Bridging Research and Practice: A Cognitively Based Classroom Intervention for Teaching Experimentation Skills to Elementary School Children

By Eva Erdosne Toth, David Klahr, Zhe Chen. 2000

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article describes the first cycle of a multiyear research project aimed at establishing a common ground between educationally relevant psychological research and educational practice. We translated a theoretically motivated, carefully crafted, and laboratory-based instructional procedure of proven effectiveness into a classroom intervention, making minimal modifications to the instructional components and adapting to the constraints of an elementary school science classroom. Our intervention produced significant gains in fourth-grade students' ability to create controlled experiments, provide valid justifications for their experiments, and evaluate experiments designed by others. It also raised several new questions about how students understand sources of error during experimentation and how that understanding is related to their level of certainty about conclusions that are supported by the experimental outcomes. We view this report as part of a continuing research cycle that includes 3 phases: (a) use-inspired, basic research in the laboratory; (b) classroom verification of the laboratory findings; and (c) follow-up applied (classroom) and basic (laboratory) research.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c3ea5ba67c012a377c2b4fc43c240a53b331ec3

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Hands on What? The Relative Effectiveness of Physical versus Virtual Materials in an Engineering Design Project by Middle School Children (2007, methodology): “A few studies have attempted to isolate the factors included in Table 1. For example, Cells A and B were compared in a series of investigations by Klahr and colleagues (Chen & Klahr, 1999; Klahr & Nigam, 2004; Toth, Klahr, & Chen, 2000 ) using physical hands-on materials (physical ramps, springs, a”
Explicit teaching of meta-strategic knowledge in authentic classroom situations (2008, result): “Control of variables thinking strategy”
Developing elementary science skills: Instructional effectiveness and path independence (2008, methodology): “The first five items – taken from material used by Toth, Klahr, and Chen (2000) – depicted pairs of airplanes that could vary in type of body, wings or tail (see Fig.”
The Equivalence of Learning Paths in Early Science Instruction (2004, methodology): “(2)The design, materials, and procedure for Day 1 are nearly identical to those described in our earlier work (Chen & Klahr, 1999; Toth et al., 2000).”
Sequential effects of high and low instructional guidance on children’s acquisition of experimentation skills: Is it all in the timing? (2013, methodology): “Children sat at their desks and completed a paper and pencil test—adapted from the transfer test used by Toth et al. (2000)—that showed nine different experimental comparisons similar to those in Fig.”
Embodiment for Education (2008, methodology): “The application of PM and IM in exposition is based on research conducted primarily by Klahr and associates (e.g., Chen & Klahr, 1999 ; Toth et al., 2000 ; Klahr et al., 2001 ; Triona & Klahr, 2003 ) and a theoretical idea developed by Schwartz et al. (2005) .”
Effects of instructional support within constructivist learning environments for elementary school students' understanding of "floating and sinking." (2006, background): “In addition, participation in learning environments of challenging science content will likely support the development of students’ scientific reasoning skills such as their experimental skills, their use of empirical data to support theorizing, and their ability to reason about patterns of covariat”
Contribution of Meta‐strategic Knowledge to Scientific Inquiry Learning (2009, result): “The same finding has been repeated more recently by Chen and Klahr ( 1999 ) and by Toth, Klahr, and Chen ( 2000 ), who showed that 7–10‐year‐olds were able to learn and transfer the control of variables strategy when provided with explicit training.”
Learning the control of variables strategy in higher and lower achieving classrooms: Contributions of explicit instruction and experimentation. (2010, methodology): “Two studies have demonstrated the feasibility of conducting the intervention in the classroom, but both lacked an appropriate control condition to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention (Li et al., 2006; Toth et al., 2000).”
The Development of Scientific Thinking Skills in Elementary and Middle School. (2007, methodology): “Domain knowledge and strategic performance have been shown to bootstrap one another, and as such interventions have targeted facilitating domain knowledge (e.g., Echevarria, 2003; Metz, 2004), strategy development (e.g., Chen & Klahr, 1999; Toth et al., 2000) or both (e.g., Reid et al., 2003).”
Towards a Theory of When and How Problem Solving Followed by Instruction Supports Learning (2017, background): “This diffusion of treatment may explain the missing effect (however, Toth et al. 2000 suggest that there was no pretest × treatment interaction; for a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Kapur 2012).”