1,721,266 research outputs found
SYMMETRY AS CONCEPTUAL CORE OF THE STANDARD MODEL OF PHYSICS: ACTIONS FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION
No full textThe paper focuses on a project aimed at communicating to non scientists the ’cultural essence’ of the Standard Model of Physics – one of the most advanced intellectual achievements of contemporary physics. The project is based on the hypothesis that the cultural essence can be reached and analysed through the exploration of the meaning of ’Symmetry’ in XX Century. The teaching actions designed so far are presented in the paper. Each action is addressed to a particular audience: general public, secondary school students and university students. Strategies adopted and problematic issues are discussed
Analysing the Storyline Approach’s Competence-Developing Potential for Climate Change in Science Education
Full text linkClimate Change is the greatest threat to mankind and the biosphere. It challenges Science Education from many points of view, including searching for effective ways to enable citizens to make decisions, embrace complexity, deal with uncertainty and envision possible futures. Two approaches are used to assess the influence of Anthropogenic Climate Change in extreme weather events: the so-called risk-based approach and the storyline one. In this study, we compared these two approaches from a Science Education point of view to understand if they have the same potential to develop sustainability competences in secondary school students
Dal progetto europeo STENCIL alcune riflessioni sullo stato dell’innovazione creativa dell’insegnamento delle scienze nella scuola
No full textIl Network Comenius STENCIL – Science Teaching European
Network for Creativity and Innovation in Learning – ha prodotto nel 2013 le Linee
Guida per insegnare ed apprendere le scienze in modo creativo in cui sono discussi
alcuni problemi relativi all’innovazione dell’insegnamento delle Scienze a scuola e
vengono forniti vari suggerimenti per azioni future. In particolare si evidenzia
quanto la questione di genere, insieme a quella più generale dell’inclusione, non
sia considerata cruciale né fra le innovazioni da apportare nell’insegnamento né fra
le competenze dell’insegnante del futuro. Un suggerimento è stato quindi quello di
sviluppare, potenziare e diffondere pratiche che stimolino l’interesse delle ragazze
nelle materie scientifiche e promuovano l'inclusione, aspetti considerati
fondamentali dall’Europa per valorizzare l’impatto della scienza sulla società.The Comenius Network STENCIL – Science Teaching European
Network for Creativity and Innovation in Learning – produced in 2013 the
Guidelines for teaching and learning science in a creative way by highlighting the
key issues of science teaching innovation at school and offering to decision makers
a number of suggestions for future actions. In particular it was found that the
gender issue, along with others issues concerning society, is not considered crucial
both among the innovations and within the competence of the teacher of the future.
One of the Guidelines recommendations concerned a greater attention to these
aspects, crucial for society and Europe
Fostering appropriation through designing for multiple access points to a multidimensional understanding of physics
Full text link[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The overarching goal of this paper is to illustrate the interplay between theory, design principles, and curriculum (meant broadly, to include both written and enacted curriculum). This dialogue is illustrated in the context of the design and implementation of a particular curricular unit on thermodynamics intended for advanced secondary students in Italy. The approach to the discipline and design of learning materials that we take in this work challenges a conventional view of physics disciplinary content as hierarchically
organized and instead promotes a multidimensional and thematically organized physics curriculum. In this paper, we emphasize not only the influence of theory on design, but also the reverse influence: how the analysis of specific classroom data from enactments of a designed curriculum can contribute to refining and building a local theory of how to learn and teach physics in a way that is inclusive and responsive to classroom diversity
Exploring students’ epistemological knowledge of models and modelling in science:results from a teaching/learning experience on climate change
Full text linkThe scientific community has been debating climate change for over two decades. In the light of certain arguments put forward by the aforesaid community, the EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching such as incorporating environmental issues into the scientific curriculum, thereby helping to make schools a place of civic education. However, despite these European recommendations, relatively little emphasis is still given to climate change within science curricula. Climate change, although potentially engaging for students, is a complex topic that poses conceptual difficulties and emotional barriers, as well as epistemological challenges. Whilst the conceptual and emotional barriers have already been the object of several studies, students’ reactions to the epistemological issues raised by climate changes have so far been rarely explored in science education research and thus are the main focus of this paper. This paper describes a study concerning the implementation of teaching materials designed to focus on the epistemological role of ‘models and the game of modelling’ in science and particularly when dealing with climate change. The materials were implemented in a course of 15 hours (five 3-hour lessons) for a class of Italian secondary-school students (grade 11; 16–17 years old). The purpose of the study is to investigate students’ reactions to the epistemological dimension of the materials, and to explore if and how the material enabled them to develop their epistemological knowledge on models
Recasting Particle Physics by Entangling Physics, History and Philosophy
Full text linkThe paper presents the design process we followed to recast particle physics so as to make it conceptually relevant for secondary school students. In this design process, the concept of symmetry was assumed as core-idea because of its structural and foundational role in particle physics, its crosscutting character and its epistemological and philosophical value. The first draft of the materials was tested in a pilot-study which involved 19 students of a regular class (grade 13) of an Italian school. The data analysis showed that the students were in their “regime of competence” for grasping subtle nuances of the materials and for providing important hints for revising them. In particular, students' reactions brought into light the need of clarifying the 'foundational' character that symmetry attained in twentieth- century physics.
The delicate step of re-thinking the materials required the researchers to articulate the complex relationship between researches on physics teaching, history and philosophy of physics. This analytic phase resulted in a version of the materials which implies the students to be guided to grasp the meaning of symmetry as normative principle in XX century physics, throughout the exploration of the different meanings assumed by symmetry over time. The whole process led also to the production of an essential, on-line version, of the materials targeted to a wider audience
How physics teachers approach innovation: An empirical study for reconstructing the appropriation path in the case of special relativity
No full textThis paper concerns an empirical study carried out with a group of high school physics teachers engaged in the Module on relativity of a Master course on the teaching of modern physics. The study is framed within the general research issue of how to promote innovation in school via teachers’ education and how to foster fruitful interactions between research and school practice via the construction of networks of researchers and teachers. In the paper, the problems related to innovation are addressed by focusing on the phase during which teachers analyze an innovative teaching proposal in the perspective of designing their own paths for the class work. The proposal analyzed in this study is Taylor and Wheeler’s approach for teaching special relativity. The paper aims to show that the roots of problems known in the research literature about teachers’ difficulties in coping with innovative proposals, and usually related to the implementation process, can be found and addressed already when teachers approach the proposal and try to appropriate it. The study is heuristic and has been carried out in order to trace the “appropriation path,” followed by the group of teachers, in terms of the main steps and factors triggering the progressive evolution of teachers’ attitudes and competences
Hybrid Models for Knowledge Tracing: A Systematic Literature Review
Full text linkKnowledge tracing is a well-known problem in AI for education, consisting of monitoring how the knowledge state of students changes during the learning process and accurately predicting their performance in future exercises. In recent years, many advances have been made thanks to various machine learning and deep learning techniques. Despite their satisfactory performances, they have some pitfalls, e.g., modeling one skill at a time, ignoring the relationships between different skills, or inconsistency for the predictions, i.e., sudden spikes and falls across time steps. For this reason, hybrid machine-learning techniques have also been explored. With this systematic literature review, we aim to illustrate the state of the art in this field. Specifically, we want to identify the potential and the frontiers in integrating prior knowledge sources in the traditional machine learning pipeline as a supplement to the normally considered data. We applied a qualitative analysis to distill a taxonomy with the following three dimensions: knowledge source, knowledge representation, and knowledge integration. Exploiting this taxonomy, we also conducted a quantitative analysis to detect the most common approaches
Epistemic Insights as Design Principles for a Teaching-Learning Module on Artificial Intelligence
Full text linkIn a historical moment in which Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have become within everyone’s reach, science education needs to find new ways to foster “AI literacy.” Since the AI revolution is not only a matter of having introduced extremely performant tools but has been determining a radical change in how we conceive and produce knowledge, not only technical skills are needed but instruments to engage, cognitively, and culturally, with the epistemological challenges that this revolution poses. In this paper, we argue that epistemic insights can be introduced in AI teaching to highlight the differences between three paradigms: the imperative procedural, the declarative logic, and the machine learning based on neural networks (in particular, deep learning). To do this, we analyze a teaching-learning activity designed and implemented within a module on AI for upper secondary school students in which the game of tic-tac-toe is addressed from these three alternative perspectives. We show how the epistemic issues of opacity, uncertainty, and emergence, which the philosophical literature highlights as characterizing the novelty of deep learning with respect to other approaches, allow us to build the scaffolding for establishing a dialogue between the three different paradigms
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