Review #4 page 1
Kevin D. McMahon
Student ID#: 78513
SED 600
March 27, 2007
Review #4: Conference
"It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have
wishes, one must also accomplish."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Conference
On January 19th, 2007 I attended a conference at the AirTel Motel sponsored by
District 1 of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The conference focused on Gifted
Instruction in Secondary Science. Dr. Sandra Kaplan, from the Department of Education,
University of Southern California, was the principal presenter. She began her
presentation with a quote from the February, 2006 edition of the Harvard Business
Review:
“To have knowledge but without being able to use it in new and
different ways is akin to not having knowledge at all.”
Kaplan proceeded to explain that the conference was not about content, but process; and
this process, put simply, was to facilitate students moving from “not knowing” to
“knowing.” To accomplish this task, Kaplan promoted a “Bridge Curriculum” which
would allow the teacher to transport the student from the region of unknowing to
knowing. She illustrated this processes by the use of a handout which is reproduced on
the following page.
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This paper will focus on one aspect of the “Bridge,” that is, the “Connect” region.
Kaplan defined “connection” as the process by which the “student connects content to
something outside the specific domain.” She further explained that “this is where transfer
occurs” which is necessary for knowledge to be used “in new and different ways.” Dr.
Kaplan provided her audience with an interesting overview of transfer techniques that
could be used in the classroom, but she did not describe any particular research that was
done in this area. Consequently, the rest of this paper will assess research on transfer
using design based science instruction that was performed by David Fortus and his
colleagues from the University of Michigan (Fortus, 2005).
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Introduction
In the introduction of their research report, Design-based Science and Real-World
Problem-Solving, Fortus, et. al., lay out what they believe is the cause of the poor
transference between academic skills to the “real world,” that is the world outside of the
academic setting. They state,
School science has been traditionally built around well-defined
problems, such as predicting an ideal projectile’s trajectory or
calculating how much hydrogen is released by the decomposition of
a given amount of water. (Fortus, 2005, p.856)
However, real world problems and are ill-defined and, similarly, real-world science does
not follow set protocols that lead to “unerringly to scientific knowledge.” (Fortus, 2005,
p.855,856). The purpose of their research they stated as follows:
Our response to the potential problem of limited transfer of
learning from school science to everyday settings is design-based
(DBS), an inquiry-based science pedagogy in which new scientific
knowledge and problem-solving skills are constructed in the
context of design artifacts. (Fortus, 2005, p.856)
Method
The study was conducted over a period of 11 weeks. One hundred and forty-nine
9th and 10th graders participated in the study. The study was conducted in a suburban
school consisting of 87% White, 10% Hispanic, 2% Black, and 1% Asian. Two teachers
participated in the study; one had two years of teacher experience, the other had six.
The DBS task presented to the students was How do I design a structure for
extreme environmental conditions? The instructional unit was conducted so as to
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emphasize inquiry learning; explicit instruction was minimize. It was conducted in a
cyclical fashion as illustrated below.
Prior to the start of the DBS students were given a pre-test. After the completion of the
DBS task they were given a post-test. Three days after the post-test the students were
given a Transfer task to design and build a kite that could fly a mile high. During the
transfer task students could use any source they chose including the Web, hobby shops,
etc. The students were to submit a solution which consisted of (1) a technical drawing,
(2) concept drawing, (3) 3D model, (4) justification, and (5) description of the steps they
went through in the design and building of their model. The researchers conducted this
part of the project.
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Results
The Transfer tasks were coded according to standards taken from the Applied
Learning recommended by the New Standards Project (NCEE, 1997) which are
summarized below:
“Applied Learning is about the capabilities people need to be
productive members of society, as individuals who apply the
knowledge gained in school and elsewhere to analyze problems
and propose solutions.” (NCEE, 1997:3)
1. Identify all the factors and variables that need to be considered.
2. Gather relevant information.
3. Develop a range of options.
4. Selected one design option to pursue and justified this choice
with reference to functional, esthetic, scientific or other
considerations.
5. Used appropriate conventions to represent the design.
6. Established criteria for judging the success of the design.
The scores students received for the Transfer task were then correlated to their pre and
post-test with the following assumption in mind:
If the knowledge constructed during instruction supported the
solution of a transfer task, we should expect the knowledge of the
subjects after the intervention to be more highly correlated with
success on the transfer task than their knowledge before the
intervention. (Fortus, 2005 p.865)
The researchers obtained the following results:
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The researchers’ interpretation of the graph was as follows:
“…the correlation between the knowledge of the students after the
curriculum enactment and the transfer task is stronger than that
before the curriculum enactment. We believe this provides evidence
that transfer occurred, that the scientific knowledge that was
constructed between pre-test and post-test supported the solution of
the transfer task. (Fortus, 2005, p.871)
Discussion
Although the researchers concluded that there was indeed a correlation between
the DBS task and the Transfer task an r2 value of 0.20 is suggestive of very little to
negligible correlation. The researchers acknowledge the small value of r2 but justified
their conclusion by making an odd comment: “As a r2 value of 0.20 may seem small, it is
important to note that there have been many transfer studies that found no evidence of
transfer at all!” (Fortus, 2005, p.871) I trust that the authors are not suggesting that
because previous transfer studies were not able to detect correlation that we should
therefore lower our standards for correlation.
The researchers’ field notes may give insight as to some of the causes of the low
correlation value: (1) one of the teacher’s classes dropped out of the study completely,
(2) in the classes that completed the study only sixty-six completed all three assessments
(pre-test, post-test, and transfer task), (3) of these students 17 of the projects had been
copied which left only 49 students out of the original 149 students in the research project
whose data could be included. Of these students, the researchers noted that few were
motivated to complete the transfer task. Few used the time provided in class to
brainstorm, research, or complete any of the various phases of the project. They noted,
with some disappointment, that when a student found a web site for “mile high kites” it
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became a “Mecca” of student interest although they did not realize that it was the name of
a kite manufacturer and that it had little to do with designing a kite that could fly a “mile
high.” The researchers made the following final comments regarding the students’
performance on the transfer task:
Only few of the submitted solutions documented the process of
reaching the solution; most of the students described their solutions as
ready-made products, ignoring how they were created. Only a few,
therefore, described how and why they chose their solutions from
among the options they considered…. Few gave scientifically sound
reasons why their kite, unlike commercial kites, could fly 1 mile high.
Most solutions considered methods of evaluating their kite’s
performance but only few of these methods were practical. (Fortus,
2005, p.868)
Conclusion
In spite of the inevitable problems that are associated with doing researcher on
organisms that possess “free will” I believe the researchers designed their study well.
The methodology of correlating the pre and post-tests with the transfer task was
fundamentally sound even if the results were less than conclusive. The field notes taken
during the tasks provided insight into the problems associated with research that requires
student cooperation. Although they may have been perhaps too confident about the
correlation they discovered in the data they admitted that it was low. They suggested that
had they performed more transfer tasks that correlation may have improved. They
concluded by stating that this was the first step in a research agenda. One can hope that
their results will be more conclusive than that reported here.
References:
Fortus, D. (2005) Design-based science and real-world problem-solving. International
Journal of Science Education. Vol 27, No. 7, 3June 2005, pp.855-879
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NCEE (1997) Performance Standards (Vol 2), Middle School. Washington DC: National
Center on Education and the Economy.