Science Learning Doctors – using diagnostic assessment in the science classroom
A topic in teaching science
Be a learning doctor!
The Science Learning Doctor approach is designed to support science teachers who wish to develop their use of diagnostic and formative assessment in the classroom, and to understand the way students' ideas can sometimes act as impediments to learning the science in the curriculum.
The 'Science Learning Doctor' idea derived from a project for the Royal Society of Chemistry (leading to the publication of 'Chemical misconceptions: prevention, diagnosis and cure'), and then related talks given to ASE meetings and for the Institute of Physics.
Principles
The basic idea is very simple:
- Teaching and learning are complex enough that motivated students often fail to learn what well-prepared teachers hoped they would. This seems an universal experience in science teaching!
- The science teacher as learning doctor sees these 'failures to learn' as bugs in the teaching-learning system: bugs to be diagnosed and treated.
Whilst accepting that it is in the nature of teaching that we seldom get a whole class to understand the science as we would like, the science learning doctor mentality is that:
- there are causes for the learning bugs which can in principle be understood
- it is possible – at least in principle – to identify the causes of learning bugs
- identification provides the basis for devising and putting in place treatment (remedial action)
There are a number of potential causes of students not learning what we hoped, and the Science Learning Doctor approach is based upon a simple classification (a typology of learning impediments) that can act as a heuristic tool that teachers can use. Since the original model was proposed, the approach has been discussed with science teachers and others. Discussion and feedback has led to a slightly modified set of categories.
( download the Science Learning Doctor 'Guidebook')
Classifying learning bugs
The Typology of learning impediments is a scheme for classifying the types of barriers that can lead to students not understanding and learning ideas as intended by the teacher (or text book author). The typology is organised into a number of categories, and is designed as a 'thinking tool' to support diagnostic assessment in the classroom.
(Read more about 'The typology of learning impediments')
A mismatch
The teacher bases teaching presentations in part on a mental model of the students – what they already know and understand and what other interpretive resources they may have available to help make sense of teaching (e.g., perhaps cultural referents based on soap operas, pop groups, well known films, current affairs, that might be used as a source of similes and analogies, for example).
Often when teaching fails, this can be because the learners' actual thinking does not match that anticipated in the teacher's mental model.
The typology of learning impediments can hep identify the 'bug' in the system.
An example of learning bugs – teaching about 'particles'
Student learning about particles can readily lead to alternative conceptions (after Figure 4, from de Jong & Taber, 2014)
Work cited:
- de Jong, O., & Taber, K. S. (2014). The Many Faces of High School Chemistry. In N. Lederman & S. K. Abell (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Science Education, Volume 2 (pp. 457-480). New York: Routledge. [Download this chapter]
