Taking the Next Step- What Should Happen after My Students Collect Science Data

Dr. Shively’s talk uses sociocultural theory to explain why seven pre-service science teachers did not design and teach science lessons that enabled their kids to communicate with each other about the data they collected during the science lessons. The pre-service science teachers in this talk were young students when the authors of the National Science Education Standards encouraged science teachers to place more emphasis on having kids draw conclusions from the data they collected, formulate scientific arguments and communicate those arguments to their classmates (NRC, 1996). If the science teachers of the 1990s and 2000s had followed the suggestions outlined in the standards, the pre-service teachers might have designed lessons that enabled their own students to talk about their data because they would have observed this method of teaching. Dr. Shively explains how grades and high stakes exams contributed to this omission in these science lessons.

[Link to Presentation]