PDE: Studying and supporting productive disciplinary engagement across cultures

• Disciplinary focus: environmental science • High school students• Material tools: e.g., topographical maps,

argument organizers• Entirely project-based, challenge-cycle

curriculum

• Disciplinary focus: chemical, biological and environmental engineering

• Senior undergraduate students• Virtual tools: Virtual Chemical Vapor Deposition

Laboratory• Student teams develop and refine solutions

through experimentation, analysis, and iteration

• Disciplinary focus: environmental biology, chemistry, social sciences

• High school students• Virtual tools: Virtual Marine Scientist, Virtual Baltic

Sea Explorer (in development) • Combines environmental biology and chemistry

• Disciplinary focus: veterinary medicine• First year undergraduate students• Material tools: case documents, concept map• Case-based group project in physiology

constructing a concept map of an authentic clinical case

Complex, realistic, and challenging science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning environments increase students’ likelihood of using the skills learned during school activities in real-world applications. These learning environments can also increase students’ motivation, immersing students in a genuine way in using scientific and engineering practices. Because they are in school, however, student sometimes see them as primarily school tasks to be finished quickly. The success of these complex learning environments in promoting better learning depends on understanding the processes of engaging students deeply in STEM practices. Our collaborative project brings together researchers from the United States (Washington and Oregon), Finland, and Australia. These researchers all study systems with similar characteristics, but at different educational levels, in different STEM fields, and in different cultures.

We have approached the problem of understanding and supporting productive disciplinary engagement in two ways, described below. One working group is investigating the ways that students regulate their learning activities in complex STEM learning environments. The other group has focused on characterizing how PDE is triggered during learning activities, and what tends to shift students into task-completion modes more typical of school learning. Both groups are using data from video or audio recordings of students working together on projects or in virtual laboratories.In both approaches we follow Volet and her colleagues (Volet, Vauras, Khosa, & Iiskala, 2013) in distinguishing between two orientations of cognitive engagement during collaborative learning tasks: task co-production and knowledge co-construction. However, each approach has tailored this distinction towards answering different questions.

Socially-Shared Metacognitive Regulation

The role of metacognition in learning is to monitor and regulate the learning process towards a goal. Shared goals are crucial when students are engaged in high-level collaborative processes in which they do not only share information but co-construct meaningful knowledge and understanding (Volet, Summers, & Thurman, 2009). We examine metacognitive regulation to identify ways students regulate the flow of disciplinary thinking and progress towards their shared goal. Because we are interested in how teams of students collaborate, we pay special attention to socially shared metacognitive regulation (SSMR), which refers to the participants’ goal-directed consensual, egalitarian and complementary monitoring and regulation of joint cognitive processes (e.g., Iiskala, Vauras, Lehtinen, & Salonen 2011).

As metacognition is the monitoring and control of individual cognition, SSMR should play a similar role but in a way that impacts the shared project activity and the shared cognitive processes. That is, the function of SSMR is to facilitate the building of a shared representation of the project and goals by the collaborative group. Another function of SSMR could be to execute control processes, namely to inhibit inappropriate conceptualizations and to turn attention to others (Iiskala et al. 2011). Metacognitive regulation activity has previously been found at transition points between task co-production and knowledge co-construction (Volet et al., 2013). Both cognitive engagement and metacognitive regulation can be seen as integral processes for the group to move into and to retain at the state of PDE.

Production and Construction in Figured Worlds

Our complex learning environments aim to immerse students in the world of disciplinary practice (i.e., of engineering, environmental science, veterinary medicine). However, these environments are embedded in “School World”, where students may learn to solve textbook problems without using discipline-based modes of thinking and to identify situations where rote learning can efficiently lead to the desired goal of a good grade. In contrast, in the worlds of the disciplines, contexts are complex and success is achieved by integrating knowledge, thinking strategically and creatively, and tolerating ambiguity. The goals, values, strategies and roles in these two social worlds are different, calling for different strategies to achieve success.

Prior studies of group work have contrasted knowledge co-construction with co-production of a school product or assignment, considering co-construction to lead to deeper learning (Khosa & Volet, in press). However, production is an essential activity of many STEM disciplines. Design work, research, and engineering all involve production. Task production in the disciplinary worlds, therefore, contrasts with production in School World, where it is often associated with “getting in the assignment” but not necessarily with understanding. To capture the legitimate, yet quite different meaning of production in both environments, we have developed a coding system for transcript data that tracks whether students are co-producing or co-constructing and in which figured world they are operating. We are particularly interested in identifying interaction events that pivot groups into PDE: the co-production and knowledge co-construction in disciplinary worlds represented by our learning systems.

USA – University of Washington

USA – Oregon State University

Finland – University of Turku

Australia – Murdoch University

Digital, virtual laboratory

Environmental science, urban IB school

Supporting PDE in Complex, Demanding STEM Learning Environments• Face-to-face collaboration• Student teams take on

professional disciplinary roles

• Rich interaction data

Students

TeacherTools