| Project | Simulations as Bridging Scaffolds for Intuitive Conceptions |
| Contact | Doug Clark & Marcia Linn joint proposal UC Berkeley |
| clark@socrates.berkeley.edu | |
| URL | http://wise.berkeley.edu/WISE/demos/13probe |
| Project description | ³Probing Your Surroundings² expands Clement's idea of bridging analogies using simulations to facilitate student construction of intermediate bridging scaffolds between normative instructed models and the intuitive experiential models. The project is based on WISE Internet software with custom simulation modeling, electronic peer critique, and laboratory components integrated to support students as they investigate thermal equilibrium. The project has already been piloted with 300 students in the Bay Area and will be translated at the University of Oslo for implementation in Norway via Internet next year. Students build strong intuitive conceptions and models around their experiences that overshadow normative models instructed in school. Our simulation promotes students' construction of useful connections between these elements of their conceptual ecologies. Preceding the simulation, students make predictions about the temperature of everyday objects around them. Students then use thermal probes to investigate the temperature of these objects and construct principles to describe the patterns encountered. The software then places students in groups with students who have constructed alternative principles. The actual student-constructed principles are seeded as the discussion topics that the groups critique and discuss working toward consensus. This first portion of the project cues conflicting elements of students' conceptual ecologies including students' experiential sense that objects are naturally different temperatures because 'they feel that way' and students' logical sense that objects in the room should be the temperature of the room because what would make them something else?. The simulation encourages students to experiment with these conceptions about thermal equilibrium while allowing the students to 'feel' the objects involved. This process facilitates students' construction of a model of 'feel' that acts as a bridging scaffold connecting students' ideas about thermal equilibrium and insulation/conduction with their experiential sense of objects' temperatures. Early assessment outcomes posit significant outcome effects for this integrated simulation project. |