9928 Views (as of 05/2023)
  1. Suzanna Loper
  2. Curriculum Co-Director
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Lawrence Hall of Science, Boston College
  1. Katherine McNeill
  2. http://www.katherinelmcneill.com
  3. Associate Professor of Science Education
  4. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  5. Boston College
  1. Kathryn Quigley
  2. Media Lead
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Lawrence Hall of Science
Presenters’
Choice

The Argumentation Toolkit

NSF Awards: 1119584

2015 (see original presentation & discussion)

Grades 6-8

The Argumentation Toolkit is a collection of multimedia educative curriculum materials. The materials include teacher-facing videos and other multimedia resources, designed to support teachers in developing pedagogical content knowledge for scientific argumentation.

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Discussion from the 2015 Teaching & Learning Video Showcase (22 posts)
  • Icon for: Brian Drayton

    Brian Drayton

    Co-Principal Investigator
    May 11, 2015 | 01:24 p.m.

    Very interesting. Two questions: Is there some overlap with the work of Sue Doubler and others in the “Talk science” project, which I would think in a way contextualizes or complements your work? And is the aim for the videos to be stand-alone once the project is over, or are they always embedded in a PD program that includes other elements?

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 11, 2015 | 09:44 p.m.

    We are definitely familiar with Sue Doubler’s “Talk Science Project”. Her project definitely informed our work. I do think there is overlap, but ours focuses specifically on argumentation and it cuts across the modalities of talking, writing and reading.

    We will be sharing the resources as stand alone as well. At the very end of the video there is a website listed – www.argumentationtoolkit.org – where we intend to provide the resources. But we are still definitely working on the design. Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.

  • Icon for: May Jadallah

    May Jadallah

    Assistant Professor
    May 11, 2015 | 03:52 p.m.

    wonderful work! It will be great to make the Argumentation Toolkit available to the public.

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 11, 2015 | 09:46 p.m.

    We are really excited to make it public. If you have any suggestions at all about formatting or other aspects as wel design the website, please let us know!

  • Jeff Ryan

    Guest
    May 11, 2015 | 06:00 p.m.

    This looks like a great project and argumentation is such a critical practice in both the NGSS and the CCSS. I have appreciated the resources developed by The Learning Design Group- notably the Literacy Practice Briefs. I look forward to seeing more

  • Icon for: Suzanna Loper

    Suzanna Loper

    Lead Presenter
    Curriculum Co-Director
    May 12, 2015 | 08:40 a.m.

    Thanks very much Jeff!

  • Dean Livelybrooks

    Guest
    May 11, 2015 | 07:24 p.m.

    Looks great. Is the video design such that there will be templates for the 3 categories (or at least activity videos) and ways for others to ‘plug in’ videos on topics not previously covered? (with perhaps some guiding docs about this…)

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 11, 2015 | 09:49 p.m.

    I would actually love to know more about your thinking. Currently, all of the resources are embedded in a middle school curriculum, which includes specific lesson plans and associated resources to go along with the Activity Videos. We still need to think through what would be most useful in terms of sharing these resources on a stand alone website. Both of these suggestions are really interesting. If you have others, we would love to hear them.

  • Icon for: Craig Strang

    Craig Strang

    May 12, 2015 | 12:23 a.m.

    What a great tool. This will make professional development so much easier! We could have used it in our PRACTISE Project (Lawrence Hall of Science and Stanford University) which is also focused on argumentation. Check out our video by Emily Weiss.

  • Icon for: Suzanna Loper

    Suzanna Loper

    Lead Presenter
    Curriculum Co-Director
    May 14, 2015 | 09:25 a.m.

    Thanks Craig! Yes there is a lot of synergy between these projects.

  • Icon for: Kathy Perkins

    Kathy Perkins

    Director
    May 12, 2015 | 01:21 a.m.

    Great work! I am excited to see the toolkit when it becomes public.
    What forms of data are you going to be looking at this summer to measure the toolkits impact?
    Also, based on your experience so far what kinds of teacher PD do you see as being needed for teachers to use the toolkit effectively?

  • Icon for: Suzanna Loper

    Suzanna Loper

    Lead Presenter
    Curriculum Co-Director
    May 12, 2015 | 08:42 a.m.

    Thanks! We’ll be looking at pre- and post-measures of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for argumentation. We also have back-end data about teachers’ access of the materials (page views of the curriculum materials, which videos they watched, how frequently) and teachers’ self-reports of curriculum use.

  • Jim Slotta

    Guest
    May 12, 2015 | 09:48 a.m.

    great ideas here – evidence, claim, reasoning! And nice job on the video. This should be used for teacher PD. I would like to link it into my teacher inquiry MOOC, but I see the resources aren’t available yet…
    ps – Hi Suzy!

  • Icon for: Suzanna Loper

    Suzanna Loper

    Lead Presenter
    Curriculum Co-Director
    May 12, 2015 | 10:40 a.m.

    Hi Jim! We’ll be able to share the resources as soon as the study is over, hopefully starting mid-summer.

  • Tracey Ramirez

    Guest
    May 12, 2015 | 01:20 p.m.

    This project seems to provide the types of scaffolding that will help teachers and students successfully engage in the practice of argumentation in meaningful ways. Thanks, thanks, thanks!! Are you planning to extend this work into the elementary level? I would love to see that happen!

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 12, 2015 | 04:39 p.m.

    I think it would be fabulous to see it extended to the elementary level. We have not actually talked about that yet. I do think some of the teacher and student supports as they currently are would be helpful for upper elementary students. But it would be interesting to think about what else would be useful for elementary science.

  • Icon for: Sue Ellen McCann

    Sue Ellen McCann

    Facilitator
    Executive in Charge, Science
    May 12, 2015 | 03:43 p.m.

    Nice project. Is there something you can say about using videos as an instruction tool? Curious about how you designed the videos and what kind of storytelling you employed.

  • Icon for: Kathryn Quigley

    Kathryn Quigley

    Co-Presenter
    Producer and Media Lead
    May 12, 2015 | 04:02 p.m.

    Thanks so much! The 24 videos and other multimedia materials in the argumentation toolkit (www.argumentationtoolkit.org) are instruction tools, but for this project they are designed to be teacher-facing rather than student-facing. Each of our video categories play a different role in supporting teacher learning – the structure and design of the videos reflect this. For example, each category follows a consistent template so that videos within a category all accomplish the same goal. The question of storytelling is interesting! Although our videos are not narrative based, we do bring in expert teachers and students to share their experiences with viewers. Additionally, we explain concepts through animations with voice over.

  • Icon for: Brian Belland

    Brian Belland

    Associate Professor
    May 12, 2015 | 04:32 p.m.

    looks very interesting. I was wondering what kind of empirical work you have done so far on the effectiveness of the argumentation toolkit on teacher practices and student learning. Do you have any preliminary findings?

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 12, 2015 | 04:42 p.m.

    We are running a study right now where the resources were embedded in a year long curriculum. Approximately 98 teachers are using the curriculum with half receiving the toolkit supports. We are collecting pre and post teacher belief and PCK measures for argumentation. In addition, our external evaluator is doing more in depth case studies on a subset of the teachers to see if the toolkit impacts teachers’ instructional strategies. We are not looking on student learning, but that would clearly be a really interesting next step depending on what we find this year.

  • Icon for: Angela Calabrese Barton

    Angela Calabrese Barton

    Professor
    May 13, 2015 | 08:03 a.m.

    Are you thinking about how students navigate data from different epistemological origins in how you are working on argumentation? I ask because this is something that our youth need to navigate in our M4C project (as they integrate social and technological concerns in their design iterations), and if you have something on this, I would love to see it. (I was thinking about this with your first point on competing forms of evidence. I am not thinking necessarily about competing forms, but perhaps more like orthogonal forms).

  • Icon for: Katherine McNeill

    Katherine McNeill

    Co-Presenter
    Associate Professor of Science Education
    May 14, 2015 | 04:22 p.m.

    We have not in the work this video talks about, but I think it is incredibly important. I had a doc student working with a BPS teacher around some socioscientific argumentation he was engaged with his students. The kids relied on a variety of types of justifications, including scientific evidence but other types of evidence as well. I will e-mail you 2 papers that came out of this work and you can see if it is helpful at all.

  • Further posting is closed as the event has ended.