"Presumptive reasoning is a really different form of argumentation. It isn't about winning or losing. It's about together trying to do something collaborative towards a shared recommendation."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking Science to School provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"One of the themes that has started to take hold in the informal world is free-choice learning, and yet I think that there aren't as many choices available to people as we would like to believe. A lot of choices have already been made by someone when an exhibit goes up..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This book illustrates the most common kinds of arguments and explains how to evaluate each kind by critical questioning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I want to know how the visit can begin before and maintain itself after you go in and out of the portal - be it a virtual portal or a physical portal - into the museum."

 

 

 

An interview with Professor Richard Duschl about an agenda for informal science education and research in scientific reasoning and argumentation.

Interview by Karen Knutson :: Summer 2007

Knutson: What kinds of things are you working on currently and what gets you excited about your work?

Duschl: Well I have various fronts on which I'm working. I've been spending a lot of time down in Washington, D.C. working on reports for the National Research Council. I chaired a review panel on science learning research for kindergarten to eighth grade, the report came out in April entitled Taking Science to School. My research right now looks at the reasoning children do in middle school around scientific investigations. Reasoning strategies that are important for making sense out of science, making sense out of scientific information. I'm interested in how children deal with information and experimental design situations? How do they engage or not engage in scientific reasoning?

Knutson: Whose work do you think has been most formative to your own beliefs about learning science?

Duschl: One of the persons who was most influential in some of my thinking was Joseph Schwab, who was an early contributor to the biological science curriculum study in the 1960s. Schwab had a model of inquiry that was trying to move science away from a rhetoric of conclusions. He was famous for coming up with the idea that science education should be an "enquiry into enquiry."

When I started to meet cognitive scientists for the first time, I began to realize that there were new and exciting ways people were pursuing to learn about learning. So the learning sciences, in general, have had an enormous influence on my thinking as a science educator.

Knutson: Whose work are you following closely nowadays?

Duschl: I do a lot of work now in argumentation, so I'm following the work of one of my doctoral students, Sibel Erduran, who is now at the University of Bristol in England. She is doing some very exciting work in the field of argumentation. Another young person who is doing interesting work is Doug Clark at Arizona State University. He is a student of Marsha Linn's, UC-Berkeley. He worked with the WISE program, but his focus was trying to unpack and understand the argumentation discourse that people were using within that area.

Argumentation discourse is something that I had started to work to analyze the effectiveness of some units that we were developing for the SEPIA project (Science Education through Portfolio Instruction and Assessment) to create a formative assessment learning environment in classrooms. And that's a hard problem. I think there's a lot of people who are looking at discourse processes, in general, and looking at conversations and how people talk. But argumentation is that form of talking which requires you to provide evidence to substantiate the claims that you want to make. It's an important area of research right now, and there are a lot of different models and frameworks that people are adopting, and some of them are really at odds with one another. So it's a field that's waiting for some kind of a first-level synthesis. And I think that Sibel and Doug are some of the people who are engaging in that kind of synthesis process.

Knutson: Could you talk a bit about the ways in which these models are in conflict?

Duschl: Well, one of the paradigms that has been used for a couple of decades is Toulmin's Argument Pattern called TAP. Toulmin was a philosopher of science and a student of Wittgenstein who started to advocate that arguments could be both field-dependent on the context in which the argument was taking place, and field-independent. The TAP model says the very general structure of argumentation discourse requires you have some data that moves to a conclusion, but in order for that conclusion to count it has to be supported by backings and the backings have to be supported by warrants. It is the general process that people use in a variety of ways to unpack language in the classroom, unpack language or rhetoric of scholars and individuals. However, it doesn't get to a level of detail necessary to understand the argumentation patterns found when you start to listen to the ways middle-school children talk. The TAP model is more sensitive to certain kinds of information that fall out from some of the more general argumentation structures you see operating in the legal field.

I tried the TAP framework for analyzing classroom/group argumentation, but gave that up in favor of a strategy proposed by Douglas Walton which is grounded in a presumptive reasoning model for argumentation. Presumptive reasoning is the kind of reasoning that takes place when someone doesn't have all of the information they need but they still have to try and persuade you for some end. In the end of the day, we have to finish our report or produce our recommendations. So when we're working together on a project, I have to convince you. You try to convince me...kind of like a tennis match of going back and forth to jointly resolve a problem as to what we think is the best strategy or the best solution. Presumptive reasoning is a really different way of argumentation. It isn't about winning or losing. It's about together trying to do something collaborative towards a shared recommendation.

So when I read Walton's work, I said, "Oh my God. That's what's going on in middle schools. Kids are being asked to draw conclusions when they don't have all of the information." We give them two or three investigations and then we ask them to say, "Ok, what's the model for why the pendulum is behaving the way it behaves? How would you convince someone else or show someone else that that's the case? And come up with some kind of a scenario." And when you do give them the supports in a learning environment that allow them to have that conversation, it's really interesting what comes out in the conversation and you begin to gain some insights on the patterns of reasoning that they're using.

So Walton, in his book, has twenty-five different categories of presumptive reasoning strategies and my analysis of those was that there were eight or nine of them probably really served best what we were trying to do in science education. So the Walton categories have taken on some interest and are getting some other people's attention. And Doug Clark has written some review papers looking at five or six different strategies that researchers are using, and talking about the advantages and disadvantages of what they obtain.

Knutson: How would you characterize the informal science agenda at the moment? What are some of the pressing issues that you think we need to address?

Duschl: I think the informal science agenda has to begin to think hard about how people come to ascertain or decide what they're going to use as evidence and then understand how is that evidence marshaled together to construct explanations that become the foundational elements of an inquiry approach to science and to science education. As children go through a children's museum and they play with various exhibits we believe that those experiences are giving them certain bits of information that can and cannot be used as evidence. But we have to mediate the process and get them to take that information on as evidence for generating a next step of the activity or generating a "why do you think that happened?" I have seen very effective ways in which prompts are given to parents, prompts are given to teachers, prompts are given to older children or adults to help leverage the learning conversation. There's a lot of research that shows that when you can add that kind of mediation process to the experience, the quality of the learning goes up. I think part of that mediation process has to be about the nature of the evidence and how those experiences become evidence.

Knutson: So from that perspective could you talk a little bit about how you see the field and what has gone right within informal science and what's gone wrong?

Duschl: Well I do get frustrated when people want to hold onto outdated notions of what's an effective way to go about science learning, for example discovery learning. Discovery learning is something that you'll hear a lot of people in science centers or children's museum say, "We want to create an exhibit so that children can discover the meaning of something, or the relationship of something." And, indeed, there's no research that suggests that discovery learning is taking place. Rather, making sense of the world requires some amount of thinking things through and trying things and testing them. So, moving away from a discovery-learning to model-based reasoning is the goal. This is what the research from Taking Science to School shows. How do you tweak the model? What's a theory-building process? How to you begin to shift that? In the same way I get frustrated when I see the models of science or views about the nature of science that people have that aren't compatible with the way that science is done.

Sometimes those views are even held by the scientists who are used as consultants to help build an exhibit. Their view of the nature of science is so narrowly construed that it doesn't really get at some of the social processes that are embedded within science and the need for communication strategies. On the other hand, I'm not an advocate for just wide-open points of view. One of the themes that has started to take hold in the informal world is the notion of free-choice learning and yet I think that there aren't as many choices available to people as we would like to believe. A lot of choices have already been made by someone when an exhibit goes up, or what's available in a community whether it's outdoors or indoors, whether it's actually institutionalized or whether it's just a part of nature. There are certain constraints on what we can do and there are certain goals that people have for what we want others to do.

Knutson: I think as a field we don't really understand about what's happening in the curriculum development side of the equation in informal settings. Problems arise when formal models of curriculum are lifted and transplanted into informal settings.

Duschl: Right. We have models in the educational arena; Montessori for example, which is a model of education where a child is allowed to choose what he or she wants to pursue on a daily or a weekly basis. Then we have other models which are very highly structured. So there's a plethora of perspectives that are available and that get studied and there's advantages and disadvantages to the different models. One of the things that frustrates me the most is when there's an inconsistency. You're thinking about learning in this way and you're thinking about the image of science that way, and they're not consistent nor compatible. You need models that pull in the same direction and I think we're beginning to understand this better. In the last forty or so years we have come to a much deeper, richer understanding of the processes of learning. We're developing better and better understandings of the nature of scientific inquiry and we need to figure out ways to align those a little bit more and then to begin to implement those ideas in the design of exhibits. I think we are seeing some work moving that way. Rather than people just saying, "Oh I think a good exhibit will be A." Instead, they begin with a question like "Well, what do we know about children's learning in this area first?" And then the front-end evaluation is more about how people are learning in this context rather than do they seem to be interested or what is keeping their attention? That is exciting work.

One exhibit that I've seen developed this way, and I'm thinking now about the first time that I was involved with one, was the Indianapolis Children's Museum when they redesigned their space. I saw it there for the first time so much back-end research that was done to try and get kids to understand and to manipulate the variables of vessels in a water tank and how that impacted the kind of reasoning, or had the potential for doing that if scaffolded in the right way.

Knutson: So in terms of thinking about the future directions for the field - you talked a little bit just now about the potential promise of having research more closely entwined in the design process - is that what you are advocating?

Duschl: Yeah. We can study learning in these environments, clearly, and we need to be doing more of that. We need to educate parents and guardians about the learning processes of young children in a way that it isn't haphazard but thoughtful. We need get that information out to early childhood educational providers, after school programs, etc.

Knutson: What do you think that a museum experience or a science center experience can offer that other types of informal learning might not?

Duschl: I think that one of the things that I've learned is that it isn't on the first visit, and not necessarily on the second visit, but more likely on the third, fourth, or even fifth visit that they finally start to become familiar enough with the environment that they can interact with it. And when they do become familiar with it they start to find the comfortable places where they want to go and return, there's a kind of deepening of engagement that doesn't occur in other environments. They know what it is they want to do and once you develop or find that kind of vein of interest "I want to spend time here. I like doing this," that becomes the opportunity for the teachable moment to try and leverage that towards their particular interest. So, it's the possibility for the sustained engagement that never happens in media-based environments. I never saw it happen. A lot of museums and children's museums struggle with the pinball behavior of the kids. They're so overwhelmed with so many things in the environment that they want to do it all. So how do you get that repeat visit? And how do you get that information to go?

When I think about science centers and museums and other places of learning outside of schools, I want to know how the visit can begin before and maintain itself after you go in and out of the portal - be it a virtual portal or a physical portal - into the museum. What is it that they can take away? How can we prepare for when they get there? And I think that's another important area of research that has to take place. And it fits really well with a school-user group so that when class trips or field trips are coming to these facilities, how are teachers, themselves, making the bridges and the connections for their students to use the museum in such a way that part of what they do there can then come back to the classroom to deepen whatever instructional goals or educational goals that they have for that time.

Knutson: Do you think that there's any difference in the way you would approach helping someone understand the field of informal science versus teaching a classroom kind of science?

Duschl: I have not found an effective way yet to fit informal learning research into the course structure in a significant way because our program is trying to prepare people for life in the classroom. We are training people to be licensed teachers in the State of New Jersey. I wish we had more time. I wish we had more opportunities. Some of my colleagues and I are going to start to sit down and talk about how to change the program a little bit, but there is a very strong bias and emphasis on reading and mathematics in the early grade levels and all other subject areas seem to have to take a back seat to what gets taught and then what gets taught to the teachers. There's a new certification program coming online for us and we don't even have a designated course in science. I had to argue for modules within other courses to try and build up an emphasis for what's taking place. So it's difficult. I think forward thinking in teacher preparation is saying we need to take down the silos, that this is math education, this is science education, this is reading, this is that. We need to have something that's a little bit more holistic that focuses on learning and effective ways to promote learning in the classroom but our system of education doesn't embrace that at the moment.

Knutson: Do you have anything else that you'd like to tell the field at large?

Duschl: What are the important bits of information that we need to have as a field? And I think those nuggets take time to develop and many come out of the process of dissertation or thesis writing. So it isn't just the published papers, the conference papers, but it's also the young people who are entering in to the field who have completed the reviews of literature, have tried to synthesize as well as analyze a particular domain. It is within those exercises of making sense of a certain part of the world or a certain part of a problem set that I think would probably be a good place to look for nuggets.

For InformalScience.org, getting young researchers involved and being some of the agents who actually participate is important. I think it would be a mistake to just go to the senior people. You need to make this a community and it's been my experience, as an editor of journals and advisor, that some of the younger people who are freshly out of PhD and MA programs have more current knowledge of what those nuggets might be than people like me. I mean, I have my nuggets now because I want to work with them. But I continue to learn so much from the people I work with.