Osborne, Jonathan

Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate

This project is a collaboration with Catherine Snow, and a research team from Harvard and with the Strategic Education Research Partnerships (SERP) group to understand, measure, and test the malleability of three contributors to reading comprehension that are both critical and often neglected: perspective taking, complex reasoning, and academic language skill. With $20 million in funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research team will embark on this project in July 2010. The work proposed here represents an extension of work that members of this research team have been conducting over the last four years developing a three-year, cross subject area academic language program called Word Generation. The program provides students with weekly opportunities to learn academic vocabulary, view controversial issues from multiple perspectives, engage in debate, and formulate and defend a position in an essay—a set of skills we argue are critical to deep comprehension. The project team will develop learning trajectories for each of the three contributors independently, and determine the extent to which they are interdependent. Researchers will conduct a longitudinal analysis to chart the movement of students along these trajectories with and without targeted interventions. The interventions the project team proposes to develop and evaluate will explore the potential of structured classroom discussion and debate to catalyze the ongoing development and integration of these skills, and their deployment for purposes of “deep comprehension.” The project will utilize the Word Generation program and will focus on 4th through 8th graders attending schools in a set of districts: Boston Public Schools (BPS), other smaller districts in Massachusetts including Brockton and Falmouth, and the San Francisco Public Schools. The team proposes to develop in-depth, 6-week units in science and social studies, which incorporate the Word generation program, for grades 4 through 8. Furthermore they propose to develop and test an approach to improving teachers’ capacity to support productive discussion by: a) providing richer professional development that extends over a longer period of time; b) incorporating strategies for discursive reasoning with text during classroom discussion; c) incorporating knowledge about students’ learning trajectories gleaned from the proposed research into the professional development, with concrete examples of students’ verbal and written production as they become more sophisticated in the targeted skills; and d) providing teachers with formative measures to probe student progress on the targeted skills during discussion. Professor Osborne will take the lead on the professional development component of the project.

Learning Progressions in Middle School Science Instruction and Assessment

CSET faculty member Jonathan Osborne is collaborating with Professor Mark Wilson, from University of California, Berkeley with the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) to develop and validate new assessments and to validate existing assessments for use in assessing student understandings of science. With $1.5 million in funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research team will embark on this project in July 2010. The project will address the following research questions (1) What is the nature of the learning progression in the content domain of Structure of Matter? (2) What is the nature of the learning progression in students’ ability to reason scientifically in the domain of Structure of Matter and also, generally? And (3) What is the inter-relationship between students’ ability to reason scientifically and their domain specific knowledge? In particular to what extent do the two covary? To address the research questions, project activities will be carried out over a four-year period from July 2010 through June 2014. The work will be organized around the research questions to develop and revise assessment materials for a number of middle school science domains.

Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach in Science.

The T2L project is a 3 year project (2008-10) exploring whether argumentation can be embedded into the teaching of science in 4 high schools and to examine what effects it has on student learning and engagement. Further details are on: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/research/projects/tlltss.html.

Science Careers and Aspirations: Age 10-14.

This is a 5 year longitudinal study of the development of student engagement with science (or not) and the factors influencing the formation of their attitudes. It is using a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. For further details see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/research/projects/aspires/