Designing for Knowledge Integration: The Impact of Instructional Time
Science educators face constant tradeoffs between allocating time to important topics and including more topics in the curriculum. We study 3000 students experiencing four increasingly streamlined versions of a computer-enhanced middle school thermodynamics curriculum to investigate the impact of instructional time on knowledge integration. Knowledge integration refers to the process of adding new ideas and sorting through connections to develop a cohesive account of scientific phenomena. Our analyses contrast performance on inquiry assessments that require knowledge integration with performance on multiple-choice items. The results show that decreasing instructional time is strongly and significantly related to diminishing student knowledge integration around complex concepts. Whereas the inquiry assessments capture the impact of decreasing instructional time on knowledge integration, the multiple-choice assessments are relatively insensitive to these decreases. To explore further the process of knowledge integration, we follow 50 students through the full curriculum. We then analyze the performance of one representative student from middle school through high school. These case studies show why packing the curriculum with many science topics results in superficial understanding for many students. We show why deep understanding of science requires sustained study of carefully designed materials.
This paper tells the story of the design of Learning by Design, a project-based inquiry approach to science learning with roots in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and Problem-Based Learning (PBL), pointing out the theoretical contributions of both, classroom issues that arose upon piloting a first attempt, ways we addressed those challenges, lessons learned about promoting learning taking a project-based inquiry approach, and lessons learned about taking a theory-based approach to designing learning environments. LBD uses what we know about cognition to fashion a learning environment appropriate to deeply learning science concepts and skills and their applicability, in parallel with learning cognitive, social, learning, and communication skills. Our goal, in designing LBD, was to lay the foundation, in middle school, for students to be successful thinkers, learners, and decision-makers throughout their lives, and especially to help them begin to learn the science they need to know to thrive in the modern world. Learning by Design has students learn science in the context of achieving design-and-build challenges. Included in LBD's framework is a set of ritualized and sequenced activities that help teachers and students acclimate to the culture of a highly-collaborative, learner-centered, inquiry-oriented, and design-based classroom. Those ritualized activities help teachers and students learn the practices of scientists, engineers, and group members in ways that they can use outside the classroom. LBD is carefully crafted to promote deep and lasting learning, but we've learned that careful crafting is not enough for success in putting a collaborative inquiry approach into practice. Also essential are fostering a collaborative classroom culture in which students want to be engaged in deep learning and where the teacher sees herself as both a learner and a facilitator of learning, trusts that with her help the students can learn, and enthusiastically assumes the roles she needs to take on.