Tuesday conference

Today featured two great scholars.  Richard Duschl focused on reforming how we view science education and also intro'ed our two day look at Ready, Set, Science!  Richard Lehrer presented how students can and should be active in inventing and critiquing methods of data collection and presentation.

Richard Duschl, "Overview of NRC Synthesis Reports Taking Science to School and Ready, Set, Science!"

·         Game changing in assessment – students now just held accountable for knowing/identifying anymore, now it is reasoning and application

·         Reforming how we view science education – vertical pathways from middle to high school to use higher level reasoning and critical thinking can’t just happen in one year; need science discourse/argumentation from students over years of education

·        need for core standards so there is a global, cohesive, vertically aligned science education 

·     not all students need to do the same activity in the same way to get the same data and express it in the same way – scientists don't do this, so why do we do it cookie cutter in "perfect" scenarios?

We also spent time with a book study of Ready, Set, Science! and looked at analyzing samples of student work for the level of their understanding.

And there are always the references made during the lecture to follow up on later, such as the work of:

      Mark Wilson and Construct Maps
Richard Lehrer (next presenter) and the Vanderbilt Project

Richard Lehrer, "Data Modeling"

   ·         contexts for statistical investigations

o   repeated measures

o   manufactured objects

o   natural objects

·         process of students taking time to invent and share displays for data and observations (size, shape, what is misleading? Pros? Cons?)

·         “display board reasoning” – what do you get from data that you can’t get from simple observations (trends, patterns, predictions, outliers)

·         Tinkerplots – easily manipulated software for creating various plots of data

·         Lessons will be posted on data modeling website:           

o   www.modelingdata.org username: guest / password: modeling

Team time: We also had some valuable team time to discuss the conference so far and listen to other people's reactions, responses, and their situations in their districts.  I'm looking forward to more of that tomorrow as well.  I want to know if they have similar issues in their district as we do.

Time for homework, reading a few chapters from Ready, Set, Science!  Tomorrow's going to be a long day 7am -8 pm.