building models, mechanisms, and concepts from there.  That feels a bit abstract, so here's an example: In the context of heat and temperature, we've found that students pretty reliably use a few resources when they're sense-making about macro thermal phenomena -- heat transfer is directional, temperature and thermal energy are related, ... (I have a short list).  What our current draft of the H & T ACORN Physics Tutorial does is put a big box on the first page, and ask students to answer some concrete questions and then reflect on the "principles" they were using, and then put those up in their box.  As they go, we invite them to refine, combine, resolve inconsistencies between, add, etc., to their principles, and then, toward the end, to test their burgeoning "model" in an experiment.  The concrete questions we ask are ones we have seen elicit particular resources, and the process is meant to make students' ideas visible to them and support them in organizing and building from them.

I think there is a lot of overlap in the processes of our tutorials and all of the materials you mention, in that they are all trying to support students in model-building and -refining in particular ways.  Ours may overlap the most with ISLE because we use a lot of experiments, but that answer may reflect more on my understanding of the curricula more than what someone who knew all of these well would say.  We do take a pretty consistently resources-oriented stance toward student thinking, which distinguishes our materials from curricula that also seek to address misunderstandings or misconceptions.

The open-source website is *almost* launched and will be here: https://www.physport.org/curricula/ACORN/.

And we are currently in process of analyzing interviews with faculty about their perceptions with the tutorials.  Some of our own team members express that they are hard to use because they are counter-cultural, and it can be like swimming upstream, expectations-wise, so we're exploring that as a team.

Happy to continue this conversation!

Dear Amy,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses! Yes, laying out that concrete example about heat flow is very helpful. In my own mind, you're taking something like Diagnoser.com's "facets" of knowledge, but turning things on their head and looking at the positive attributes of "misconceptions" (hopefully I'm not misunderstanding).

As for faculty uptake, I wonder if it just is going to be hard, and therefore requires a substantial investment in professional development. For example, Modeling Instruction folks have just realized it takes 2-3 weeks of full-time investment in professional development to get people to really adopt these counter-cultural approaches. (I'm not sure how easily-adoptable ISLE is, but my finding is that the strongest advocates for it are people who have become accustomed to it through long-term exposure, such as through their masters coursework). So, I wouldn't lose heart about it being hard.

I look forward to seeing the website rollout!

If there were emojis here I'd give this response a big heart!

Hi Sarah! It is really exciting to hear from someone who is working from a similar perspective! (Also, what a cool project! I've just started dipping my toes into the world of NLP and students' ideas, and It's very interesting.) Thanks so much for each of your questions, and I'll try to respond to each here:

- For heat and temperature, some of the most common ideas we've seen are things like "heat/thermal energy flows from hot to cold," "material matters for heat transfer," or "energy is related to motion of the particles of an object." I suspect that these are especially dependent on the kind of question we've asked students -- lots of things about putting different sizes or types of blocks in contact with each other. We're really curious about students' microscopic thinking, and there is some ongoing investigation about that in particular. 

-For me, the most inspiring ways I see instructors use students' ideas as resources are when they are able to suggest "mini-experiments" to test or affirm students ideas, or when they can suggest analogies that resonate with ideas that students voice. Here, I am mostly thinking about ways my undergraduate Learning Assistants leverage resources in the intro physics class I teach. They are great at picking up on or suggesting analogies! 

- I think it's hard to tell how students feel when their ideas are affirmed, because it seems to me like students don't often expect it! I see their proudness when they are really convinced they have great ideas, but I think they see their ideas as great less frequently than I do, if that makes sense. 

-Our video lessons will be housed on Periscope, which has a collection of video lessons for physics teaching. They include short video clips from classes where students are using ACORN Physics tutorials, and come with discussion/consideration questions to help instructors think about how students' ideas can be fruitful or how to respond to situations that seem to be common in the context of these tutorials. The discussion/consideration guides are framed around a central question that the video clip gets at, like "What ideas do students have about heat and temperature?" or "when do students pursue challenging questions?" 

Sarah, echoing Lisa's thanks for your engagement.  I wanted to add that one of the graduate students on our team is currently leading a project that is seeking to develop a tool/survey where students reflect on how they see their ideas having changed during instruction and how they felt about it.  E.g., were their ideas challenged, built on, elaborated, etc., and did they feel confident, embarrassed, confused.  Once we get something semi-reliable, we want to look at couplings between answers to these questions -- do instances of building on couple with feeling confident, for instance?  Looking forward to checking out your work, too!

Hi Sarah!  Yes, we have absolutely seen ideas like cold flow; in fact, a graduate student on our team designed a question that was meant to specifically elicit that idea after seeing it, and we are awaiting data.  We framed the question not only in terms of "what do you think happens" but also "why might it be reasonable to think that cold flows" and "what are the limitations."  I'd be excited to co-think with you when we get that data!