Abridged methodology
This research uses a participatory design-based methodology to elicit tasks and professional development resources to investigate and develop teacher capacity in supporting their students’ epistemic development.
Curriculum content around socio-scientific issues will be targeted, allowing for broad recruitment strategy, and application of the work (particularly via curriculum connections/‘learning across the curriculum’ in NSW), while connecting the work to teachers’ particular contexts. Expert teachers will be identified by participating partner schools, based on the Professional Standards for Teachers stages. Consider the scenario:
Sustainability
A teacher introduces their class to sustainability-diet curriculum connections. Students highlight that they have heard conflicting messages on the topic, including around different cultural norms, and genuine expert disagreement on the best diet (personal level) or food-system (policy level). How should the teacher proceed? Students must learn to navigate this uncertainty and disagreement in evidence. But, there are challenges in enacting teaching strategies to support this learning. This can lead to practice that focuses on factual content, or neutral presentation of “both sides” (Kilinc et al. 2017), including in Australian classroom coverage of climate change and sustainability (Nicholls 2017). This has lifelong implications, “in 2006, just over half of Australians aged 15-74 years had adequate or better prose (54%) and document (53%) literacy skills.” (ABS 2009), with most students who graduate from high school ill-prepared to comprehend, integrate, and evaluate information from complex texts (OECD 2013). This inability to reconcile conflict may lead to confusion and generalised distrust of expert advice (Lee et al. 2018).
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These are areas in which 1) people must learn to navigate uncertainty and disagreement in evidence, and 2) there are challenges in enacting this teaching, that can lead to a focus on factual content, or neutral presentation of “both sides” (Kilinc et al. 2017), including in Australian classroom coverage of climate change and sustainability issues (Nicholls 2017).
The ways in which teachers design tasks for teaching socio-scientific issues in their area will be focal, because these “artefacts can make clear what is expected of students and how students respond to those expectations in ways that are not always observable” (Joyce et al. 2018, p. 49). This approach is significant because task demands are related to the learning opportunity for those tasks, with well-structured high-demand tasks supporting learning. Despite this, task demands are often low (Joyce et al. 2018), and – in science tasks – qualitatively differ in terms of reasoning demanded as compared to the reasoning in authentic science activity (Chinn & Malhotra 2002). Moreover, task analysis can be used to identify sites at which to promote learning constructs such as self-regulated learning (Perry et al. 2004). Initial task designs and analyses of them will feed into development of a preliminary Epistemic Demand Assignment Protocol (EDAP) as both a research instrument and a part of the toolkit. These features include opportunities to engage with source evidence and group-dialogue, and nuanced decisions for example students being asked to ‘summarise both sides’ in the context of high and low quality sources mapped to two sides of an argument, is likely to produce significantly less epistemic engagement than being asked to make a recommendation based on evidence where credibility does not map to perspective. Throughout the phases, the focus is “How do students learn to navigate uncertainty, disagreement, and evidence?”, and “How do teachers design for this?”.
Elements include:
- Participatory toolkit development for intermediate theory (Hennessy, 2014). As Hennessy outlines this process may involve a range of theory that may be “appropriated, integrated, recontextualised and adapted to mesh with teachers’ own perspectives” (Hennessy 2014, p. xxvii), in order to understand development of teacher “intermediate theory: theory that bridges educational theory and a specific setting – specifying the conditions in which theory applies” (Hennessy 2014, p. xxvii).
- Investigation of assessment practices (Fives et al. 2017) and instructional beliefs (Maggioni & Parkinson 2008) in relation to activity in a simulated design task, in which strategies could be incorporated.
- Use and iteration of the toolkit particularly targeting socio-scientific issues, including in simulated design tasks. These will involve engaging in a design process to develop a learning task that probes and develops students’ navigation of uncertainty, disagreement, and evidence, with prompts to consider how data informs this design, and what data (through technologies, and assessment), could be used to understand and provide feedback on student processes and outcomes.
- Approaches such as retrospective stimulated recall interviews
- Artifact analysis to understand the ‘demand’ that task designs place and how these might support learning