Vol. 7 Nos. 3 & 4

Special Issue: Learning Through Problem Solving

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Guest Editors' Introduction

Articles

Guest Editors' Introducation

Susan M. Williams and Cindy E. Hmelo

Organizing learning around problem solving has a long tradition when teaching adults to carry out specific jobs. Examples include traditional apprenticeships, such as those described by J.S. Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) and Lave (1977), and graduate school education for the professions of law, business, and medicine (Barrows, 1985; Williams, 1992). Solving real problems with the guidance of an expert has helped adult learners acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to perform specific jobs and to link this knowledge with the social and functional contexts in which it is used.

Recently, there has been increased interest in problem-centered teaching and learning for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. This is due, in part, to a pervasive belief that schools are not meeting the intellectual and occupational needs of their students (Airasian & Walsh, 1997). Even though many students become proficient at tasks requiring the memorization of discrete facts and the rote application of procedures, relatively few gain an understanding of the deep principles in a domain or master higher order thinking skills such as analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. Without these skills, students are left unprepared to enter a workforce in which rapid changes require them to be independent learners (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Needed Skills, 1992). This perceived deficiency in our current educational outcomes has led to new standards issued by organizations such as the National Research Council (1996) and the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (1989). These standards call for a change: Traditional instructional approaches in which students memorize information should be replaced with inquiry methods that provide opportunities for students to generate their own goals and plan and carry out research to achieve those goals..........

The five articles in this special issue represent the findings of researchers working in classroom settings to explore key issues in learning through problem solving. Although they vary in the domains being studied, the age of students, and the methods they employ, there are numerous common themes that can inform both theory and practice......

Read more of the "Guest Editors' Introduction" in JLS Volume 7, Number 3 & 4.


Table of Contents

Abstracts

Doing with Understanding: Lessons From Research on Problem- and Project-Based Learning

Brigid J.S. Barron, Daniel L. Schwartz, Nancy J. Vye, Allison Moore, Anthony Petrosino, Linda Zech, John D. Bransford, and The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt

A major hurdle in implementing project-based curricula is that they require simultaneous changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices - changes that are often foreign to the students as well as the teachers. In this article, we share an approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating problem- and project-based curricula that has emerged from a long-term collaboration with teachers. Collectively, we have identified 4 design principles that appear to be especially important: (a) defining learning-appropriate goals that lead to deep understanding; (b) providing scaffolds such as "embedded teaching," "teaching tools," sets of "contrasting cases," and beginning with problem-based learning activities before initiating projects; (c) ensuring multiple opportunities for formative self-assessment and revision; and (d) developing social structures that promote participation and a sense of agency. We first discuss these principles individually and then describe how they have incorporated into a single project. Finally, we discuss research findings that show positive effects on student learning and that show students' reflections on their year as 5th graders were strongly influenced by their experiences in problem- and project-based activities that followed the design principles.


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Inquiry in Project-Based Science Classrooms: Intial Attempts by Middle School Students

Joseph Krajcik, Phyllis C. Blumenfeld, Ronald W. Marx, Kristin M. Bass, Jennifer Fredricks, and Elliott Soloway

Although inquiry is an essential component of science learning, we know little about students' experience with inquiry in regular science classrooms. Our goal is to describe realistically what middle school students do and where they have difficulties in their first encounters with inquiry learning. We report findings from case studies of 8 students as they designed and carried out their own investigations during 2 projects that spanned several months. We detail how students asked questions, planned and designed investigations and procedures, constructed apparatus, carried out their own work, interpreted data and drew conclusions, and presented the findings. We discuss how collaboration among group members and support from the teacher influenced this process. The findings indicate that middle school students were thoughtful in designing investigations and in planning procedures; for instance, they thought about controls, about samples, and about how to organize data collection. However, the cases also reveal areas of weakness, such as failures to focus onthe scientific merit of questions generated and to systematically collect and analyze data and draw conclusions. Teacher structuring and questioning were crucial in encouraging students to be thoughtful about the substantive aspects of inquiry. Overall, these findings can help curriculum developers and science educators in their attemps to design instruction to improve the inquiry process.


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The Evolution of Critical Standards As Students Design Hypermedia Documents

Julie Erickson and Richard Lehrer

We conducted a 2-year design experiment in which 6th- and 7th-grade students designed hypermedia documents that were used by their classmates as tools for learning. In the process of creating these documents, the students learned about research and communication skills as they developed an understanding of topics in social studies. Consensual patters of student beliefs, which we refer to as critical standards, emerged in the classroom and were fostered by teachers. Critical standards exemplified and made communal that research and design skills that sustained inquiry. They became a means by which classroom discourse was transformed into a language of learning. We illustrate longitudinal transitions in students' critical standards by focusing on changes in those standards developed for judging the appropriateness of a reseach question and for evaluating the quality of a hypermedia design. Questions that students considered "good" evolved over the course of the study, from those requiring little effort to answer and even less to evalute to those affording opportunities for building knowledge. Standards for good hypermedia design evolved from eye-catching presentation to clarity of communication and consideration of audience. We discuss the means by which teachers asisted these transitions in students' beliefs and conclude with some observations about how student design was supported by successive redesign of the learning environment.


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Using Explanatory Knowledge During Collaborative Problem Solving in Science

Elaine B. Coleman

This research evaluates the effects of a scaffolded explanation-based approach to collaborative discussion on students' understanding of photosynthesis. This approach consists of instruction and prompts encouraging students to engage in the processes of explaining and justifying one's personal knowledge and comparing it to scientific knowledge. Forty-eight 4th- and 5th-grade students, identified as having high or average "intentional" approaches to learning, were divided into 3 groups (high, average control [AC], and average intervention [AI}). Students worked both collaboratively and individually on 2 reasoning tasks (problem-explanation and concept maps) in the domain of photosynthesis. The results of the concept-mapping tasks indicated that the students in the AI group developed a more accurate scientific and functional understanding of photosynthesis than the AC group who did not receive the intervention. This study also confirmed the prediction that the AI group would more closely resemble the high intentional learning group by constructing explanations that were conceptually more advnaced as well as retaining and acquiring more subject matter knowledge than those of the AC group. The scaffolded explanation-based intervention did not have a significant effect on the structure of students' explanations. This research supports the importance of the nature of students' discussion (i.e., explanation) to advance their beliefs about scientific phenomenon and emphasizes the usefulness of explanation and concept-mapping techniques as evaluative measures of student knowledge during collaborative problem solving.


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From Physical Models to Biomechanics: A Design-Based Modeling Approach

David E. Penner, Richard Lehrer, and Leona Schauble

In this study, we used a design context for developing children's understanding of the natural world via the designing, building, testing, and evaluation of models. In this instance, we asked children to design models of the human elbow. Children's models were then used as the basis for an exploration of the biomechanics of the human arm. The investigation of biomechanical principles is a major extension of our earlier research. By building on children's design-based models, we were able to engage students in an investigation of the relation between force and the location of the attachment point of the biceps. In so doing, we were able to provide children with opportunites to develop their understanding of the relations between mathematics and science through the construction and interpretation of data tables and graphs.


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