UC Berkeley

Generating explanations is central to science and has the potential to have a powerful impact on students’ conceptual understanding in science instruction. However, improving conceptual understanding by generating explanations is a fraught affair: students may struggle with the sense of false clarity that may arise from generating explanations, fail to detect gaps in their understanding, and dismiss salient information that contradict their beliefs. Critiquing explanations has the potential to counteract these pitfalls by exposing students to alternative ideas to contrast with their own. This dissertation seeks to clarify how to design critique in technology-enhanced science instruction to support students in revising their explanations about scientific phenomena, and in doing so, refining their conceptual understanding.

Using the Knowledge Integration framework, I revised two technology-enhanced curriculum units, Plate Tectonics and Global Climate Change, in a design partnership between teachers, researchers, and technologists. I conducted a series of studies with sixth-grade students to investigate the conditions under which guided critique of explanations can support revision. The pilot critique study investigated the impact of the revised Plate Tectonics unit on students’ understanding of convection, as well as of a preliminary design of critique where students generated and applied their own criteria for what makes a good explanation in science. The guidance study explored how incorporating a complex selection task that features meta-explanatory criteria into critique supports students in distinguishing among different criteria, as well as how students use peer or expert guidance on their initial explanation during revision. The critique study investigated how designing critique with a complex selection task that features plausible alternative ideas and giving guidance on students’ critiques support students in distinguishing among a range of relevant ideas and making productive revisions to their initial explanations.

These studies clarify how critique can be designed to help students sort through various ideas in their conceptual repertoire, be they ideas about meta-explanatory criteria or science ideas about a specific phenomenon. The study findings illuminate the challenges of guiding students to examine or re-examine the full range of ideas for knowledge integration. Students struggle to identify salient, missing, or normative ideas in their own or another explanation, and to incorporate their insights in a coherent way through revision. The studies demonstrate that embedding complex selection tasks in critique encourages students to consider a broad range of ideas and supports them in making conceptual revisions of their explanations. The results have implications for the design of critique in technology-enhanced science instruction.