Sunday, February 3, 2008
Integrated Science Processes
The abstract of the article states, " Since the items measure performance on objectives that can be readily translated into classroom activity, the test has direct applicability to classroom based research, and evaluation of instruction." Such a statement takes for granted the range of differences inherent as one moves from school to school, classroom to classroom, and teacher to teacher. The suggested generalizability or applicability of it's findings needs to be tempered by a sober understanding of the fact that true replication is not something that can be guaranteed when considered within the context of human interaction.
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2 comments:
I reviewed Tobin and Capie (1982). In this study, students were given science lessons intended to engage them in 9 categories of academic engagement. One category was “off task.” Of the other eight, only two occurred with much frequency. Two of the nine categories (attending and generalizing) were positively correlated with students’ integrated process achievement and retention. Therefore, these two categories, for which sufficient data were collected, were studied further.
The researchers’ discussion contains some cautious interpretations and tentative recommendations resulting from analyses that yielded weak correlations and data categories whose low frequency of appearance calls into question any nascent patterns that might have been detected.
Two assumptions were made in this study that are suspect, or at least worthy of some scrutiny: (a) that the lessons actually provided opportunities for students to exhibit the academic engagements being measured; and (b) that teacher individuality and behavior (other than providing prescribed lessons) did not have an effect on student achievement.
I referred to the paper I read as Tobin and Capie (1982), and then realized that there are several of those. The one I reviewed is called, "Relationships between formal reasoning ability, locus of control, academic engagement and integrated process skill achievement."
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