Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences

Visual representations are ubiquitous in modern-day science textbooks and have in recent years become an object of criticism and scrutiny. This article examines the extent to which changes in representations in textbooks published in the USA over the past six decades have invited those critiques. Drawing from a correlational analysis of a corpus of 34 US middle school physical science textbooks, continuities are established with respect to the purposes that most textbook images serve and the numbers of schematic representations that are used. Changes are observed in the overall total number of representations in textbooks and in the proportion of representations that are photographic. Interpretive cases of individual representations over time are presented to further illustrate the continuities and changes that have taken place. Specifically, high-fidelity images, such as photographs, are shown permeating or replacing schematic and explanatory images in the interest of promoting familiarization to students. This shifting emphasis toward familiarization is discussed as a specific cause for concern about quality and utility of representations in modern-day US science textbooks.

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal – the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper introduces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative examples of computational thinking that are observed and documented in Pandemic. The primary contributions of this work are the description of and evidence that complex computational thinking can develop spontaneously during board game play.

This paper describes an iteration of a design-based research project that involved integrating commercial physical activity data (PAD) sensors, such as heart rate monitors and pedometers, as technologies that could be used in two fifth-grade classrooms. Design-based research involves the development, implementation and study of new learning interventions in real-world contexts with the goal of elaborating principles or guidelines relevant to the design of new technologies and learning experiences. The current project involved the implementation of PAD technology-supported learning activities in two fifth-grade classrooms where students pursued investigations related to the distances that they walk, the relationship between heights and footsteps taken, and variations in heart rates among twins and with adults. In addition to describing some of the practical lessons learned related to the use of PAD technologies with elementary school children, we describe our initial efforts to assess students’ knowledge before and after the learning intervention. Results from the written assessments indicated that the newly designed activities indeed covered the intended content related to measures of center and averages. Results from the interviews suggested that students who participated in the unit designed to incorporate PAD technologies more reliably accessed knowledge related to measures of center and averages in scenario based problems than their counterparts who followed a traditional unit.

Historical reenactments are an activity in which history enthusiasts research historical figures and gather to act out a famous historical event as those individuals. This chapter describes a development and implementation framework for conducting historical reenactments virtually using the Twitter microblogging service. Following a general introduction to the practices associated with historical reenactment, we describe the steps involved in successfully organizing a virtual reenactment, share some examples from already completed virtual reenactments, and present a firsthand retrospective and reflection from a high school teacher who led her history students in a virtual reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We discuss some central challenges associated with aligning virtual reenactments to problem-based learning approaches and close with specific proposals for improvements that could be made in future implementations. 

In recent years, an emphasis on scientific argumentation in classrooms has brought into focus collaborative consensus-building as an instructional strategy. In these situations, students with differing and competing arguments are asked to work with one another in order to establish a shared perspective. However, the literature suggests that consensus-building can be challenging for students because their interpretations of the argumentative task and context may not enable their productive engagement with counter-arguments and evidence. In this paper, our goal is to explore the ways in which interactions of students support or inhibit their consensus-building. To that end, we examine and describe three cases that represent different ways in which initially dissenting students try to work towards a consensus with their peers. Through these cases, we demonstrate that legitimization of disparate or incorrect ideas is one vehicle that can enable students whose arguments rely on incorrect ideas feel that their ideas were heard and valued by the rest of their group. As such, we suggest that this legitimization is important because it can help students ‘save face’. This enables students to move away from the competitive and persuasive aspects of argumentation towards interactions that align more closely with sense making and consensus-building.

The “Quantified Self” is a growing global movement to use new mobile and wearable technologies to automatically obtain personal data about everyday activities. The social and material infrastructure associated with Quantified Self movement provides a number of ideas that educational technologists should consider incorporating and using. This article discusses some recent efforts to bring Quantified Self to the practices of educational technology and presents some issues to consider in the future.

Rapid adoption of wearable tracking devices and motion sensitive apps has led to the development of the “Quantified Self” movement (QS). Some in the learning sciences community have begun to take notice and incorporate ideas from QS into the research and design of new learning environments. Yet the QS movement is still new enough that very little is known about it, and there are many open questions about how QS might be of value to the learning sciences. This paper provides some history of the movement and through a qualitative
analysis of a public video corpus of QS presentations, identifies the variety of participants, the reported motivations driving individuals to self-quantify, and the data analysis activities of some individuals active in the movement. Opportunities for future research and design efforts
in the learning sciences are also discussed.

cite as: Lee, V. R. (2014). What’s Happening in the Quantified Self Movement? In J. L. Polman, Kyza, E. A., O'Neill, D. K., Tabak, I., Penuel, W. R., Jurow, A. S., O'Connor, K., Lee, T., D'Amico, L. (Ed.), Learning and Becoming in Practice: The International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2014 (Vol. 2, pp. 1032-1036). Boulder, CO: ISLS.

This paper examines variability in teachers’ usage patterns as they interacted with an online teacher support tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), as part of their professional work. The CCS is a web application that supports teachers in planning, adapting, sequencing, and enacting differentiated instruction in Earth science education. By mining the usage log files of over 40 teachers who used the CCS over a yearlong period, we analyzed for variability using a framework developed in marketing research to characterize appropriation of technology. This analysis helped reveal different kinds of teachers’ patterns along two dimensions: frequency and variability of use. We then turned to qualitative records of teachers’ experiences during the year to better understand why those variations appeared.
Focusing on the experiences of several teachers, we distilled "contextual contingencies” that influenced how they chose to appropriate and use the CCS.

Recess is often a time for children in school to engage recreationally in physically demanding and highly interactive activities with their peers. This paper describes a design effort to encourage fifth-grade students to examine sensitivities associated with different measures of center by having them analyze activities during recess over the course of a week using Fitbit activity trackers and TinkerPlots data visualization software. We describe the activity structure and some observed student behaviors during the activity. We also provide a descriptive account, based on video records and transcripts, of two students who engaged thoughtfully with their recess data and developed a more sophisticated understanding of when and how outliers affect means and medians.

Biomechanics, and specifically the biomechanics associated with human movement, is a potentially rich backdrop against which educators can design innovative science teaching and learning activities. Moreover, the use of technologies associated with biomechanics research, such as high-speed cameras that can produce high-quality slow-motion video, can be deployed in such a way to support students’ participation in practices of scientific modeling. As participants in classroom design experiment, fifteen fifth-grade students worked with high-speed cameras and stop-motion animation software (SAM Animation) over several days to produce dynamic models of motion and body movement. The designed series of learning activities involved iterative cycles of animation creation and critique and use of various depictive materials. Subsequent analysis of flipbooks of human jumping
movements created by the students at the beginning and end of the unit revealed a significant improvement in both the epistemic fidelity of students’ representations. Excerpts from classroom observations highlight the role that the teacher plays in supporting students’ thoughtful reflection of and attention to slow-motion video. In total, this design and research intervention demonstrates that the combination of technologies, activities, and teacher support can lead to improvements in some of the foundations associated with students’ modeling.

In current science education reform, two criteria are considered most critical for determining whether or not an external representation is pedagogically productive. One is whether or not the representation maintains a high level of epistemic fidelity. The other is whether or not
the representation is transparent relative to the content it is supposed to represent. We believe that these criteria are too limited in scope and have been considered acceptable in part because we have a very limited understanding of how students construct meaningful interpretations of unfamiliar representations. To remedy that, we propose a new framework for understanding acts of interpretation that focuses on four major constructs: registrations, symbolic forms, interpretive genres, and interpretive maxims. We demonstrate this framework’s utility by applying it to excerpts of middle school students interpreting unfamiliar representations of light reflection.

Wearables have increasingly been appearing in various forms as technologies that have the potential to support teaching and learning. This chapter surveys a number of recent and current wearable technology projects in the educational technology, learning sciences, and human-computer interaction literatures to illustrate the diversity of wearable technologies. It also identifies some regularities in how various forms of wearables are being deployed to support learning. These forms of support include using wearables to: promote personal expression; integrate digital information into social interactions; support educative role-play; provide just-in-time notification in a learning environment; and produce records of bodily experience for subsequent inspection, reflection, and interpretation. While examples of each support are provided, two more extended descriptions from the authors' recent and ongoing work with wearables are given as examples of how human and other animal bodily experiences can be harnessed to support learning. Future directions and considerations for educational technologists are discussed.

Clinical interviews are a research instrument for STEM education that elicit a variety of
conceptual dynamics. While some efforts have been made to document what conceptual
dynamics take place in such interviews, more remains to be done. This article describes
conceptual dynamics observed in two cases where high school students were interviewed and
responded to discrepant embodied experiences where what they predicted would take place
physically differed from what actually took place. One case involves discussing and enacting
projectile motion. The other case involves discussing and trying different configurations of
bicycle gearing. The cases illustrate a short-term conceptual change in response to the discrepant
experiences in which the same explanatory elements remained in their explanations over time,
but how various ideas and perceived attributes of the situation were organized changed.
Together, these cases illustrate an additional trigger for conceptual dynamics that have been as
yet undocumented in literature about interviews.