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Consolidating understanding of variation as part of STEM: experimenting with plant growth

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-07-14, 23:15 authored by Jane WatsonJane Watson, S Wright, Noleine FitzallenNoleine Fitzallen, Ben Kelly
Integrated STEM activities are espoused as appropriate for enhancing student learning in relation to statistical concepts; however, a greater understanding of the way in which students’ ideas about those concepts develop is needed to maximise the learning potential offered by engagement in STEM activities. For this study, plant growth was chosen as a topic from the Year 6 Australian Science Curriculum as an appropriate context to employ aspects of the four STEM disciplines to explore students’ developing ideas about variation. Sixty-four Year 6 students across three school terms worked in groups of four to trial various treatments and their effects on the growth of radish or wheat seeds. This report considers two aspects of student learning related to this topic based on (i) the formative assessment of features of students’ workbook entries specifically related to variation during the part of the classroom activity based on their TinkerPlots graphs and (ii) the later summative evidence of learning in responses to end-of-year questions on the activity for 56 of the students. The workbook entries are presented via a qualitative analysis to provide evidence of the forming of understanding of variation in a STEM context, with the SOLO Taxonomy being employed to assess the longer-term evidence and developmental nature of that learning. Overall, a broader picture has emerged of the potential for developing appreciation of variation in a STEM context in primary school.

Funding

Australian Research Council

History

Publication title

Mathematics Education Research Journal

Volume

35

Issue

4

Pagination

961-999:39

ISSN

1033-2170

Department/School

Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment, Office of the Faculty of Education, Education

Publisher

Springer Netherlands

Publication status

  • Published

Place of publication

Netherlands

Rights statement

© 2022. The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Socio-economic Objectives

160103 Primary education

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