Using Expansive Framing to Enhance Personal Relevancy and Engagement in Science

Indiana science standards conceptualize science, engineering, and computer science towards two main goals: preparing students with adequate knowledge and skills to pursue science careers, and helping students develop into scientifically literate citizens capable of fully engaging with socio-scientific issues. Meeting these goals requires an understanding of how to contextualize science skills and content for application outside the classroom: teaching beyond the test towards students' future needs and interests. They need to make connections between science taught in the classroom with their own lives. One strategy for doing so is by utilizing expansive framing, a way of making this connection more tangible towards increasing relevancy and engagement with science. Here, we discuss expansive framing, how it works, and how it can be easily utilized in the K-12 science classroom. We follow up with considerations and implications for effective science teaching and learning.

The Nature of Third Grade Student Experiences With Concept Maps to Support Learning of Science Concepts

To support effective science teaching, educators need methods to reveal student understandings and misconceptions of science concepts and to offer all students an opportunity to reflect on their own knowledge construction and organization. Students can benefit by engaging in scientific activities in which they build personal connections between what they learn and their own experiences. Integrating student-constructed concept mapping into the science curriculum can reveal to both students and teachers the conceptual organization and understanding of science content, which can assist in building connections between concepts and personal experiences. This chapter describes how a class of third grade students used concept maps to understand science concepts (specifically, “watershed systems”). During class discussions and interviews, students revised concept map content and structure as their ideas developed. The study's results demonstrate how students' critical thinking (self-reflection and revision) was supported as misconceptions were revealed through their construction of concept maps over time.