Chapter 2: Eliciting Students' Ideas

Chapter 2 Eliciting Students Ideas Student Ideas as the raw material of science teachers work. None of the students could resist running their hand over the black bear pelt laid out on the table as they took their seats surrounding it. Before Tom could even say hello to the class, people started asking questions about the bear. Was this caught up here when student asked? What kind of bear is this, another called out? Tom, a master environmental educator working at the New Jersey School of Conservation, patiently answered each question, but purposefully did not go into too much detail. He had a question of his own he wanted to ask first. So he said, addressing the students seated around the bear skin? What do you know about bears? Good science teaching starts with the premise that student ideas are the raw material of our work. In order to shape those ideas, we need to know what they are. Otherwise our teaching may be transient, like building sandcastles or drawing on a sidewalk with chalk, and likely to fade over time, as students revert to ideas that are more familiar and make more sense to them than the science content the teacher intended them to learn. Only when students ideas are out in the open, does it become possible to engage in discussion about the intelligibility, plausibility, or the explanatory power of those ideas? This does not mean that teachers need to elicit every student's idea about every topic they teach. It can be enough to be aware that for any given science topic, there will be a percentage of students who hold one particular idea, while others will think differently. Even if we cannot predict who exactly will believe what, knowing the possible misconceptions that our students may hold will help us teach them. There are a range of wonderful strategies for eliciting students' ideas, and plenty of resources to help teachers do that, but here I wish to focus on the question of what we are actually eliciting their ideas about. One kind of elicitation, represented by Tom's question, what do you know about bears, is designed to probe students for the cognitive and cultural resources they bring to the task of learning. In this type of elicitation, there is no need for students to justify their responses. The important thing is to get that prior knowledge out in the open. When Tom asked, what do you know about bears? He knew that most of the students had likely heard quite a bit about bears in their lives. Researchers, particularly those who had grown up in places where bears were less a part of the culture than they are in the United States, might have had less prior knowledge about bears and therefore drawn more directly from the bear skin right in front of them. He also knew from years of experience that as students talked, he would hear a number of misconceptions about bears from students, and the conversational tone he used helped to put the students at ease because they were not being judged on the correctness of each idea. Students take stock of students' cognitive and cultural resources and help teachers plan for instruction. A prompt for elicitation may take the form of an open-ended question that can be answered with a range of divergent responses. Examples include, what are some reasons why we might look at things under a microscope? Where have you seen something made from rock in your everyday life? What are some situations where water might change from one phase to another? Such questions have multiple possible answers, and students' responses inform teachers about the existing resources that students can bring to bear on further understanding of the topic. The best designed prompts allow for every student to give an answer and participate in the discussion. This type of elicitation has its limits, however. In the examples above, students would need to have familiarity with microscopes, rocks, ice, and steam. If Tom had asked a group of first graders, "Tell me what you already know about Wollia del Gids." He might not have unearthed too many cognitive and cultural resources. I've had conversations with teachers who are skeptical about the whole notion of eliciting student ideas, and their argument goes something like this. If I'm going to teach DNA transcription and translation to my biology students, it may be a topic that is brand new to them. In fact, their understanding about DNA may be so limited that if I ask them what ideas they have about transcription and translation, they are not going to have any because they have never thought about those things before. I would actually agree that it makes little sense to ask students at the beginning of such a unit what do you know about DNA transcription and translation. There are many times when I've seen teachers engage in this type of elicitation at the beginning of a unit or lesson, and it almost always ends up positioning students as ignorant as if they should already know. The problem in such a case is that teachers are attempting to elicit prior knowledge about scientific concepts, instead of tapping into students' ideas about a phenomenon. The distinction is subtle, but important. Esking students about a concept they have never encountered before can be confusing for them. However, if you show them a phenomenon that requires crafting an explanation of some sort, even if it is simple, students can immediately begin by drawing on what they know and from what they have observed about the puzzling phenomenon. Imari queued up the video clip and got the attention of her high school biology class. I'm going to play you a short segment from a documentary that has a mystery for you to think about, she said to her students. She pressed play and the video showed multiple clownfish brushing up against a sea anemone. The narrator on the video described how sea anemones use their stinging tentacles to paralyze and snare and consume small fish. But clownfish, he continued, seemed to use the anemones tentacles for protection from other predators. How can this be, as the narrator, at which point Imari stopped the video? She turned on the lights and said, "I'd like for you to get into your groups and come up with as many possible ideas as you can for that question. Give each idea its own sticky note." How might it be possible for a fish to live so close to another organism that is so dangerous? A second kind of elicitation is illustrated by Imari's prompt to her students about the puzzle posed in the video, which allowed students to share their ideas, even if they had never seen or heard about clownfish or sea anemones before watching the video. In this elicitation, students were presented with a puzzling phenomenon and tasked with describing their ideas about how the unseen processes operate. Elicitation takes advantage of the human capacity for generating inferences and explanations. For example, if I walk into a room, notice a burning smell, and see a blackened popcorn bag next to a microwave oven, I can put together a fairly plausible explanation of what happened to before I got there. The problem with elicitation prompts that are only about concepts is that they do not provide students the opportunity to create explanations. Imagine how different this lesson would have looked if Imari began by asking, "What do you know about mutualism?" Eliciting students' ideas about a puzzling phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the big ideas in the science curriculum in ways that are accessible and familiar to students. This is where the teacher's knowledge of students becomes critical. Because by being familiar with both the students and the content, the teacher will be able to pick the phenomenon that resonate with their students. When we present students with a puzzling phenomenon, what we are really doing is giving them both an opportunity to draw upon their existing resources and put them together in a way that makes sense to them. For example, if we present students with a hot and cold beaker of water and put a drop of food coloring in each, the phenomenon is that the beaker with the hot water disperses the color much more rapidly than the beaker with the cold water. The elicitation question we might put to students in a case like this is, "What ideas do you have about why the colors spreads more rapidly in the hot water?" In order to respond, students must draw upon whatever existing knowledge they have in order to construct an explanation. They may draw upon their life experiences, like making juice from a mix or dropping tents into a bathtub as analogies for their explanations. And even if the student gives a perfect textbook answer that reflects a sophisticated knowledge of kinetic theory, they can still be pointed towards other components of the phenomenon, like the downward trajectory of the food coloring drop, that still require explanation. Phenomenon can be videos, demonstrations, or even just simple descriptions of situations. Often they describe events that unfold over time, and usually entail an unseen process in some way. Students may not be able to explain the whole phenomenon, but often they are able to bring in ideas that hold the prospect of being part of an explanation. And something completely far into students, like observing the slow fall of a strong magnet through a copper tube, can be the source for student ideas. A teacher who has students for ideas to explain the behavior of the magnet, rather than asking, who remembers what lens's law is, will get much greater participation on the part of students, and also get everyone thinking. Prompts for elicitation can also be genuine questions that result from everyday experiences in the classroom. It was recently in one chemistry class where students reacted solid magnesium with hydrochloric acid, and then heated the resulting liquid until only a white solid remained. The class ran out of time, and left the white solid in the evaporating dishes, and when they came back the next day they found that overnight the white solid had turned into a puddle of liquid. This was a good puzzling phenomenon, albeit one only tangentially related to the lesson on empirical formulas the teacher had planned for that day. In the teacher, abandoning the do now he had previously planned for the first five minutes of class, made good use of the unexpected situation with a class discussion. Science teachers who start keeping their eyes open for puzzling phenomena will begin seeing them everywhere. Recently in a grocery store in Colorado, my family and I noticed that all of the bags in the snack aisle seemed to be filled with little extra air, making them more puffed out than they are in New Jersey. We bought a few bags for our ride through Rocky Mountain National Park, and later when we stopped the car at the Alpine Tundra, one small bag of popcorn on the center console resembled the balloon. There was not a single wrinkle or indentation in the bag. The signs told us that we were at 12,000 feet, about a mile higher in elevation than we had been in town. I took out my phone and began to record a video of the swollen popcorn bag. It would make a great puzzling phenomenon.