MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM (Marc Vilain) (01/29/88)
BBN Science Development Program
AI/Education Seminar Series Lecture
THE THINKERTOOLS PROJECT:
CAUSAL MODELS, CONCEPTUAL CHANGE, AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
Barbara Y. White and Paul Horwitz
BBN Labs, Education Dept.
(BYWHITE@G.BBN.COM, PHORWITZ@G.BBN.COM)
BBN Labs
10 Moulton Street
2nd floor large conference room
10:30 am, Thursday February 4 (NOTE UNUSUAL DAY)
This talk will describe an approach to science education that enables
sixth graders to learn principles underlying Newtonian mechanics, and to
apply them in unfamiliar problem solving contexts. The students'
learning is centered around problem solving and experimentation within a
set of computer microworlds (i.e., interactive simulations). The
objective is for students to acquire gradually an increasingly
sophisticated causal model for reasoning about how forces affect the
motion of objects. To facilitate the evolution of such a mental model,
the microworlds incorporate a variety of linked alternative
representations for force and motion, and a set of game-like problem
solving activities designed to focus the students' inductive learning
processes. As part of the pedagogical approach, students formalize what
they learn into a set of laws, and critically examine these laws, using
criteria such as correctness, generality, and parsimony. They then go
on to apply their laws to a variety of real world problems. The
approach synthesizes the learning of the subject matter with learning
about the nature of scientific knowledge -- what are scientific laws,
how do they evolve, and why are they useful? Instructional trials found
that the curriculum is equally effective for males and females, and for
students of different ability levels. Further, sixth graders taught
with this approach do better on classic force and motion problems than
high school students taught using traditional methods.
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