Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Education Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

PDF

Science and Mathematics Education

The University of Maine

Contrasting cases

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Education

A Granular Account Of Student's Understanding Reasoning Within An Everyday And Scientific Contexts, Grace M. Gonnella Aug 2018

A Granular Account Of Student's Understanding Reasoning Within An Everyday And Scientific Contexts, Grace M. Gonnella

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers and educational researchers in the Maine Physical Sciences Partnership (Maine PSP) at the University of Maine identified making quality scientific arguments as a struggle for students. Not only is argumentation hard, but reasoning is the hardest component of an argument. Many frameworks have been developed to target teaching about argumentation but do not address how to teach one component of an argument in isolation. Educational practitioners encourage using everyday context to learn about arguments in the scientific context, but there is limited support in what is the best method. The first purpose of this research was to understand a …


Assessing Student Understanding Of Reasoning Using Argument-Based Contrast Matrices, Ethan Geheb Apr 2018

Assessing Student Understanding Of Reasoning Using Argument-Based Contrast Matrices, Ethan Geheb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is strong national interest in increasing student proficiency in STEM, which includes the learning and practice of scientific argumentation. The codevelopment of scientific knowledge and argumentation has shown to positively influence student general understanding of argument construction, scientific knowledge and principles. Research indicates students continue to struggle with constructing complete arguments, with specific difficulty in correctly incorporating reasoning. Numerous frameworks have been developed to support student learning about argumentation. These frameworks contain common teaching strategies for introducing and teaching reasoning within the context of a science classroom. However, these strategies do not specifically target student struggle with using reasoning, …


Using Contrasting Cases To Build Metacognitive Knowledge About The Impact Of Salient Distracting Features In Physics Problems, Thanh K. Le Aug 2017

Using Contrasting Cases To Build Metacognitive Knowledge About The Impact Of Salient Distracting Features In Physics Problems, Thanh K. Le

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Student reasoning on physics problems is often context dependent. A possible explanation is that salient distracting features (SDFs) in physics problems may cue students’ “spontaneous” reasoning. This cued reasoning is often accepted without question, even though it may be unproductive and may even preclude the use of relevant knowledge. One possible approach to address such reasoning difficulties is to strengthen students’ metacognitive skills, particularly their metacognitive knowledge. While metacognitive knowledge plays an important role in facilitating effective regulation, little is known about how to build student metacognitive knowledge. This dissertation explores the use of contrasting cases (e.g., a …