Hi Michael, thanks for your thoughtful questions. As part of our research, we have been providing professional development sessions for teachers - typically 2 sessions and a total of ~4-6 hours with time spent becoming familiar with the technology, understanding the EcoXPT curriculum, practicing guided inquiry, and becoming familiar with our research protocols. EcoXPT is a problem-based inquiry curriculum in which students are challenged to build evidence-based arguments. It has been important to help teachers anticipate the kinds of challenges students will encounter during open-ended inquiry, and give them a chance to develop and practice strategies that encourage students to develop their evidence-based reasoning (rather than focusing on whether they got "the right answer").

EcoXPT is built using Unity. Students can design their own experiments within certain constraints, but they cannot develop new kinds of tests. That's a neat idea - I wonder what they would come up with. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Thanks for your insightful comments and questions, Janet! We appreciate the kind comments you've shared here and in other posts :)

1) To understand how we designed the tools, you might think of the overlapping area in a Venn diagram where one circle represents the approaches that real ecosystem scientists use and the other circle represents tools through which students gain new ways to view, think about and test core ecosystem science ideas. Through talking with our stellar advisory board and interviewing 10 practicing ecologists, we gathered a suite of candidate approaches and tools. Based on prior work with EcoMUVE, we had a sense of some of the ideas that remain challenging for students - like thinking about spatial and temporal scales, distinguishing between relationships that are correlational versus causal, and thinking about interacting and/or indirect causes. We define "experiment" fairly broadly (as we heard ecosystem scientists do) and use it to refer to opportunities students have to intervene in a system and witness or measure the outcome. Not all the tools are experimental (like the buoy), but they all emphasize different perspectives on causal relationships or dynamics.

2) We have only just begun testing the materials, so as you suggest, I can't provide any concrete findings at this time. Based on my initial observations, the Thinking Moves seem really powerful in supporting the interactions between teachers and students. They provide a common language and a resource the teacher can point to if students feel "stuck". I think they will help support guided inquiry.

3) Again, I can’t offer anything definitive on this point. The comparison study we’re conducting right now provides an interesting contrast. We are offering the experimental tools to only half of the students, and I find those without the experimental tools asking questions that they cannot always answer, like “why does X go down”. Students who have been provided with the experimental tools have a way to continue this thread of inquiry and unpack some of the causal mechanisms that might otherwise be “black boxed”. We are exploring whether providing these tools will help students develop their understanding of the distinction between correlation and causation as well as to develop more sophisticated causal explanations.

4) The continuous data from the buoy is scaffolded to provide views of the data at daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal time scales. We also overlay points based on data students are able to collect using water measurement tools, thus helping students to relate their experience with collecting water measurement to the continuous data stream provided by the buoy. Students appear to interpret these data fairly easily and have been incorporating buoy data as evidence in their explanations. Our tests so far have been with seventh grade students.

Amy,

I love hearing/reading about all the thinking you guys do about this!!! You guys have such good sense about getting to understanding; what a great team! I still want to go beyond that and address the issue of getting to insights. We'll do it together!!!

Janet

Thanks, Janet!

Thanks, Emerson! As described above, we interviewed ecosystem scientists and found an incredible range of tools, strategies and approaches they employed in order to address their research questions. A big challenge has been to provide both support and freedom for students to engage in open-ended inquiry, while recognizing that they don't have the kind of background knowledge and expertise that experts would have. We focus on meeting the students where they are in their learning, while also ensuring that the options available are modeled on approaches that are authentic to the practices of ecosystem science. So far, one success has been that students are demonstrating a greater awareness and appreciation for the diversity of approaches and tools that are used by ecosystem scientists.

Hi Chris, I hope that you could say more about what you mean by "physical space practices", as I'm not sure how to interpret that part of your question. That being said, I am excited to look more closely at how the Thinking Moves are used by both teachers and students.

As I described above, we have developed a clear sense of the kinds of misconceptions students have and overcome when working with EcoMUVE, so we've designed EcoXPT to go further in addressing some of those challenges. In both the Teacher's Guide and the professional development sessions we review with teachers some of the challenges they can expect their students to face. These range from challenges in motivation (a student may feel lost or unmotivated when their first hypothesis doesn't pan out), to challenges in causal thinking (pushing beyond direct causal connections to considering indirect or interacting causes), to challenges in applying science concepts (like thinking about photosynthesis and respiration in the context of the pond). The Thinking Moves, the experimental tools, and the curriculum all provide support for teachers and students to address misconceptions, and the Teacher's Guide and professional development session highlight pedagogical moves teachers can make to address issues that arise. In some cases we link well-known misconceptions with specific prompts, Thinking Moves and/or experimental tools that a teacher can leverage when working with students.

We'd love to stay in touch as our work unfolds. Thanks for your questions!