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Supporting Science Learning Connected to Students’ Interests and Questions in the Realities of Standards-Based Accountability

headshot of the speaker

Supporting Science Learning Connected to Students’ Interests and Questions in the Realities of Standards-Based Accountability

Wednesday, February 16, 2022
12:00pm
Zoom (Link under Website below)

Brian Reiser, Professor, Northwestern University

K-12 education reforms advocate “the practice turn” - engaging students in disciplinary practices (e.g., in science, mathematics, literature, history) to make learning more meaningful and effective. This aim is central in the National Research Council’s 2013 policy recommendations, A Framework for K-12 Science Education, reflected in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other standards adopted in 44 states. I argue this commitment to practices cannot be met by asking students to engage in the work because “that is what scientists do” or “because it is a good way to learn.” Instead, students need to see their science work as helping them make progress on questions and problems their classroom community has committed to address, which we term “coherence from the students’ perspective.” Yet the realities of standards-based accountability prescribe a canon of particular science ideas identified for curriculum and assessment. I will present an instructional model, storylines, developed to negotiate this tension between specific standards and building on students’ ideas and interests. The storylines model supports teachers in eliciting students’ questions and experiences through their engagement with phenomena and problems, and in using these questions and ideas to work with the class to guide the trajectory of sensemaking. We have explored storylines to support NGSS-designed science learning in studies of elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms across the country. I will present classroom interactions and student work to examine how storyline design principles and instructional routines support coherence from the students’ perspective and describe evidence of students’ engagement in science practices and the agency students take on. Finally, I will present evidence of students’ perceptions of coherence of their learning experiences drawn from studies of a ten-state field test of storyline-based materials in the OpenSciEd middle school program.

Bio: Brian Reiser is professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University. Reiser’s work explores how to make science learning more meaningful in K-12 classrooms as students investigate questions and problems they identify. Reiser’s research examines how to support students in science knowledge-building practices through storyline curriculum materials and teaching approaches, and how teachers learn as they enact these reforms. Reiser heads NextGen Science Storylines, a researcher-teacher collaborative developing and investigating design principles for storyline units in which students help manage the trajectory of science knowledge building. Reiser leads the Northwestern team of the OpenSciEd Developer’s Consortium, working with ten state education agencies to create and field test middle school and high school storyline instructional materials released as open educational resources.

Reiser was a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Science Education from 2011 to 2018, serving on the NRC committee authoring A Framework for K-12 Science Education (guiding development of the Next Generation Science Standards, NGSS), and reports recommending policies for NGSS assessment and implementation. Reiser collaborated with districts and states around the country to design and support professional learning programs supporting K-12 teachers in NGSS implementation. Reiser was a founding member at Northwestern of the first graduate program in learning sciences, chairing the program from 1993, shortly after its inception, until 2001. Reiser is a Member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association. Reiser earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and has been a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and professor at Princeton University.

Event Details


Event Admission 
GSE community only
Event Audience 
Faculty/Staff
PhD Students
MA/MS Students
Undergraduates

Contact Information


Contact Name 
Tamara Danoyan
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