DEEP IMMERSION ACADEMIC LEARNING (DIAL): AN ANALYSIS...

DEEP IMMERSION ACADEMIC LEARNING (DIAL):

AN ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE LEARNING IN CONTEXT

by

Michael Giamellaro

B.S., University of Wyoming, 1997

M.A., University of Colorado Denver, 2004

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Colorado in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Educational Leadership and Innovation

2012

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© 2012

MICHAEL GIAMELLARO

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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This thesis for the Doctor of Philosophy degree by

Michael Giamellaro

has been approved for the

Educational Leadership and Innovation Program

by

Deanna Sands, Chair & Advisor

Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo

Nancy Leech

Casey Allen

August 28th, 2012

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Giamellaro, Michael (Ph.D, Educational Leadership and Innovation)

Deep Immersion Academic Learning (DIAL): An Analysis of Science Learning in Context.

Thesis directed by Professor Deanna Sands

ABSTRACT

This study was an investigation into high school students’ deep immersion

academic learning (DIAL) experiences in science. Defined in this dissertation, DIAL is

an experiential learning process that is content-driven, facilitated by a teacher, and

conducted through immersion into an authentic, contextualized environment. The study

relied on a theoretical foundation of situated constructivism. The goals of the study were

to determine if students’ conceptual science knowledge structures change following

DIAL experiences and if so, to determine what elements of the learning environment

contributed to those changes. Four high school science classes using DIAL participated

(n=67). Each class was considered to be a case for this mixed methods, multiple case

study. A pretest/posttest design was used in conjunction with the Pathfinder algorithm to

measure changes in structural science knowledge. The students’ test scores showed

significant change from pretest to posttest across the full sample but variability from case

to case. Testing was followed by student and teacher interviews and field observations to

characterize environmental contributors to learning. Both peripheral and facilitated

learning opportunities within the learning environment were important for DIAL and a

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synergistic effect led to deeper student learning when both were utilized. The social

aspect of the learning environment was the most important source of cues for students’

contextualization of targeted content knowledge. The physical environment was also an

important contributor. Contextualization of target science content led to more expert

knowledge structures, and occurred as a result of the individual learner indexing and

making connections amongst all of the environmental components. The study contributes

to the fields of experiential education and contextualized science learning by introducing

the DIAL framework, offering a novel way to assess experiential learning, and providing

empirical evidence of the degree and sources of learning in contextualized settings. The

implications for DIAL teaching and further research are discussed.

The form and content of this abstract are approved. I recommend its publication.

Approved: Deanna Sands

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DEDICATION

I dedicate this work to my wife Monica Giamellaro. It was her perpetual support and

guidance that allowed this project to come to completion.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their support

and extensive feedback throughout this process, particularly my advisor, Dr. Deanna

Sands for her tireless advice, editing, and guidance. I would also like to thank Dr. Carole

Basile for her help in conceptualizing and launching this project. I would like to thank

the members of the UCD LEARN lab for their feedback along the way, particularly Dr.

Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo who contributed much wisdom to this project and guidance to

this developing researcher.

To all of the teachers and students who participated in this project, I am forever

grateful for their insight and efforts. I would also like to thank the various and fluid

members of my writing group who contributed their thoughts along the way.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my wife Monica who was the

primary funder, cheerleader, and counselor for the project. Although my daughter Chloe

joined the project late in the game, she reminded me how important it was to step away

from the computer and just bang on something.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 Defining the Problem ..................................................................................................... 2

Difficulties with Investigating Experiential Learning ................................................ 7 Defining Deep Immersion Academic Learning (DIAL) ............................................ 9

Deep Immersion ................................................................................................... 12 Academics ............................................................................................................ 13 Learning ............................................................................................................... 13

Purpose and Significance of the Study ......................................................................... 15 Research Questions ...................................................................................................... 16 Theoretical Framework- “Situated Constructivism” .................................................... 16 Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................ 22

Context Vehicles ...................................................................................................... 27 Identifying the Environmental Components ............................................................ 30

Social Interactions ................................................................................................ 30 Physical environment. .......................................................................................... 31 Cultural Environment .......................................................................................... 32 Emotional Environment ....................................................................................... 33 Artifacts and Tools ............................................................................................... 34 Internal Dialog and Expression ............................................................................ 35

Learner-Networks .................................................................................................... 36 Method Overview ......................................................................................................... 37 My Background ............................................................................................................ 39 Chapter One Summary ................................................................................................. 40

II. LITERATURE REVIEW ......................................................................................................... 42 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 42 Theoretical Foundations ............................................................................................... 43

Experiential Learning Theory .................................................................................. 43 Situated Learning Theories ...................................................................................... 49

The Social Environment ...................................................................................... 51 The Physical Environment ................................................................................... 53

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The Cognitive Approach to Learning ....................................................................... 54 Schema Theory .................................................................................................... 57 Hierarchies and Networks .................................................................................... 58 Scripts and Plans .................................................................................................. 59 The Role of Context in Schema Theory .............................................................. 60

Situated Constructivism ........................................................................................... 62 Context and Learning ................................................................................................... 64

General Understanding of Context ........................................................................... 64 Context in School ..................................................................................................... 67

Experience in Authentic Settings ................................................................................. 72 Experience and Activity ........................................................................................... 74 Cognitive Learning ................................................................................................... 75 Affective Learning ................................................................................................... 76 Novelty ..................................................................................................................... 78 Immersion ................................................................................................................. 80

Environmental Components ......................................................................................... 82 Social Contributions to Learning ............................................................................. 82 Physical Environment .............................................................................................. 84 Tools ......................................................................................................................... 85 Affective and Individual ........................................................................................... 85 Culture ...................................................................................................................... 86

Facilitated Versus Peripheral Learning ........................................................................ 87 Chapter Two Summary ................................................................................................. 92

III. METHOD ................................................................................................................................ 94 Overview ...................................................................................................................... 94 Participants and Settings ............................................................................................... 95

Case Selection and Sampling ................................................................................... 95 Similarities Across the Cases ................................................................................... 97 Case 1, Winter Ecology ............................................................................................ 98

The School, Case 1 .............................................................................................. 98 The Students, Case 1 ............................................................................................ 99 The Teacher, Case 1. .......................................................................................... 100 The Class, Case 1 ............................................................................................... 101 The DIAL Experience, Case 1 ........................................................................... 102

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Case 2, Winter Environmental Science .................................................................. 102 The School, Case 2 ............................................................................................ 102 The Students, Case 2 .......................................................................................... 104 The Teacher, Case 2 ........................................................................................... 105 The Class, Case 2. .............................................................................................. 105 The DIAL Experience, Case 2 ........................................................................... 106

Case 3, Crane Migration Study .............................................................................. 107 The School, Case 3 ............................................................................................ 107 The Students, Case 3 .......................................................................................... 107 The Teacher, Case 3 ........................................................................................... 108 The Class, Case 3 ............................................................................................... 108 The DIAL Experience, Case 3 ........................................................................... 109

Case 4, Everglades Ecology ................................................................................... 110 The School, Case 4 ............................................................................................ 110 The Students, Case 4 .......................................................................................... 110 The Teacher, Case 4 ........................................................................................... 111 The Class, Case 4 ............................................................................................... 112 The DIAL Experience, Case 4 ........................................................................... 112

Research Design ......................................................................................................... 113 Procedures- Research Question 1 ............................................................................... 114

Preparing the Pathfinder Instruments ..................................................................... 118 Creating the Referent ............................................................................................. 122 Administering the Assessments ............................................................................. 122 Data Analysis for Q 1 ............................................................................................. 122

Procedures- Research Question 2 ............................................................................... 124 Teacher Data .......................................................................................................... 125 Student Data ........................................................................................................... 126 Data Preparation, Coding and Analysis ................................................................. 128

Descriptive Codes .............................................................................................. 129 Pattern Codes ..................................................................................................... 135 Learning opportunities ........................................................................... 138 Contextualization ................................................................................... 139

Student Notebooks ................................................................................................. 140 PFnets ..................................................................................................................... 140

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Field Study ............................................................................................................. 141 Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 144

Field study data analysis ........................................................................................ 146 Synthesis ................................................................................................................. 146

Data Handling and Protection of Informants .............................................................. 148 Validity / Legitimation ............................................................................................... 148

Construct Validity .................................................................................................. 149 Internal Validity ..................................................................................................... 150 External Validity .................................................................................................... 151 Reliability ............................................................................................................... 152 Researcher Bias and Reflexivity ............................................................................ 153

Chapter Summary ....................................................................................................... 154

IV. PATHFINDER RESULTS ................................................................................................ 155 Overview .................................................................................................................... 155 Pathfinder Results ....................................................................................................... 155 Learning Levels .......................................................................................................... 157 Distributions of Student Learning .............................................................................. 159 Negative Change ......................................................................................................... 163 Growth in the Middle ................................................................................................. 167 Patterns in the Other Cases ......................................................................................... 168 Chapter Summary ....................................................................................................... 169

V. RESULTS: CONTRIBUTORS TO LEARNING ............................................................... 170 Overview .................................................................................................................... 170 Learning opportunities ................................................................................................ 171

Facilitated Opportunities ........................................................................................ 173 F1 Guiding Observations ................................................................................... 174 F2 Providing Instructional Resources ................................................................ 177 F3 Facilitating Assignments and Activities ....................................................... 178 F4 Making Connections ..................................................................................... 180 F5 Demonstration ............................................................................................... 183 F6 Providing Expertise ...................................................................................... 185 F7 Direct Instruction .......................................................................................... 188 F8 Synthesis ....................................................................................................... 189

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Peripheral Opportunities ........................................................................................ 192 P1 Personal Discoveries ..................................................................................... 192 P2 Discordant Observations ............................................................................... 195 P3 Affective Connections .................................................................................. 197 P4 Other Resources ............................................................................................ 202

Interactions Between Facilitated and Peripheral Opportunities ............................. 202 B1 Completing the Picture ................................................................................. 203 B2 Keystone Events ........................................................................................... 207 B3 Personal Application of Facilitated Learning .............................................. 209 B4 Extension of Learning .................................................................................. 212

Environmental Components ....................................................................................... 215 E1 Social interactions ............................................................................................. 216

E1.1Teacher-Student Interactions ...................................................................... 217 E1.2 Group Interactions ..................................................................................... 220 E1.3 Peer-to-Peer Interactions ........................................................................... 223 E 1.4 Cultural Interactions ................................................................................. 224

E2 Physical Environment ....................................................................................... 225 E2.1 Visual Evidence of Concepts .................................................................... 226 E2.2 Embodied Experience ................................................................................ 232 E2.3 Geographic Cues ....................................................................................... 236

E3 Tools ................................................................................................................. 238 E4 Individual Factors ............................................................................................. 242

E4.1 Individual Reasoning and Internal Reflection ........................................... 244 E4.2 Writing and Verbal Articulation ................................................................ 247 E4.3 Linking Across Events .............................................................................. 248 E4.4 Connection to Past Learning ..................................................................... 250

E5 Emotional Contributors to Learning ................................................................. 253 Contextualization ........................................................................................................ 260

Misconceptions ...................................................................................................... 264 Chapter Five Summary ............................................................................................... 264

VI. DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................... 267 Overview .................................................................................................................... 267 Discussion and Implications: Research Question 1 .................................................... 268 Discussion and Implications: Research Question 2 .................................................... 272

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Learning Opportunities .......................................................................................... 272 Environmental Components ................................................................................... 280

Social Interactions and Cultural Elements ......................................................... 280 Physical Environment ........................................................................................ 283 Tools .................................................................................................................. 285 Individual Role and Emotional Environment .................................................... 287

Contextualization ................................................................................................... 290 Revised Conceptual Framework ................................................................................. 292 Limitations .................................................................................................................. 296 Contributions .............................................................................................................. 299 Recommendations for Future Research ...................................................................... 301 Chapter Six Summary ................................................................................................. 303

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 305

APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................. 319 APPENDIX A: Important Terms and Abbreviations ................................................. 319 APPENDIX B: Original and Revised Conceptual Frameworks ................................ 320 APPENDIX C: Student Interview Protocol ................................................................ 322 APPENDIX D: Coded Interview Sample ................................................................... 323 APPENDIX F: IRB Approval .................................................................................... 334

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LIST OF TABLES

Table

3.1 Contributing Data by Case………………………………………………….. 125

3.2 Codebook: Descriptive Codes………………………………………………. 130

3.3 Codebook: Pattern Codes…………………………………………………… 136

4.1 Pretest and Posttest Assessment Results……………………………………. 156

4.2 Learning Levels and Distributions Across Cases…………………………… 158

5.1 Frequencies of Learning Opportunity Codes Across Cases………………… 172

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

1.1 The DIAL conceptual framework…………………………………………... 24

3.1 Data Synthesis………………………………………………………………. 114

3.2 Example of a Pathfinder PFnet……………………………………………… 116

3.3 Sample Pathfinder Assessment……………………………………………... 121

3.4 Coded Student Interview Transcript Excerpt………......…………………… 138

4.1 Changes in Student Knowledge Structures, Case 1………………………… 160




4.5 Student 224 Pretest PFnet…………………………………………………... 164

4.6 Case 2 Referent PFnet………………………………………………………. 165

4.7 Student 224 Posttest PFnet………………………………………………….. 166

5.1 Social Contributions to Learning…………………………………………… 217

5.2 Contributions to Learning from the Physical Environment………………… 226

5.3 Contributions to Learning from Tools……………………………………… 239

5.4 Individual Learners’ Contributions to Learning…………………………….. 243

5.5 Affective Connections to Learning…………………………………………. 254

5.6 Relative Frequency of Contextualization Levels…………………………… 262

5.7 Contextualization and Learning By Case…………………………………… 263

6.1 Revised Conceptual Framework……………………………………………. 293

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of the research described in this dissertation is to explore the role of

authentic, contextualized learning environments in high school students’ learning of

science concepts. I describe student learning from a largely situated theoretical

perspective that explains learning as a multi-faceted and interconnected process between

the learner and the many components of the learning environment, including the social,

cultural, and physical aspects. I pay particular attention to the learning opportunities that

are made available to students through the facilitation of their teachers and the more

peripheral or unintended opportunities provided by the environment. This research

explores the potential for contextually immersive pedagogies to support students in

developing explanatory, conceptual science knowledge and to provide some insight on

how to increase the potential of those pedagogies.

In this chapter I provide a discussion on the problem this research is addressing,

an overview of the foundational theory upon which the study is based, propose a

conceptual framework to explain learning in contextualized environments, and briefly

describe the study design used. Chapter Two is a review of the theoretical,

methodological, and empirical literature that provide the foundation for the present study.

In Chapter Three I describe the methods used to investigate the research questions,

reporting the results in Chapters Four and Five. Chapter Six includes a discussion of the

results, their implications, contributions, and limitations.

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Defining the Problem

This research addresses a related set of issues in science education. There is an

ever-present struggle in science education to help students develop conceptual knowledge

that is applicable to the world they live in. Experiential pedagogies represent one possible

avenue to do just that but there has been very little formal investigation into the efficacy

of these approaches. This is partially due to a lack of clarity in defining distinctive

experiential approaches and partially due to the complexity of those learning

environments that makes study of them difficult. This study addresses these problems.

In most reports on the state of science education in the United States over the last

twenty years or in recommendations for improvement of science education, we find a

common call for the need for deeper, more conceptually rooted knowledge that students

can relate to and apply to real world problems (Achieve, 2005; BSCS, 2006; Kesidou &

Roseman, 2002; NRC, 2011a, 2011b). However, these goals have also proven elusive, as

indicated by large-scale science testing such as NAEP (NCES, 2009) and PISA (OECD,

2010) and a lack of student preparedness for college level science (Achieve, 2005; ACT,

2011). Traditional classroom pedagogical approaches do not tend to foster schematic,

applicable science knowledge for the majority of students (Fensham, 2009). Alternative

approaches to science education may be required if we are to advance the goal of students

developing higher order scientific knowledge. One identified problem is that science is

often taught as what Whitehead (1929) called “inert knowledge,” information that is de-

contextualized from the real world (NRC, 2011b). This is problematic if science

education is to have any utility for students once they leave the walls of the classroom or

move to more advanced levels of study, as Greeno, Collins, & Resnick (1996) explain:

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Considerable effort in didactic teaching is aimed at students’ understanding of

general concepts. The difficulty is that didactic teaching of concepts does not

result, for most students, in general understanding. Most students who learn to

recite definitions and formulas that express the meanings of concepts in general

terms, or to carry out procedures with numbers or formulas, show limited

proficiency in solving problems and understanding other situations in which those

concepts or procedures could be used. (p. 29)

Attempts to add context to classroom learning, such as through Problem-Based

Learning (See Dochy, Segers, Van den Bossche, & Gijbels, 2003 for meta-analysis;

Strobel & van Barneveld, 2009) and project-based learning (Rivet & Krajcik, 2004a,

2004b) have shown some promise but still do not result in substantial improvements in

conceptual knowledge and transfer to real world applications.

Despite this struggle in science education to foster the development of applicable,

conceptual knowledge, at some point for professional scientists or those people who use

science in their professional lives these types of knowledge are developed. Situated

Learning Theory, as described by Lave and Wegner (1991) would suggest that these

people learn largely through immersion into a relevant context, a community of practice

where more advanced ways of knowing are shared and developed within the community

and an environment that is supportive of the science or other knowledge germane to that

group. Falk and Dierking (2010) calculate that 95% of the science knowledge that

Americans possess is developed not through formal schooling but through informal

educational sources and personal interaction with the natural world. This latter, informal

source of science learning, what Lave refers to as the learning of “just plain folks” (1988),

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is not without its problems as it is rife with naive conceptions or misconceptions (Choi &

Hannafin, 1995) and lacks the guidance offered by a community of practice.

A solution for improving the depth and applicability of school-sourced science

learning may lie somewhere in the middle. How is science learning different when

students are provided with the contextual opportunities found in many informal settings

but with the formal supports of school learning environments? We do not currently have a

good sense of this. In a review of recent research on outdoor learning, all of which

implies some experiential and contextual component, Rickinson et al. (2004) conclude in

part, “substantial evidence exists to indicate that fieldwork, properly conceived,

adequately planned, well-taught and effectively followed up, offers learners opportunities

to develop their knowledge and skills in ways that add value to their everyday experiences

in the classroom” (p. 24). Rickinson et al. (2004) also identify the nature of learning in

outdoor settings as a “blind spot” in the literature and call for greater methodological rigor

in the field overall, noting “Impacts on young people’s knowledge, understanding and

cognitive skills is arguably the least strongly-evidenced aspect of outdoor adventure

education” (p. 26). It should also be noted that much of the literature in their review came

from the fields of geography and environmental education rather than science education.

A 1997 meta-analysis of adventure education research, including some studies in

science education, showed that studies in that field tended to focus on summative results

rather than answering formative questions about the processes or theoretical concerns

involved in these contextualized, experiential learning events (Hattie, Marsh, Neill, &

Richards, 1997). This gap has remained largely unfilled. In both the Hattie et al. (1997)

meta-analysis, as well as another meta-analysis on adventure learning (Cason & Gillis,

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1994) larger effect sizes were found for experiential, contextualized learning than for

more traditional interventions. However, as Hattie and colleagues (1997) point out, that

was not true for all of the cases but the lack of formative, process-oriented studies leaves

us with little understanding as to why one program is effective and another is not.

Although the environment itself is the most significant difference in contextualized or

outdoor learning, we know very little about how it actually contributes to learning.

Rather, experiential education tends to be seen as a “black box” (Baldwin,

Persing, & Magnuson, 2004), in that there are many suggestions/practitioner reports as

well as some empirical evidence that experiential education results in significant learning,

but little indication of how it does so. A more formal examination into the nature of

experiential learning in authentic, contextualized science learning environments is needed

as the advancement of experiential science education is limited by this gap in our

understanding.

It is generally accepted that experiential education is more than just any

experience in which learning takes place. After all, students in the most didactic of

classrooms are still having an experience. There is an assumption that experiential

education implies a more direct experience with the world, an experience within a context

that is not a traditional classroom environment. To think of it this way, we see context as

the most significantly defining aspect of what is commonly called experiential education.

Direct experience is probably not enough, it must be experience within a real or at least

intentional context. Despite this, we do not know how the contextual surround of

complex environments affects student learning. It has been repeatedly shown that the

context within which each student lives on a daily basis is a significant contributor to or

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detractor from learning (Hanscombe, Haworth, Davis, Jaffee, & Plomin, 2011; Vermunt,

2005) and there is a wide field of research into the classroom as a learning environment

(see Fraser, 2007 for review) but we do not know much about real world learning

contexts.

There is also a lack of clarity on how comparable various experiential pedagogies

actually are. Because the term, ‘experiential education’ is used so widely, it hinders

comparability between studies and fosters broad stereotypical generalizations across

programs and curricula. It seems that experiential education is often celebrated or

criticized as whole, neglecting the wide diversity of programs and curricula that it

encompasses. In one of the more blistering critiques Hirsch defined “learning-by-doing”

as “process–heavy, devoid of content, and a holdout from the 1960s progressivist

approaches” (as cited by Roberts, 2002, p. 256). He goes on to assert “learning by doing

and its adaptations are among the least effective pedagogies available to the teacher.”

Such broad statements are difficult to interpret when one considers the broad scope of

programs, curricula, and their associated goals that are to be included in this

pronouncement.

Even those who tend to support experiential education have presented generalized

critiques, as does Seaman (2008) who describes the lack of ongoing, empirical research

around experiential education as having led to an evolution of “practice–driven models

with historically specific purposes into a broader belief system underwritten more by

liberal–humanist ideology, folk psychology, and administrative interests than by scientific

or epistemological foundation for learning” (p. 228). While Seaman’s observation

regarding the lack of empirical evidence is valid, the overgeneralization of the field may

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be more to blame as it makes it almost impossible to define exactly what can be compared

or what the focus of inquiry should be.

Similarly, there is a general sense that science education can be lumped into

formal and informal settings with formal including traditional classroom formats and

anything outside of the classroom being lumped together as informal (Falk, 2005). There

are a number of problems with the formal/informal designation (Falk, 2005), particularly

the categorization of everything occurring outside the classroom as being somehow

similar. This designation speaks more to traditional assumptions of what education

should look like than it does to providing a meaningful designation of the relationship

between a learner and a learning environment. As a learning environment, a guided field

trip through a museum probably has more in common with the classroom than with an

experience in which students are working with scientists in the field to gather legitimate

scientific data. In order to better understand experiential science learning in authentic

environments we need to be able to compare experiences within meaningfully comparable

groups, moving beyond attempts to describe “informal learning” or “experiential learning”

as if these represented groups of comparable processes. The best research on free choice

learning in a museum or on self efficacy developed on an Outward Bound course may

have little or no validity when applied to a group of students doing field work with a

scientist.

Difficulties with Investigating Experiential Learning

A number of barriers to understanding the experiential learning process present

themselves in any attempt to research it. These include the accurate assessment of

learning that is highly individualized, the more open-ended nature of the variables of

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authentic versus classroom learning environments, the highly variable nature of the

enactment of any given experiential education program, and as previously described, the

categorization for comparison of disparate approaches. The atomization of the learning

process is a historical reality that has also contributed to these difficulties. This has been a

natural result of the research process, particularly in understanding the role of context in

education, as Nardi (1996) reflects: "How can we confront the blooming, buzzing

confusion that is “context'' and still produce generalizable research results?" This is true

but it is unlikely that the whole of learning is equal to the sum of the parts and it is likely

that there are substantial differences between what happens in a naturally complex

environment and what happens under controlled conditions (Salomon, 1993a). Rickinson

et al. (2004) offer a word of caution: “The difficulty of identifying, measuring and

evaluating the benefits of fieldwork and field trips should not be underestimated by

researchers, practitioners or policy makers. There are far too many poorly conceptualised,

badly designed and inadequately carried out studies” (p.24).

There is an ever-present tension between complexity and parsimony and while it

has been necessary to subdivide the learning process into manageable units in order to

understand it, we may be at a point where we can move toward consilience and approach

learning from a more systemic perspective, as proposed by Lee (2011). To look at

learning in authentic environments we must acknowledge the varied pathways that

knowledge can be developed as an individual interacts with the actors and objects within

her environment.

To use the image of the black box of experiential education, research has shown

us some parts that make up the black box and it has shown us the results of a learner who

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has gone through the black box but we don’t know how many of the elements in the box

work, nor how the elements of the box work together. We need to know more about how

the parts work together to generate specific outcomes. Without this knowledge

practitioners cannot manipulate the components to target specific outcomes nor to

maximize science learning for a particular group or individual. It is not enough to know

that strong social relationships contribute to learning nor is it enough to understand simply

that being immersed in a real-world environment increases information retention or

application. If practitioners do not understand how authentic learning environments

contribute to learning there is a real danger that experiential learning experiences are not

designed to utilize the potential benefits and student learning suffers.

Experiential pedagogies represent potentially powerful tools for teachers in

schools and informal education settings, particularly those focused on science content, but

without understanding how the tools work, that potential is limited. The problem is clear:

we need to get past the notion that experiential learning is “too mysterious a phenomenon

to fully comprehend” (Conrad & Hedin, 1982, p. 58) by considering both a greater range

of environmental contributors to learning, the interactions among elements within the

learning environment, and their role in developing student knowledge. This study was a

step toward exploring those factors.

Defining Deep Immersion Academic Learning (DIAL)

‘Experiential education’ has become an omnibus term used to describe a wide

range of ideas and practices from Outward Bound type adventure education courses to

service learning experiences, to in-class activities. It is a value-laden term, often and

incorrectly equated with “hands-on learning,” “learning by doing,” “active learning,” and

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learning “outside the four-walled classroom” (Roberts, 2008). One use of the term is to

describe the immersion of learners into learning environments that are either

representative of environments where the target knowledge can be applied, or

environments that closely approximate the ‘real-world.’ The labels authentic, in-situ,

immersive, and contextualized all contribute important descriptors to this type of learning.

It could be argued that every learning environment is imbued with some context

or another but the term is used within this dissertation as it is described by Rivet &

Krajcik (2008):

Contextualizing instruction refers to the utilization of particular situations or

events that occur outside of science class or are of particular interest to students to

motivate and guide the presentation of science ideas and concepts.

Contextualizing often takes the form of real-world examples or problems that are

meaningful to students personally, to the local area, or to the scientific

community. These are situations in which students may have some experience

with (either directly or indirectly) prior to or in conjunction with the presentation

of target ideas in science class, and that students engage with over extended

periods of time. (p. 80)

Contextualized experiences then, stand in contrast to decontextualized

experiences, wherein the context is a scholastic one, abstracted from events that the

students are experiencing and from the content knowledge as it is typically used in

practice (Rivet & Krajcik, 2008). In the typical secondary classroom, for example, the

knowledge that students are intended to learn may be presented in conjunction with a

description of contexts in which the knowledge is applicable but all of the actual contexts

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the students are operating within are not likely to be related to the content knowledge.

The physical, cultural, social, and temporal surround is the context of school; even the

best-intentioned posters and visuals provide scholastic rather than actual contexts. When

the class ends in forty-five minutes, the context switches to other parts of the school and

socio-cultural surround and the peripheral context cues the student is exposed to no longer

have anything to do with the target knowledge.

Contrast this with a language immersion program in which the student travels to

and immerses herself in a culture with a different language. She receives formal

instruction on vocabulary and the proper ways to apply it but in addition everything else

outside of class provides contextual cues to support her learning. She can practice, test,

question, and apply the new knowledge throughout the environment and she is presented

with countless opportunities to extend her knowledge in directions that mesh with her own

interests. Her learning is a function of both the facilitated formal curriculum and the

peripheral elements of the context. While these types of immersion experiences do

happen in other academic disciplines at the secondary level, they are not common. There

is no unified body of research within which this type of learning happens and so it is

typically described simply as experiential education. Because that term is used so widely,

however, it is not of much use for understanding this more specific use of contextualized

learning experiences.

A sub-category of experiential education is needed to distinguish the pursuit of

academic knowledge through a combination of facilitated curricula and immersion in a

contextualized environment. As the literature does not provide a label, I introduce the

phrase deep immersion academic learning (DIAL) to indicate both the contextualized

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nature of the learning environment and the abstract/academic nature of the learning

targets. Though the practice has existed for a long time under the more general label of

experiential education and although the practice is increasingly enacted, the label of DIAL

has not specifically been identified or defined. The label of DIAL applies to a real world

pedagogy that fosters student learning in authentic environments over an extended period

of time, much like the language immersion programs. In addition, DIAL has aspects that

are very intentional and facilitated as well elements that are more open, has content-based

learning goals, and occurs in contexts specifically chosen to enhance the academic content

of the course. As such, DIAL offers a laboratory with which to understand the role of

environmental contexts in student thinking, learning, and development.

Deep Immersion

The first part of the term, “deep immersion”, implies that students are introduced to an

intentional place, time, social setting, and overall environment specifically intended to

enhance the experience and understanding of the topic of study. Within this context,

there are environmental elements that are specifically facilitated and scaffolded by the

teacher and others that are directly related to the content being taught but peripheral,

incidental, or not specifically accounted for by the teacher. Additionally, deep immersion

implies an extended period of time, typically multiple days, in which students are

immersed in the milieu of the learning experience and not being directly influenced by

the distractions of typical daily life. The deep immersion aspect of DIAL often takes the

form of an extended field trip experience but there are cases of deep immersion that do

not necessarily involve a distant trip, and more commonly there are trips that do not rise

to the level of deep immersion.

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Academics

Similarly, there are deep immersion experiences that are not intentionally

academic, such as group-building experiences and adventure education trips. That is not to

say that learning does not occur during these experiences but that the learning is not

intentionally academic. The “academic” piece of DIAL refers to the specific use of

experience to deliver academic content, predetermined by standards or curricular

expectations, albeit with the understanding that each student will construct their content

knowledge somewhat differently. It is not what I loosely refer to as “the Columbus

method” (send them on their way and hope they discover something). This academic

content knowledge can be declarative, procedural, schematic, or strategic1 (Li, Ruiz-

Primo, & Shavelson, 2006). Typically, the academic content knowledge is well grounded

in application in at least part of the experience.

Learning

The final piece of the DIAL definition is learning through experience. For the

purpose of defining DIAL, I refer to learning in an in-situ, relevant, contextualized,

perhaps embodied process, in which the students are engaged in a transactional form of

information exchange, and using all or most of their sensory perception to construct

knowledge in conjunction with the elements of their environment. I see this learning as

situated within and distributed throughout the environment but represented uniquely

within each individual learner. A more detailed description of this learning process is

1 In the framework there are four types of knowledge: declarative knowledge, or knowing what, is conceptual or factual in nature; procedural knowledge, or knowing how, indicates understanding of sequential processes applicable to a class of acts; schematic knowledge, or knowing why, is explanatory and can be used to make predictions, and strategic knowledge, or knowing when, where, and how to apply knowledge.

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described below and in Chapter Two. The experience piece is an important distinction as

it is possible to be deeply immersed but still learning in a largely didactic manner, and not

truly experiencing an event.

DIAL stands in contrast to what Roberts (2008) refers to as “one-off” experiences

in which students take a day off from normal school activities to participate in a challenge

course or visit a nature center, participating in activities without any direct link to their

school studies. An example of DIAL might be a high school biology class taking an

extended trip to coastal California to study marine biology. The trip might include

exploration of tide pools; a day working on a commercial fishing vessel; another day

helping out at a Marine research facility, performing a necropsy on a beached dolphin

alongside a marine biologist; a service learning project at a local estuary rehabbing critical

habitat; and a project in which the class gathers data of species abundance while

snorkeling through a kelp forest. Throughout the experience students may be reading

appropriate texts and reflecting both on their own constructions of knowledge and

connections back to the intended curriculum that explores the human relationship with

marine systems. The facilitating teacher is responsible for intentionally structuring each

experience, helping the students understand the connections between the canonical science

knowledge and the students’ experiences, addressing misconceptions, and delivering

critical content that does not neatly emerge from the experiential elements of the trip.

While these roles may manifest differently within different contexts, they are all critical to

the DIAL process and help differentiate DIAL from other experiential approaches.

The balance between structure and free-choice, abstract and applied knowledge,

continuity and novel experience, and canonical and social information land DIAL

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somewhere between the worlds of formal and informal education. The goals and some

academic tools are more closely aligned with formal education while the methods and

venues are more readily associated with informal pedagogies. DIAL attempts to find a

balance between the learning of “just plain folks” (Lave, 1988) while also addressing the

deficiencies of that method, as described by Choi and Hannafin (1995):

While "just plain folks" behave and learn in everyday life, their knowledge and

performance is not the same as the experts'. They do many things inaccurately and

inefficiently and possess many misconceptions about daily life. Some

understanding, such as scientific concepts like gravity and earth rotation, require

opportunities beyond our everyday experience. In many cases, everyday

experiences actually hinder learning. (p. 67).

Relatedly, DIAL tends to embrace both the intentional contexts of the learning

environment facilitated by the teachers, as well as the incidental or peripheral, again

finding the balance between the informal and formal. It takes the natural learning

processes of “just plain folks” and forms a bridge to more expert ways of understanding a

given topic.

Purpose and Significance of the Study

The goal of this study was to describe cases of student learning in authentic,

contextualized environments over the course of DIAL experiences in order to fulfill the

purpose of exploring how the components of the environment contribute to that learning.

The study explored how physical environment, social interactions, social constructions of

knowledge, and both facilitated and peripheral opportunities influenced student learning

during DIAL experiences. Because this study was largely a new line of research and was

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more exploratory than confirmatory in nature, it also serves the purpose of generating new

ideas that can be tested later in this line of inquiry. Through tracking the elements of a

learning environment, including peers and other actors, and how they contribute to

individual students’ knowledge of highlighted academic content, we can better understand

the connected nature of learning in-situ. As this is arguably one of the most complex

phenomena, the goal was more truly to begin understanding it.

The work contributes to the fields of science education and experiential education

by providing empirical evidence on how the contexts of authentic learning environments

support changes in students’ conceptual knowledge structures within four science class

DIAL experiences. The work also provides a tested methodology for investigating

learning in highly complex environments that combines a more formal assessment of

concept knowledge change with a qualitative assessment of the complexity of

environmental supports for learning.

Research Questions

To meet these goals, the following research questions guided the study.

Q1: Do students’ knowledge structures reflect greater understanding of science

concepts following a DIAL experience?

Q2: If so, do students’ interactions with the components of a DIAL environment

contribute to change in their conceptual science knowledge structures?

Theoretical Framework- “Situated Constructivism”

This study is an investigation into learning. In this section I provide an overview

of the learning theory that provides the foundation for the work. A more developed

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discussion of this theory appears in Chapter Two. I use a general definition of learning to

encompass its breadth: “Learning is the process by which knowledge is increased or

modified. Transfer is the process of applying knowledge in new situations” (Greeno, et

al., 1996). Of course, exactly what that process is or what knowledge is makes this simple

definition much more complex. For my purposes here, no singular theoretical tradition

adequately describes the process and the results of learning. Rather, I adopt a more

synthetic understanding that is heavily influenced by situated, cognitive, and experiential

learning theories.

Greeno et al. (1996) divide perspectives on cognition and learning into three

categories: empiricist (aka behaviorist), rationalist (aka cognitive, information-processing,

or constructivist), and pragmatist-sociohistoric (aka situative), acknowledging that this is

not the only way one could categorize the field. This division is useful for this study and I

will refer to two of these categories throughout, using the terms cognitive and situative to

generally describe these traditions. Greeno et al. (1996) describe the perspectives in this

way: “the situative/ pragmatist–sociohistoric perspective views knowledge as distributed

among people and their environments, including the objects, artifacts, tools, books, and

the communities of which they are part” (p. 16-17) while “The cognitive/rationalist

perspective on knowledge emphasizes understanding of concepts and theories in different

subject matter domains and general cognitive abilities, such as reasoning, planning,

solving problems, and comprehending language” (p.16).

The premise of the learner/environment relationship, the focus of this study, as

seen in situative theories is summed up well by Fenwick (2000):

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Situated cognition maintains that learning is rooted in the situation in which a

person participates, not in the head of that person as intellectual concepts

produced by reflection nor as inner energies produced by psychic conflicts.

Knowing and learning are defined as engaging in changing processes of human

activity in a particular community. Knowledge is not a substance to be ingested

and then transferred to a new situation but, instead, part of the very process of

participation in the immediate situation. (p. 253)

Understanding the relationship between the individual learner and environment as

a part of a whole rather than as an inside/outside phenomenon is important but it does not

imply that individual cognition ceases to exist; nor need it imply that all parts of the whole

have equal value in a given activity. The role of the individual’s mental representations

and the role of the individual as a processing nucleus are absolutely critical. The premise

of the cognitive approach is that learning is the accumulation of mental representations or

schemas within one’s memory and that transfer occurs because some of these

representations are seen as invariant across situations (Greeno, et al., 1996). A schema is

a data structure that we use within our memory to store generalized information about the

world we know and that is used to interpret future events and incoming information

(Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). These schemata are encyclopedic and semantic rather than

definitional and declarative in the sense that they record generalized information that is

useful for interpreting the environment rather than absolutes to be recalled as a unit

(Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). As there is a close alignment between these cognitive

structures and learning, they can be used as a way to understand individual learning

(Shavelson, 1972, 1974; Shavelson & Stanton, 1975).

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While some find these two perspectives to be mutually exclusive (J. R. Anderson,

Reder, & Simon, 1996, 1997) many others see the different perspectives as

complementary (Choi & Hannafin, 1995; Cobb & Bowers, 1999; Cobb & Yackel, 1996;

Greeno, 1997; Greeno, et al., 1996; Perkins, 1993; Salomon, 1993a, 1993b). I support this

latter notion, viewing the two as lenses looking at learning from different levels of

granularity such that situative theories address the interactional network of learning within

an environment and cognitive theories focus on one piece of that network- the individual.

In a recent panel discussion at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Educational

Research Association, a group of learning theory luminaries including Barbara Rogoff,

Roy Pea, Carol Lee, and James Greeno revisited the premise of the heavily cited National

Research Council report “How People Learn” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000),

concluding that a more synthetic, multi-level model more accurately reflects the learning

process than does any, one, singular approach.

This study examined learning as it exists in a situated context but did so largely

by looking at the meanings and representations assigned by individual students. To do so

a theory that combines the cognitive and situative perspectives was needed. Cobb &

Yackel (1996) offer a theoretical framework for such a union called “the emergent

approach.” I refer to this general idea as situated constructivism to avoid the ambiguity of

Cobb & Yackel’s term. Within their framework, it is possible to locate analyses of

individual’s constructive activities in a social context (Cobb & Yackel, 1996). They

describe the impetus for this approach in this way:

In general, analyses conducted from the psychological constructivist perspective

bring out the heterogeneity in the activities of the members of a classroom

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community. In contrast, social analyses of classroom mathematical practices

conducted from the interactionist perspective bring out what is jointly established

as the teacher and students coordinate their individual activities. In drawing on

these two analytic perspectives, the emergent approach takes both the individual

and the community as points of reference. This approach seeks to analyze both

the development of individual minds and the evolution of the local social worlds

in which those minds participate. (Cobb & Yackel, 1996, p. 180)

Perkins (1993) introduces a useful concept to be used with situative views of

learning and one that also works well with the idea of situated constructivism, the

“person-plus” as a unit of analysis in understanding learning. The person-plus represents

the individual along with all of the external tools, practices, and other individuals that

allow for a given cognitive process. This is contrasted with the more conventional view

of the person-solo, the conception of learning as being entirely ‘in the head’ (Perkins,

1993). Thus, the cognitive process as well as any memory or “cognitive residue” are

distributed throughout the learning environment, such that the learner off-loads some

memory into notebooks, other people, etc. (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Perkins,

1993) in addition to maintaining some representations within their own memory as is

described in schema theory and the cognitive perspective of learning.

This perspective should not be seen as “person-solo” cognition occurring within a

larger social vessel but rather as person-solo as an entity with specific roles within the

larger person-plus system. These roles include perception, indexing, and the assignation

of meaning. Brown & Duguid (1996) offer a useful analogy:

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The process is not, then, like the addition of a brick to a building–where the brick

remains as distinct and self–contained as it was in the builder's hand. Instead it is

a little like the addition of color to color in a painting, where the color that is

added becomes inseparably a part of the color that was there before and both are

transformed in the process. (p. 49)

Vygotsky’s thoughts on social mediation and internalization also offer some

insight into the interaction of learning roles between the person-solo and the person-plus.

The gist is that all human thought has an external, social precedent such that,

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice, on two levels.

First, on the social, and later on the psychological level; first, between people as

an interpsychological category, and then inside the child, as an

intrapsychological category. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to

logical memory and to the formation of concepts. The actual relations between

human individuals underlie all the higher functions. (Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 125,

emphasis original)

In this way, internal patterns of thought, are at least fundamentally reflections of similar

patterns that happened between the learner and her learning environment.

A final, uniting aspect that needs to be considered in this idea of situated

constructivism is the role of experience. Experience is the process that unites the

individual learner with the person-plus; the interactions in the physical world with the

cognitive constructions of the mind (Hunt, 1981). Carver (1996) describes the individual

learner as situated within her environment not as an independent entity integrating

experience and reflection, but as one doing so with myriad contributing and confounding

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factors. Knowledge becomes co-constructed by the learner, experience, reflection,

environment, and social inputs. Seen another way, “Experience itself is often commonly

understood as knowledge held in context–we have experience in something, we

participate in something. These ‘somethings’ are related to contexts. Transfer cannot be

understood apart from the recognition of the importance of context learning” (Quay, 2003,

p. 185). Experience is a process of incorporating learner and environment with

knowledge and contextualization as the residues of that process.

In summary, an understanding of DIAL is best accomplished with a view that

encompasses the individual mental representations described through schema theory, and

a more holistic account of how the schemata and higher-order thinking of the person-solo

interact with innumerable external physical and social elements to result in a system of

learning that is distributed throughout the environment but centered around an individual.

Experience becomes a person-solo perspective of a learning environment. Knowledge is

constructed as an individual gives meaning to information that is processed by and

distributed throughout the physical and socio-cultural environment.

Conceptual Framework

The theoretical framework presented above provides a foundation for the

introduction of a new conceptual framework for learning while immersed in

contextualized environments (Figure 1.1), such as in a DIAL experience. Building on the

theoretical framework of “situated constructivism” outlined above, this conceptual

framework takes into consideration the roles of the individual as well as the components

of the environment in modeling the DIAL process. The framework does not model every

aspect of DIAL, instead focusing on the central goal of supporting the development of

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academic content knowledge for the learner via the affordances of a contextualized

environment.

The framework allows for the manipulation of the components to both test and

manipulate practice in the field and while there are countless ways in which the

framework could be organized, the delineations are intended to facilitate these

manipulations in manageable ways. Fundamentally this framework explores the

relationship of distributed environmental cues to each individual learner’s present state

and the interaction amongst these elements that lead to and support learning. I refer to

these person-plus systems as learner-networks.

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Learner/environment network components

Facilitated social interactions

Peripheral social interactions

Facilitated physical environment

Peripheral physical environment

Figure 1.1. Learning environments provide a contextual surround that lead to elaborations and greater integration of learning targets with schemata. Deeper and more connected learning occur when the environmental components add contexts that are related to a learning target. .

Context

Vehicle

Learner

Learning Target

Learner elaborates the learning target with a unique set of environmental context cues

Facilitated non-‐academic tools

Peripheral non-‐academic tools

Facilitated emotional environment

Peripheral emotional environment

Facilitated academic tools

Peripheral academic tools

Facilitated cultural environment

Peripheral cultural environment

Fac. internal dialog & expression

Per. internal dialog & expression

Learning targets without contextual elaborations are less likely to interface with the learner’s schemata and less likely to be learned.

DIAL Framework: Contextualization of Learning Targets Through Environmental Interactions

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The target knowledge, shown in the upper left of Figure 1.1, is learned within the

contexts of the learning environment. Within this framework, the components of the

learning environment, shown as inward pointing arrows, can be grouped into: social

interactions, cultural environment, emotional environment, tools and artifacts, physical

environment, and internal dialog & expression. These components are somewhat

artificial as they may not be mutually exclusive and any given object or event in the

learning environment likely crosses boundaries and networks with other objects/events.

However, this taxonomy is useful in its ability to focus study, and more importantly, it

provides a focus for adjusting pedagogy in manageable ways. For example, it is true that

peer interactions are informed by the cultural and emotional environment but by isolating

elements of the interactions it becomes easier to highlight them for study and to adjust

their facilitation when teaching. Understanding how these components work together is

also an important phenomenon to be explored. These components are described and

differentiated below.

For each of these environmental components, a categorical distinction is made

between what is facilitated by the teacher or curriculum and what is peripheral.

Facilitated components are those objects and events that were planned by or

spontaneously enacted by the teacher/curriculum. Peripheral contributions to learning

occur when students pick up relevant information directly from the environmental

components without the direct intervention of the teacher. This is not to say that the

peripheral components are necessarily distracters or unimportant for learning. On the

contrary, these peripheral elements are critical to DIAL. Positioning peripheral

components in contrast with facilitated components does not imply that the teacher is

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unaware of them. Rather, a teacher would use DIAL in large part to capitalize on these

peripheral context cues for their students. Classroom teaching typically focuses on the

facilitated aspects of the environment and tries to minimize the peripheral. This, of

course, makes sense if the peripheral offers little potential to support and much potential

to distract from the learning target(s). Some of these cues play a much bigger role than

others do in learning and combinations of cues might amplify their independent effects.

The tenets of this conceptual framework are summarized here:

(a) Target knowledge is a socio-cultural construction that a teacher, curriculum,

society, etc. deems should be known by individuals.

(b) In the presentation of target knowledge there exist countless components of the

learning environment that can be associated/elaborated with the target knowledge as a

person learns it (learning is distributed).

(c) Within a given environment, some learning opportunities are facilitated by the

teacher and some are embedded within the environment, peripheral to the intended

learning opportunities.

(d) Each individual keys into different combinations of environmental components

with which the target knowledge is elaborated. These unique combinations become

“context vehicles”.

(e) The context vehicle interfaces with the learner’s schema and allows for the

development of mental representations, though some of the knowledge may remain

distributed throughout the environment and is indexed by the learner.

(f) Target knowledge that is not associated with environmentally-sourced

elaborations is less likely to interface well with the learner’s schemata.

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(g) Because each learner is both dynamic and unique, no single context vehicle can

be universally effective across time or population.

From these tenets, the following hypothesis can be drawn: Increasing the depth

and breadth of contextual cues increases the chances of finding combinations to

effectively elaborate target information into context vehicles for each individual learner.

Context Vehicles

As mentioned, a learning target must begin as a socio-cultural construction. The

central arrow in Figure 1.1 illustrates the process of the learning target being perceived by

the learner, but perceived in conjunction with much additional information and action that

is distributed throughout the environment. All of these factors become elaborated with the

target knowledge and result in a networked mental representation. For example, the

learning target might be an understanding of how marine organisms deal with issues of

buoyancy. As the learner develops his understanding of this idea, it becomes elaborated

with his experience of how his wetsuit was buoyant while snorkeling (facilitated non-

academic tools), with a spontaneous conversation he had with a friend about the topic

(peripheral social interaction), with a lecture introducing the idea (facilitated social

interaction) and with perceptions of how excited his peers are about the topic (peripheral

emotional environment). All of these factors become elaborated with the target

knowledge and result in a networked mental representation. Together, these contributors

can be thought of as a context vehicle.

Ideally all of these associations would be directly related to the content to be

learned and while this seems more likely in a learning environment where more of the

components are conceptually bound to the learning target, such as in DIAL, it is

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unrealistic to assume that everything a learner perceives will be so. Rather, there may be

contextual components that are conceptually unrelated but still become elaborated with

the learning target. Extending the previous example, the student studying buoyancy may

also be taking in much information from the environment that is unrelated to that concept.

If a student is exposed to a context-free and isolated idea, there are limited

potential connections through which she can situate that idea within her existing schemata.

When asked to recall or use that idea later, only by triggering that limited pathway can she

do so (J. R. Anderson, 1990). If, on the other hand, she learns the idea in a manner that

assists her in making multiple connections to existing schemata, she is in a better position

to access and use that information later. She has built, in conjunction with her

environment, a context vehicle, or a bundle of contextual cues that become associated with

target information and allow for the delivery of that information where it would otherwise

be unavailable to the learner due to a lack of relevance or positioning within an existing

schema. Rivet & Krajcik (2008) refer to this process as “contextualization”. Our brains

are particularly adept at filtering out irrelevant information (Bransford, et al., 2000) and

the context vehicle provides the means to access a schema and make it through this

filtering process. Experts within a given context are particularly adept at making

connections between conceptual knowledge and relevant information within that context

(de Groot, 1965; Schneider, Gruber, Gold, & Opwis, 1993). The implication of the

conceptual framework presented here is that interactions with authentic contexts may

support learners to build this ability by fostering the development of context vehicles that

are relevant to knowledge being learned.

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The intentional manipulation of context typically represents only a small fraction

of what constitutes an actual context vehicle in a learning situation. All other sensory

cues are combining with and are being associated with the target information as well.

Though the use of context vehicles can be an effective pedagogical tool, there are two

problems that arise in conjunction: first, no two individual learners nor their schemata are

the same so it is impossible to create a universal context vehicle, and second, context

vehicles are inevitable in the sense that even if context is not assigned, it is impossible to

entirely divorce information from context, intentional or otherwise. A teacher then,

cannot entirely create a context vehicle for a student and certainly not for a group, but he

can facilitate an environment that is replete with context cues that support rather than

distract from the targeted information.

Viewed from the environment side, knowledge on any given subject is distributed

throughout the people and objects of the learning environment and so limiting learners’

access to that distributed knowledge necessarily limits the learners’ conceptions. The

important recognition here is that even seemingly insignificant or peripheral

environmental cues can add or detract from the assimilation of the targeted information as

the contexts become elaborated with it. Thus, a student who is learning in a classroom

may have a more difficult time assimilating information deeply and broadly as compared

to a student who is learning in an environment in which most of the contextual cues

support the learning targets, as in DIAL. Further, there is a danger of students who are

learning in strictly academic environments associating learned information largely with

academic settings.

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Identifying the Environmental Components

The purpose of this study is to understand the roles of environmental contributors

in the development of conceptual knowledge, and so it becomes useful to group those

environmental components so that trends can be explored. This becomes more important

for future or resultant interventions and manipulations of learning environments. The

component groups shown in figure 1.1 are arranged in such utilitarian groups. It is

important to reiterate that these groups may be more a function of the lens used to look at

them than delineations that exist in the complexities of the real world. The following

sections define these groupings for the purposes of this study.

Social Interactions

For the purposes of this conceptual framework, social interactions refer only to

direct human-to-human communication that will typically have both verbal and non-

verbal elements. It can be assumed that these social interactions, including conversations,

class discussions, and lectures play a large role in contextualizing learning targets. We

have the ability, largely through abstract language, to prepare information for other

learners (Vygotsky, 1978), thus creating a context vehicle that very effectively activates

the schemata of the other. When we are sharing information in a conversation, we

typically provide a context; we express emotion through word choice, inflection, and body

language; we inquire as to previous connections the listener might have; we are constantly

monitoring the listener for nonverbal feedback; and we inadvertently link the shared

information to ourselves, as the expresser of it.

Perhaps more significantly, when we share information via language we have

abstracted it in a way that meshes well with generalized schemata. We use language as a

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mediating tool to universalize a concept (Wertsch, 2007). When we interact directly with

the environment, we need to first take the step of abstracting the information while in

human-to-human interactions the information often comes pre-abstracted and bound in

contextual clues. The contextualization allows us to take in information that has been pre-

filtered for relevancy and assigned a meaning for ready assimilation. Looked at from a

situative perspective, the learning is distributed between participants as they co-construct

an idea. This also becomes apparent when we contrast social, transactional information

exchange with information gained from artifacts (e.g. text, art, etc.) that also contextualize

information but in a much more static manner. In DIAL environments, these social

interactions, whether facilitated by the teacher or spontaneous, inevitably begin to

incorporate the other elements of the environment, assisting the learner in interpreting that

environment.

Physical Environment

When processing raw information from the environment our task of learning is

difficult but not impossible. When interacting directly with the environment, learning is

still largely socially mediated. We situate new information within the language and

contexts that we already know and we often support each others’ learning via reflection

and debrief (Vygotsky, 1978). From this it would be logical to conclude that this sort of

direct immersion in the environment is unnecessary- logical but not accurate.

Rather, the environment around us provides important contextual cues that are

more easily assimilated via social mediation and, in turn, help elaborate socially mediated

information. A teacher may help a student couch their observations in a culturally

common schema and therefore find a connection to an individual student’s schema or a

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student may be cataloging sensory information in conjunction with the teacher’s

description of a concept. In either case, the information is value-added as context cues

and elaborated information are combined for more diverse connections to schemata and

therefore greater chance of recall/application. This contextual support may have a much

more significant impact on learning than is typically ascribed to it.

These contextual cues may also help to customize the context vehicle for each

individual learner. That learner is constantly associating the targeted information with a

combination of context cues that they uniquely perceive from the environment. One

student may be tuned in to a deep sense of place, the motivation of her peers, and a

particularly poignant visual cue. Another student might be focused on the sounds and

smells of an environment but they are both still learning the target information. For the

purpose of this framework then, the physical environment category refers to landscapes,

flora, fauna, and objects not used as tools that students interact with and experience in the

pursuit of DIAL.

Cultural Environment

Disentangling the social from the cultural is a difficult task and is beyond the

scope of this dissertation. Rather, the grouping cultural environment is used here to

categorize a narrow range of cultural phenomena. The label refers to cultural practices or

their effects that differ from the mainstream culture of the learner. More specifically, the

label refers to cultural practices that are part of the class or school culture or those that are

related to the group within which the DIAL immersion takes place. Certainly there are

broad cultural factors at work in any learning environment but those that can be

manipulated are of most use to this framework.

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For example, if the school uses an acronym or a memorized phrase to encourage

certain behaviors and the teacher uses this tool to motivate students in a given situation,

this could be considered contextualization through a facilitated aspect of the cultural

environment. To use the previous example of the Marine Biology class, a student may be

struggling to understand why human impacts on the ocean are not immediately stopped

but after spending the day within the culture of commercial fishermen, they contextualize

the issue by understanding the economic needs of that cultural group and how they may be

in tension with conservation efforts. This too, would be cultural contextualization.

It is important to remember that these component groups are designated with the

purposes of observation and pedagogical manipulation in mind. Background cultural

phenomena that are not noticed by the learner may not play a useful role in the

differentiation and representation of the target knowledge as ever-present cultural

elements would be bound to all learning for the student. Cultural as well as social

subtleties clearly have an impact on every aspect of a learning environment but the

subtleties are beyond the scope of this study and are probably not easily manipulated.

Emotional Environment

Similarly, it can be difficult or impossible to disentangle emotion from any other

aspect of learning. For the purposes here, I refer to either the very intentional use of

emotion in instruction and/or metacognitive identification of emotional elements. For

example, the teacher may facilitate a very specific ‘tone set’ to prime students for what the

teacher hopes will be a moving experience. Alternatively, a student might identify

frustration that they felt regarding an assigned task they could not master or a deep sense

of awe associated with a natural phenomenon they experienced.

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Artifacts and Tools

Human artifacts including texts, art, architecture, recordings (video/voice), and any

other object that is manmade also provide the learner with uniquely human context

associations to facilitate integration with schemata. Similarly, known heuristics and

procedures have a similar effect. In the case of text, voice recordings, or any other

symbolic language, this contextualization may be a function of the abstraction. Artifacts

share this with direct human communication but there are important differences as well,

predominantly the non-transactional and static nature of artifacts.

Artifacts also play a critical role in a rapidly changing society as they provide an

unchanging referent such that learners can all go back to the same source. Although each

will learn the information via unique pathways and interactions with their schema, will

have different access to the materials, and may index the sources differently, they are all

starting with the same information, unchanged by additional learners/teachers in the chain.

I define academic tools as artifacts, heuristics, or procedures that have been

designed or co-opted for the purpose of academic instruction or the facilitation of abstract

thought for pedagogical ends. Clear examples include textbooks, worksheets,

journals/notebooks, educational media, and content-related websites. Other cases might

be less clear such as computers/computer programs, non-fiction books, calculators, etc.

The definitive test is the intention for use so that a computer can be an academic tool or a

recreational tool, depending on how it is used.

Though there is a fine line between when a tool is academic and when it is not, the

distinction is an important one in understanding how DIAL occurs in the field. In the

earlier example of the student discovering buoyancy through use of a wetsuit, this would

35

be considered a non-academic tool but if the teacher created a mini-lesson using the

wetsuits as an example, it would then become a co-opted academic tool for the purposes

here. Thus, non-academic tools are man-made objects, procedures, or heuristics used for

some purpose that is not intentionally related to the content being taught.

Internal Dialog and Expression

Learning and the incorporation of new ideas into the schemata are not limited to

sensory information that moves from the external to the internal. Rather, learning can also

occur via internal dialogue and by moving ideas from the internal to the external such as

when a learner expresses an idea. While these ideas likely have a person-plus origin, they

can be manipulated within the person-solo to varying degrees. Both internal dialogue and

expression add elaborations to the schemata, leading to increased generalization or

specialization of the schemata (J. R. Anderson, 1990)

Learners often catalog experiences they do not have strong connections to but later

make those connections as relevant information becomes available. For example, a

student might notice while in the field that different plants grow on north and south slopes

but might not situate that knowledge until a later ecology lesson helps them create an

explanation for it. Though asynchronous, those episodes become linked via internal

dialog (Kolb, 1984).

Both internal dialog and expression can be either facilitated through prompting or

can be spontaneous. The only access researchers have to this process is when the learner

recognizes it in himself and can articulate it to someone else. This creates difficulties for

studying it but it is a critical piece of the person-plus learning network.

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Learner-Networks

To bring all of these parts together then, we see a dynamic network in which the

learner is in constant interaction with her environment, extensively filtering incoming

information with existing schemata and offloading cognitive and perception tasks to other

aspects of the environment. When raw information is bundled with contextual clues, the

learner is better positioned to find a connection between the new information and past

experience.

We must look beyond the context cues that are tightly bound to targeted content

and consider how knowledge is distributed throughout the entire learning environment.

Different components of the environment have very different implications for learning as

they each offer different ways and degrees with which to access information related to

learning targets. Though peripheral connections may seem as if they have only weak ties

to the targeted information, I am proposing that there is strength in these weak ties,

particularly when combined with or in supporting the stronger ties of socially mediated

learning.

These context cues are often neglected in most education settings but probably

provide significant contributions to how information is elaborated and therefore, to how it

can be recalled or applied. These context cues may also be of little apparent use at the

time of learning but may become more useful later when further or more advanced

learning on the subject takes place. When information is presented in such a way that

most of the context cues are related to the target content, as in DIAL, the information is

more effectively elaborated and an effective context vehicle has been created. In the

classroom, learners do not cease elaborating information with environmental context cues,

37

they simply elaborate the context cues of the classroom with the new information, thereby

associating academic content largely with academic settings, rather than the real world

they are intended to be applied to.

Every learning event is a function of (a) information distributed throughout the

environment, including social and communicated information, (b) the experience of the

learner, and (c) the current state of activation of the myriad schemata of the learner.

However, it is difficult to conceive of any learning event that could truly isolate any

singular learning. Rather, we must see learning as an environmentally networked event in

which many bits of information are learned together and become, at least in part,

associated in memory. Through DIAL, we support that process.

Method Overview

To answer the research questions, a mixed-methods, multiple case study design

(Yin, 2009) was used. Four high school science classes that participated in DIAL

experiences served as the four cases of the study. These cases included 68 students, the

teachers of each class, and local experts who participated in the experiences of two of the

cases. Students in two of the cases studied various aspects of the winter environment

while participating in residential programs situated in montane and alpine ecosystems.

Students were often required to travel on skis through the environment. The third case

traveled by van to a sandhill crane migration staging area to study the birds and human

impact on the birds’ habitat. The final case traveled to the Florida Everglades to study

that ecosystem while traveling by canoe and on foot.

The first research question regarding whether or not students learned through their

DIAL experiences was addressed through a pretest-posttest design using a graph-theoretic

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assessment of structural knowledge, Pathfinder Network Modeling (Schvaneveldt,

Dearholdt, & Durso, 1988). The Pathfinder process uses students’ judgments of

relatedness between pairs of germane concepts to create a network diagram, or PFnet, that

illustrates the most salient connections that students make amongst the set of concepts.

These data were used largely in a quantitative manner by comparing various measures of

similarity between each students’ pre- and post-PFnet to an expert referent, noting change

in similarity to the referent over the span of the DIAL experience. Wilcoxon Matched

Pairs Tests were used to assess for statistically significant change at the case level. The

PFnets were also used qualitatively to (1) analyze for patterns in the nature of the changes

students were making in their knowledge structures as a result of the DIAL experiences,

and (2) to drive the interview process used to answer the second research question.

That second research question, regarding the contributions to learning made by

components of the learning environment, was answered using a qualitative approach. As

mentioned, students were interviewed immediately following their DIAL experiences and

they were shown the PFnets from their pre- and post- assessments. Changes in the PFnets

that represented conceptual shifts important to the learning goals of the class were

highlighted and pointed out to the students. For each of these, students were asked to

describe their current understanding of the highlighted relationship, if the change was

indeed a conceptual shift that they felt they made, and how they learned about or made

that shift. Follow-up questions were often asked to help students clarify their self-

identified learning process. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and coded

using the method of pattern matching logic (Yin, 2009). Cross-case analysis was used to

identify common themes and patterns across the four DIAL experiences.

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In order to triangulate the data gathered through the interview process, I directly

observed one case, the Everglades class, throughout their DIAL experience. I recorded

video, audio, photographs, and field notes of student learning and interactions with their

environment, conducting on-the-spot interviews as we traveled. While four students were

intentionally highlighted within this process to capture as complete a record of their

experience as possible, all students in the class, their teacher, and a local guide hired for

the trip, were all included. My role in the group could be described as a quasi-participant

as I was not involved in the targeted learning but participated in general camp and travel

activities and engaged in casual as well as data-collection conversations. The data

collected through this process were coded and analyzed using the same scheme as for the

interview process. The formal interviews conducted on the trip were recorded,

transcribed, and coded, while all other audio, video, and photographic data were coded

directly with a qualitative research software tool. The data were compared to the findings

from the interview process and included in the cross-case analysis. A more in-depth

discussion of the methods used in this study can be found in Chapter Three.

My Background

In qualitative research the researcher is the primary instrument and as such it is

important for the reader to understand the background and perspective of the researcher as

it relates to the methods and data being presented (Creswell, 2007). As this study includes

qualitative methods I address my background in this section.

My own background in contextualized science education began as a freshly minted

wildlife biologist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In that position it

became clear to me that there were many aspects of my undergraduate education that did

40

not fully come to light until I experienced the use of learned knowledge in the context of a

working field biologist interacting with other scientists, wildlife, ecosystems, and a body

of focused knowledge.

When I transitioned into teaching science at the secondary level, I tried to foster

similar approaches to contextualize the targeted information for my students, using

experiential learning, problem-based learning, service learning, integrated curricula, and

what I am now calling DIAL. It was clear to me that these approaches led to much higher

student engagement but it was always difficult to determine if student learning was

greater, categorically different, or longer lasting than that which resulted from more

traditional pedagogies. It seemed as though students’ interactions with people and their

environments were often markedly different during DIAL experiences than they were with

more traditional approaches but identifying these differences proved elusive and the

literature on experiential education did not offer much guidance. While I often felt as

though experiential approaches to learning could be very powerful, I have often observed

situations where I doubted that any significant learning was occurring, even in my own

teaching. With that perspective, I approached the present research not in an attempt to

prove the efficacy of experiential education or DIAL, but to test and explore it.

Chapter One Summary

In this chapter I presented the problem this study addressed: the need for science

pedagogies that foster deeper conceptual knowledge, offering DIAL as a potential but

untested solution to this problem. I explained the role that situated constructivism played

as the theoretical foundation for the study and introduced a new conceptual framework

that was tested in this study. I described some of the difficulties of studying authentic

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learning environments and provided an overview for the mixed methods approach I used

to work around these difficulties.

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CHAPTER II

LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

Thinking about DIAL as a unique learning process is a new endeavor and as such

there is no existing literature that directly informs an understanding of it. However, there

are a number of bodies of research that inform elements of DIAL. That past work

directed the design and implementation of this study. The first part of this chapter

provides a more in-depth discussion of the theoretical foundations of the study, what I am

calling situated constructivism. That first section explains the contributions of situative,

cognitive, and experiential learning theories as well as the thinking of others who have

found utility in a combined theoretical view of learning.

A simple way to conceive of DIAL is as a pedagogy, and a process in which

cognitive learning happens in conjunction with a contextualized, real-world environment

that was specifically chosen by the teacher to support academic learning. With this

framing, the relationship between the environment, the content, and the learner are deeply

interrelated through the processes of contextualization and experience. In the second

section of this chapter I present some empirical evidence on contextualized science

learning from existing studies. This is done in three parts outlining (a) understandings of

context and contextualization, (b) evidence concerning the role of experience in learning

within authentic learning environments, and (c) a look at past studies that have compared

facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities.

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Theoretical Foundations

The theoretical foundation for this study was introduced in Chapter One. The

approach was described as being based on the assumptions of situated learning theories

that assert learning is a complex process involving all of the animate and inanimate

objects within a learning environment, continuously processing information and

recording changes within the system. The cognitive view is one of learning as an

individual process that happens within the learner’s head through changing

representations of knowledge. The perspective used here combines these two, seeing

specific and critical roles for the individual within the more complex ecology of the

person-plus. Experience is the interaction between the individual and the system. In the

next sections, each of these theoretical traditions is explained in isolation. Some more

recent thinking on bringing the traditions together is then presented. At the outset of this

research, the work used experiential learning theory (ELT) as a theoretical foundation.

ELT is presented first to capture the evolution of the thinking that went into the

development of the present theoretical basis.

Experiential Learning Theory

In scanning the experiential education literature, one finds almost as many

definitions for EE as there are authors writing about it. Curiously, and perhaps in

reaction to the broad sweep of what has been called EE, many writers choose to define it

by what it is not, as in Chapman, McPhee, & Proudman (1992):

Experiential education is not simply ‘learning by doing.’ Living could be

described as learning by doing. Often this is not education, but simply a routine,

prescribed pattern of social conditioning… Learning that takes place without

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reference to relationships is not experiential as it does not allow learners an

opportunity to see how they fit into the bigger picture. (p. 18)

In contrast, Kolb (1984) offers an affirmative definition that is deceptively simple,

“the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”

(p.38). The Association for Experiential Education defines EE as “both a philosophy and

methodology in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience

and focused reflection to increase knowledge, develop skills, and clarify values”

(Breunig, 2008, p. 78). Itin (1999) offers a more complete understanding of experiential

education, and a definition that most closely resembles DIAL:

Experiential education is a holistic philosophy, where carefully chosen

experiences supported by reflection, critical analysis, and synthesis, are structured

to require the learner to take initiative, make decisions, and be accountable for the

results, through actively posing questions, investigating, experimenting, being

curious, solving problems, assuming responsibility, being creative, constructing

meaning, and integrating previously developed knowledge. Learners are engaged

intellectually, emotionally, socially, politically, spiritually, and physically in an

uncertain environment where the learner may experience success, failure,

adventure, and risk-taking. The learning usually involves interaction between

learners, learner and educator, and learner and environment. It challenges the

learner to explore issues of values, relationship, diversity, inclusion, and

community. The educator's primary roles include selecting suitable experiences,

posing problems, setting boundaries, supporting learners, ensuring physical and

emotional safety, facilitating the learning process, guiding reflection, and

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providing the necessary information. The results of the learning form the basis of

future experience and learning. (p. 139)

Still others identify a theory of experiential education that has emerged in the

collective works of scholars who have turned their attention to understanding learning

through experience (Itin, 1999; Kolb, Boyatzis, & Mainemelis, 2000; Kraft, 1986;

Roberts, 2008). Though labeled “Experiential Learning Theory” (ELT) by Kolb et al.

(2000), and described as “emerging”, it is largely built on the philosophy of John Dewey

(1938/1997).

For Dewey, understanding the world through experience provided an elegant

solution for the dispute between the rationalists and the empiricists of his day and it was

his philosophical approach to experience that led to his pedagogy (Hunt, 1981). It is

experience that unites the physical world (‘primary experience’), with the reflective and

cognitive constructions of the mind, or ‘secondary experience’ (Hunt, 1981). According

to Dewey, these two levels of experience are continually at work integrating cognitively

with past experiences and preparing the individual for future experiences, a concept he

referred to as “continuity of experience” (Breunig, 2008). Dewey cautioned against

educators who favored primary over secondary experience or vice versa, highlighting the

importance of both in the process (Dewey, 1938/1997).

One could argue that Dewey jumped from philosophy to pedagogy, skipping

theory, but this emerging ELT is now filling that void. It was this relationship between

experience and reflection that led to and drove the development and evolution of theory

that includes cyclical models of experiential learning, most notably those of Kolb (1984)

and Joplin (1981). In these stepwise models, the learner continually enters various stages

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of experience or reflection, transitioning to the next step via internal or external impetus

(Quay, 2003). More recently, writers have been questioning the insularity of these cycles

(Quay, 2003) as well as the nature and role of the reflection within them (Bell, 1993).

While these models are useful to the practitioner, they will necessarily continue to evolve

over time to accommodate more nuanced understandings of learning.

This is where it becomes important to understand experiential learning as a theory

that undergirds pedagogy and that can be used as a lens to interpret DIAL. Joplin (1981),

for example, warns against assessing a program as experiential simply because it has an

action component. A theoretical framework provides a better lens with which to assess.

Dewey’s ‘empirical naturalism’ provides one such theory (Hunt, 1981), but experiential

theory has expanded beyond Dewey’s original conception. To, expand on this theory,

Carver (1996) describes the individual learner as situated within her environment not as

an independent entity integrating experience and reflection, but as one doing so with

myriad contributing and confounding factors, a situated view of experience. Knowledge

becomes co-constructed by the learner, experience, reflection, environment, and social

inputs. Therefore, teaching methods and learning can be couched in this way:

Simple participation in a prescribed set of learning experiences does not make

something experiential. The experiential methodology is not linear, cyclical, or

even patterned. It is a series of working principles, all of which are equally

important and must be present to varying degrees at some time during

experiential learning. These principles are required no matter what activity the

student is engaged in or where learning takes place. (Chapman, et al., 1992, p.

20)

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While the call to incorporate social and environmental aspects of learning into EE

seem relatively recent (e.g. Seaman, 2008), Dewey recognized the importance of

considering the social and environmental in his model of learning: “Experience does not

occur in a vacuum. There are sources outside an individual that give rise to experience; it

is constantly fed from the springs” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 40). Place-based education,

considered by some to have its genesis in the EE movement, is an attempt to better

understand and utilize the relationship of the learner to his/her environment and it is also

an important piece of the ELT theoretical framework (Gruenewald, 2003). Itin (1999)

discusses the role of environment in learning:

The educational process does more than take place within the setting; it interacts

and transacts with numerous environmental aspects. The environment would

include not only the setting (the context in which teaching takes place), but also

the larger social–political–economic systems, the multiple students in the class,

and any other system that impacts the teaching–learning process (p. 139).

Quay (2003) adds, “Experience itself is often commonly understood as knowledge held

in context–we have experience in something, we participate in something. These

‘somethings’ are related to contexts. Transfer cannot be understood apart from the

recognition of the importance of context learning” (p. 185).

The repositioning of knowledge beyond the individual experience/reflection cycle

and into the social, cultural, and environmental realms marks an important shift in ELT

away from pure constructivism and it also relieves an additional tension that accompanies

constructivism: if knowledge is constructed in an entirely individual manner, can there be

any transfer of canonical knowledge? This question is of particular interest in science

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education as it would be unrealistic to expect even the brightest students to independently

develop thousands of years’ worth of discovery when presented with even the best

experiences. The modern practice of science requires individuals to be empirical and to

construct new ideas but it also requires a solid understanding of the canon from which to

proceed.

The inclusion of canonical knowledge is also more realistic in a public school

system responsible for ensuring that students not only learn, but gain specific knowledge

and skill sets as deemed necessary by society. As Hunt (1981) jibed “One only need look

at some products of innovative education who are very much “in touch with their

feelings,” but who cannot write a coherent sentence” (p. 212). Zahorik (1997) wrote:

In productive constructionism, a teacher's job is to fuse students' knowledge with

what experts know, not to favor one over the other. Teachers do not promote

understanding by permitting students' constructions to stand even though they

clash with experts' constructions. Student engagement in problem-solving tasks is

crucial, but so is teacher-student dialog. (p.38)

Despite its long pedigree and foundations in empirical naturalism, ELT is far from

being universally agreed upon. The nature and composition of experience itself is still

hotly debated (Bell, 1993; Fox, 2008; Roberts, 2008). One of the more significant

tensions within the emerging ELT is the simultaneous importance placed on individual

experience and social contributions to learning. ELT values individual experience, both

primary and secondary, but recognizes an emergent quality associated with shared

experiences, an idea associated with situated learning theories (Quay, 2003). ELT takes

the critical step beyond constructivism in acknowledging the interplay of the individual,

49

the environment, and the social. It does not, however, describe exactly how these

elements work together for learning, nor does it reconcile the inherent tensions in this.

More targeted theoretical tools are required to help frame the assumptions upon which

this study is built, namely the roles of social mediation and contextualization in a learning

environment as well as the specific role of the individual in learning.

Situated Learning Theories

As reflected above, incorporating the role of experience in learning implies an

interaction with the learner’s environment. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how learning

could take place without factors external to the learner. Theories of situated cognition,

situated learning, and the closely aligned theory of distributed cognition address this

relationship in a manner that is more directed than can be found in ELT.

Within this situative theoretical frame, a computer, a book, other people, and

cultural elements, for example, all participate with an individual to process information

and retain it. In this way, a student might take a math problem from a textbook, use a

calculator to solve it, and record the answer in the notebook and so all of these elements

become part of the thinking and learning process. Cole & Engeström (1993) also

describe cognition as being distributed across the dimension of time.

Significantly, Dewey described what would now be considered a situated

conception of learning: “the idea of environment is a necessity to the idea of organism,

and with the conception of environment comes the impossibility of considering psychical

life as an individual, isolated thing developing in a vacuum” (1884, p. 285). For Dewey,

primary experience is entirely situated in physical and social contexts. In that way,

knowing becomes a practice and learning a strengthening of that practice rather than a

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possession of an individual (Greeno, et al., 1996). In other words, “intelligence is

accomplished rather than possessed” (Pea, 1993, p. 49).

Perkins (1993) introduces a useful concept to be used with distributed cognition,

the person-plus, as a unit of analysis in understanding learning. The person-plus

represents the individual along with all of the external tools, practices, and other

individuals that allow for a given cognitive process. This is contrasted with the more

conventional view of the person-solo, the conception of learning as being entirely ‘in the

head’ (Perkins, 1993). Thus, the cognitive process as well as any memory or cognitive

residue are distributed throughout the learning environment, such that the learner off-

loads memory (Brown, et al., 1989), into notebooks, other people, etc (Perkins, 1993).

According to Perkins (1993), where the knowledge is stored is irrelevant as long as its

retrieval is equivalent, a function he labels the equivalent access hypothesis.

Perkins (1993) uses the example of executive function to describe the situative

perspective. It is quite often that we rely on the external environment to make decisions

for us (e.g. laws and directions to follow), noting that this is a more efficient method than

processing every decision we are faced with on a daily basis. If learning is distributed

throughout the environment, how then can transfer ever happen? According to Fenwick:

Each different context evokes different knowings through very different demands

of participation. This means that training in a classroom only helps develop a learner’s

ability to do training better. What is learned in one training or work site is not portable

but is transformed and reinvented when applied to the tasks, interactions, and cultural

dynamics of another. (2000, p. 254)

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That is, transfer as it is understood in cognitive psychology does not exist.

Rather, new processes are created, informed by the cognitive residues of the person-solo,

but entirely dependent on the new person-plus. Within the situative understanding of

learning, knowledge is distributed throughout the environment rather than possessed by

the person-solo but the person-solo indexes the knowledge, providing the tools with

which to access that distributed knowledge at a later time (Brown, et al., 1989).

Again, it is the action and practice that are relevant, rather than where information

is stored. However, this does not imply an exclusion of the abstract, as explained by

Brown & Duguid (1996) “Because of its emphasis on the implicit and practice, situated

arguments have occasionally been accused of championing the implicit, in denouncing

the explicit and abstract as if these were somehow antithetical to practice... But

explication and abstraction are themselves situated social practices” (p. 4, emphasis

original). It is the context that makes sense of the abstraction. Brown et al. (1989) offer

a useful way to understand this concept: "Tools share several significant features with

knowledge: They can only be fully understood through use, and using them entails both

changing the user's view of the world and adopting the belief system of the culture in

which they are used" (p. 33). The goal of education within a distributed cognition model

is to learn how to more efficiently distribute and access information rather than to possess

more knowledge within the person-solo (Pea, 1993).

The Social Environment

Within the situated perspective of learning, there is an appropriately heavy

emphasis on the social mediators to learning, recognizing the fact that how we participate

within a functioning community and how we interact with other individuals is perhaps

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the most significant and productive manifestation of learning (Greeno, et al., 1996; Lave,

1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 2007). Salomon (1993a) describes

this interaction:

People appear to think in conjunction or partnership with others and with the help

of culturally provided tools and implements. Cognitions, it would seem, are not

content free tools that are brought to bear on this or that problem; rather, they

emerge in a situation tackled by teams of people and the tools available to them.

(p. xiii)

Even in the case of physical tool use, cultural and social factors determine how

that tool is to be used, and conversely, tools can be seen as a reflection of the values and

situated knowledge of the community (Brown, et al., 1989).

For Vygotsky, all learning originates in the social, such that anything that is

internalized by the person-solo must have originally been present as a previously existing

social construct (Vygotsky, 1978). Even physical tools and abstract signs are

manifestations of social processes. Thus, mediation involves the use of a sign or a tool to

convey meaning (Vygotsky, 1978) and "in higher forms of human behavior, the

individual actively modifies the stimulus situation as a part of the process of responding

to it” (Cole & Scribner, 1978, p. 14). Both signs and tools mediate activity but they can

be distinguished by how they are used. Signs are used for internal mediation, such as in

language, while tools are used for the mediation of interactions with the external

environment (John-Steiner & Souberman, 1978).

The use of language, then, is much more than a tool for communication it is a

process that mediates higher thought. It is language that allows us to internalize and

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process stimuli from the external environment. Vygotsky (1978) explains the

developmental ramifications of this process:

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which

gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence,

occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent

lines of development, converge... as soon as speech and the use of signs are

incorporated into any action, the action becomes transformed and organized along

entirely new lines. (emphasis original, p. 24)

The use of language then, allows for an entirely different relationship with the

environment, a relationship that is labeled, categorized, and has cultural/historical

relevance. Wertsch (2007) summarizes this idea well: “Instead of acting in a direct,

unmediated way in the social and physical world, our contact with the world is indirect or

mediated by signs" (p. 178).

The Physical Environment

The situative approach to learning depends on the concept of affordances within

the environment. Affordances are the limits and opportunities placed on the process of

distributed learning and knowing; the “psychologically significant information in

environments [that] specifies ways in which spatial settings and objects can contribute to

our interactions with them” (Greeno, et al., 1996, p. 21). Affordances of a thing or idea

can be actual or perceived (Pea, 1993). While these affordances apply to all aspects of

the environment, they are perhaps most easily understood through the physical aspects.

These affordances, often the result of socio-cultural history and manifested as physical

tools such as books, may actually play a larger role in cognition and learning than what is

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happening in the mind of any person-solo and thus, they “constitute a cultural theory of

mind” (Cole & Engeström, 1993).

The role of these physical, human elements of a learning environment, or

artifacts, may receive less attention than their contributions to situated cognition may

warrant in current writing on socio-cultural learning (Pea, 1993), as they are obscured by

the more directly social aspects. They provide a scaffolding that allows the transmission

of cultural intelligence beyond what can be done through direct social interaction (Pea,

1993). In essence, “the artifact is to cultural evolution what the gene is to biological

evolution - the vehicle of information across generations" (Pea, 1993, p. 79). Wertsch

(2007) introduced the idea of a ‘sign vehicle’ to explain the concept of a sign conveying

socio-cultural information that allows for both easy transmission of an idea from person

to person and the possibility of mediating understanding even beyond what the user

intended.

Whether socially-mediated or not, the non-human physical aspects of the learning

environment also play a role in a situated perspective of learning. By providing

affordances to be used by the learner, the physical environment also scaffolds learning by

influencing what can be and what is likely to be learned.

The Cognitive Approach to Learning

As mentioned in Chapter One, there is some debate as to the compatibility

between the situative and cognitive approaches to learning. Some have argued for a

completely distributed or situated view of cognition where the role of the individual is

seen as essentially irrelevant or secondary (Brown, et al., 1989; Cole & Engeström, 1993;

Rogoff, 1990) while others have argued against situated cognition entirely (J. R.

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Anderson, et al., 1996). I find the more moderate views that allow for some overlap,

more compelling and useful for the present study. Understanding the relationship

between individual learner and environment as a part of a whole rather than as an

inside/outside phenomenon is important but it does not imply that individual cognition

ceases to exist; nor need it imply that all parts of the whole have equal value in a given

activity.

I contend that understanding the role of individual cognition within a distributed

or situated system of cognition is important for three reasons. First, the role of the

individual’s mental representations and the role of the individual as a processing nucleus

are absolutely critical to even distributed cognition. To remove any one aspect of the

‘plus’ in the person-plus system will change the nature of the thinking process but to

remove the ‘person’ from the person-plus system ends the thinking process altogether.

The individual is an appropriate unit of analysis and understanding the processing and

representations of the individual provides a lens into the infinite nature of the person-

plus. The individual provides the only access to an insider’s view of the person-plus

system.

A second reason to understand the learning from a constructivist, cognitive

perspective lies in the difficulty that situated cognition has with addressing transfer. That

is, transfer may not have a significant role in situated theories but it is clearly valued in

educational contexts. Particularly as the contextual distance between learning and

application grows, understanding transfer becomes important if theory is to inform

educational praxis. Cognitive theories provide a mechanism to understand transfer.

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Similarly, a third reason to complement a situative understanding with the person-

solo cognitive theories also lies in praxis. It is not yet clear exactly how to direct

instruction or assessment within an entirely situated education model (Greeno, et al.,

1996), particularly within a cultural environment that places a premium on the value of

personal achievement. This may change, but for now informing situated cognition with

the empirically rich tradition of cognitive psychology will add to the relevance of the

approach.

The premise of the cognitive approach is that learning is the accumulation of

mental representations within one’s memory and that transfer occurs because some of

these representations are seen as invariant across situations (Greeno, et al., 1996). As

there is a close alignment between these cognitive structures and learning, they can be

used as a way to understand individual learning (Shavelson, 1972; Shavelson & Stanton,

1975). Taking this one step further, there is some evidence that mental representations

may be very closely tied to actual physical spaces/relationships (Battista, 1994) as

learners create conceptual models, such as which concept is close to or overlaps another

or how to get from one concept to another, that reflect geo-spatial organization in the

physical world. Understanding mental representations may then provide insight into the

environments in which learning occurred.

While there are innumerable facets of mental representation and the cognitive

approach that offer insight into human cognition (Tulving, 1985), for the more bounded

purpose of this dissertation I limit this discussion to one aspect that is necessary and

sufficient in describing mental representations of the individual with a system of situated

cognition- schema theory.

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Schema Theory

Originally proposed by Bartlett (1932), a schema is a data structure that we use

within our memory to store generalized information about the world we know and that is

used to interpret future events and incoming information (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977).

These schemata are encyclopedic and semantic rather than definitional and declarative in

the sense that they record generalized information that is useful for interpreting the

environment rather than absolutes to be recalled as a unit (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977).

Schemata represent what are normally true but are flexible enough to incorporate new

conditions when appropriate.

Within schema theory most of our memories; our representations of past events,

environments, and ideas are cataloged as generalized meanings based on our

interpretations of past events (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). Remembering, then, is not

usually based on a perfect recall of the original information but a recognition through

piecing together of discrete bits of information, glued together with the meaning

attributed by our schemata (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977).

Within this theory, each schema has a set of variables with allowable ranges of

information (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). For example, a DOG schema would have a

variable for size that might range between 2 and 200 pounds, and a number of legs

variable that is essentially fixed at 4. Still, the schema variables work together and are

flexible enough to accommodate novel events (J. R. Anderson, 1990) such that a dog

with only three legs would still be recognized as a dog.

These schemata are not only used for interpreting new information but also for

recall. When we do recall what a dog looked like, for example, we use our DOG schema

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to provide most of the information and then fill in the details for the particular dog we

saw, thus avoiding the requirement to remember every detail of every dog we ever see (J.

R. Anderson, 1990). It has been shown that we actually add information in the recall

process that is a function of our schema and not of reality (Brewer & Treyens, 1981).

Similarly, when interpreting information, we tend to accept data that is closer to average

values for a given schema rather than values near the extreme (McCloskey & Glucksberg,

1978).

Important for the theory and critical for this study is the idea that schemata are

constantly in a state of change or adjustment. As more data for a given variable become

available, the schema can become either more specialized or more generalized

(Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). The more one studies dogs, the more variables one can add

regarding exactly what constitutes a dog but as one becomes aware of hyenas, foxes, and

jackals, one must accommodate this new knowledge with a more generalized CANID

schema. As we learn then, each related schema must be adjusted to accommodate. As a

schema becomes more specific, the depth of our knowledge increases and as that

knowledge is more generalized, the more we are able to transfer it (Rumelhart & Ortony,

1977). Because of this, specialized schemata allow us to interpret the environment more

quickly and consistently while more generalized schemata require more time and

reasoning but allow for greater flexibility (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977).

Hierarchies and Networks

Another important point regarding schemata is that they do not work alone.

Rather, they are organized in hierarchical networks with more specialized schemata

nested within more generalized schemata, as described by Rumelhart & Ortony (1977):

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This organization seems to lead to an infinite regress, in which each schema is

characterized in terms of lower-level constituents, or subschemata. Presumably,

the dependence that schemata have on lower-level subschemata must ultimately

stop, that is to say, some schemata must be atomic in the sense that they are not

characterized by reference to any other constituent schemata. (p. 106)

There are implications for both encoding and recall from these hierarchies in that

either process can happen from the top-down, the bottom-up, or simultaneously from

both (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). We can make inferences about the general based on

what we are seeing in the specific or we can use general observations to make

assumptions about the details. To use the DOG example, we can see a dog and make the

assumption that it barks (top-down) or we can see a dog track in the mud and assume that

a complete dog was present at some point (bottom-up). The cognitive structure of these

schemata seem to be closely aligned with how the information was learned (Shavelson,

1972).

Scripts and Plans

Scripts are schemata that are specialized for use with events, or as Schank and

Abelson (1975) put it, “a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that

define a well-known situation. A script is, in effect, a very boring little story" (p. 151).

These scripts allow us to operate in the world and interpret the world without the need to

observe every detail. Plans are similar but also connect sequences of events to goals

(Schank & Abelson, 1975). These are particularly important in interpreting the actions of

others as the assumption of goals leads to the ability to interpret actions (Schank &

Abelson, 1975). For example, seeing a person running down the street does not give us

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enough information to accurately interpret why but seeing a person carrying a briefcase

and running toward the bus allows us to assume a plan and fill in the story.

The Role of Context in Schema Theory

It is clear that the environment has a critical role in the use of schemata as mental

representations, as described by (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977): “The environment provides

reference for the mental conceptualizations which become associated with the variables

in the schema” (p.102). If the mind serves as an index of knowledge, then the

environment activates that index. Context becomes important in a number of ways.

First, there is a direct correlation between the ability to recall information and the

similarity of the contexts where learning happened and where recall is expected, a

concept dubbed the encoding-specificity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973).

However, when a topic is learned in multiple contexts, two factors lead to greater recall:

there are more potential links with which to recall the information and the related

schemata become more generalized and access can occur from a top-down direction

(Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977). This is particularly true when recall is expected with a long

lag time from the learning event (J. R. Anderson, 1990).

When learning and recall do occur, any given idea is associated with contextual

elaborations from prior knowledge, imaginings and inferences, and the current

environmental surround (J. R. Anderson, 1990). Rumelhart & Ortony (1977) offer the

example of the phrase “I would like something to drink” (page 129). This phrase has a

very different meaning at a bar than it does at a children’s birthday party. Miller and

Gildea (1987) showed that vocabulary learned in a decontextualized environment was

often misused during recall while when words were learned in an appropriate context,

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learners were able to transfer that word for appropriate use in other contexts, due to the

elaborations surrounding the information.

It has also been found that recall is more accurate when learners are allowed to

generate their own elaborations from existing contexts as compared to when they are

given an a-priori context with which to remember it (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure,

Wood, & Ahmad, 1987). A final point to make regarding schema theory for the purposes

here is that these elaborations play a key role in the cognitive structures we create and

maintain as memory. These elaborations can be conceptualized as creating pathways and

alternate retrieval routes that the learner can use to access remembered information.

Additionally, the elaborations, along with schemata, offer alternate cues with which to

infer a forgotten bit of information (J. R. Anderson, 1990). The conclusion then is that

diversity of contextual cues at learning leads to greater fidelity and speed at recall.

Cognitive science has also provided evidence that could be extrapolated to the

outcomes of learning in-situ. It has been shown, for example, that semantic memory is

boosted when associated with episodic memory events (Menon, Boyett-Anderson,

Schatzberg, & Reiss, 2002; Verfaellie, Croce, & Milberg, 1995). That is, direct, personal

experiences lead to higher and more permanent rates of information assimilation.

Additionally, research has shown that contextual clues allow us to bypass our brain’s

penchant for filtering out new information (e.g. Martens & Wyble, 2010). This work

done in cognitive science should inform what is happening when an actual learner

interacts with her learning environment but there is a dearth of evidence supporting this

jump. An unpublished work by Hutchins is quoted by Brown et al. (1989): "’[W]hen the

context of cognition is ignored, it is impossible to see the contribution of structure in the

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environment, in artifacts, and in other people to the organization of mental processes’ (p.

67).”

Situated Constructivism

The study reported herein was conceptualized from a foundation that considered

learning as it exists in a situated context but did so largely by looking at the meanings and

representations assigned by individuals through experience. Therefore, a theory that

combines the cognitive and situative perspectives, and informed by ELT was needed. As

discussed in the previous chapter, Cobb & Yackel (1996) offer a theoretical framework

for such a union called “the emergent approach,” but I prefer the label situated

constructivism as it is more descriptive and reflects the traditions from which it was

developed. Within their framework, it is possible to locate analyses of individual’s

constructive activities in a social context (Cobb & Yackel, 1996). They describe the

impetus for this approach in this way:

In general, analyses conducted from the psychological constructivist perspective

bring out the heterogeneity in the activities of the members of a classroom

community. In contrast, social analyses of classroom mathematical practices

conducted from the interactionist perspective bring out what is jointly established

as the teacher and students coordinate their individual activities. In drawing on

these two analytic perspectives, the emergent approach takes both the individual

and the community as points of reference. This approach seeks to analyze both

the development of individual minds and the evolution of the local social worlds

in which those minds participate. (Cobb & Yackel, 1996, p. 180)

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How do the roles of the individual and the roles of the environment work together

within a conception of situated constructivism then? Perkins (1993) describes the

individual as containing and using higher-order knowledge, illustrating three reasons why

higher-order knowledge must exist within the person-solo rather than the person-plus:

First of all, because higher–order knowledge is referenced more or less

continuously by the executive function in complex inquiry activities it is not like a

formula that, checked once a month, might as well be buried in a book. Second,

higher–order knowledge is fairly stable, not ephemeral like scratch work, and so it

might as well sit in long–term memory. Third, higher–order knowledge is

relatively compact compared with the mass of facts and procedures in a domain.

(p. 104)

Perkins goes on to describe the close relationship between higher-order thinking

and executive function, noting that while executive function can certainly be distributed,

when it does occur within the individual, it typically requires ready access to higher-order

problem-solving skills. Greeno et al. (1996) describe the role of the ‘plus’ within a view

of situated constructivism: “The practices of a community provide facilitating and

inhibiting patterns that organize the group’s activities and the participation of individuals

who are attuned to those regularities” (p.20).

As discussed previously, Vygotsky saw a direct relationship between what occurs

in the socio-cultural environment and with individual thought via the process of

internalization. Wertsch (2007)connects this idea of internalization back to that of social

mediation: "It is because humans internalize forms of mediation provided by particular

cultural, historical, and institutional forces that their mental functioning is

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sociohistorically situated" (p. 178). All of these ideas are manifestations of development

for Vygotsky (Cole & Scribner, 1978), and as such he describes a relationship between

the biological and the cognitive but also a progression from the biological to the cognitive

in the sense that over time, a young learner begins to incorporate more of the external and

thus abandon the biological and sensory (Vygotsky, 1978). In this way, the developing

learner relies less and less on sensory stimuli and more on internalized thought and ideas,

or ‘artificial stimuli’. This could also be described as a greater reliance on schema in

interpreting the world.

Context and Learning

The immersion aspect of DIAL is an immersion into an authentic context, directly

related to the targeted content. There is an assumption then, that context contributes to

learning. The academic aspect of DIAL focuses attention on cognitive, academic

learning. Although there is no literature base specific to DIAL, there has been some

work done that looks at the role of context in learning and some specific work that has

focused on the role of contextualized learning in science education. This section will

begin with a general discussion of what context is and how it relates to learning.

Examination of the role of context in schools and contextualized science education will

follow.

General Understanding of Context

There are countless ways to conceptualize exactly what context is or is not.

Tessmer and Richey (1997) provide one definition. Context is “A multilevel body of

factors in which learning and performance are embedded… Context is not the additive

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influence of discrete entities but rather the simultaneous interaction of a number of

mutually influential factors” (p. 87, emphasis original).

Through contextualization there is a direct connection between experienced

events and concepts (Rivet & Krajcik, 2004b). Tessmer & Richey (1997) also point out

some important aspects regarding the relationship between context and learning. First,

they point out that we are “condemned to context” in that it is unavoidable. Removing or

minimizing some contextual factors only leads to their replacement by different factors.

Even an empty room with nobody else in it is a context for a learner. A second point they

make is that an instructional design can accommodate context but cannot create it. That

is to say, because context is inevitable, curriculum can work within it but it cannot

manufacture it from a vacuum. A third point is that context varies based on the intensity,

details, and individualized interaction with each learner (Tessmer & Richey, 1997).

Because of this, the meaning of any concept is always under construction as it is

reformed within ever-changing contexts (Brown, et al., 1989).

There are a number of experimental studies that have tested the role of context in

learning. Introducing semantic contexts through electronic games, it has been shown that

contextualization features promote memory recall and subsequent transfer of information

to new settings (CTGV, 1990; Robinson, 2001) as well as learning. Barab et al. (2009)

found that students instructed through immersion as an avatar in a virtual world scored

better on standardized tests than did textbook-instructed students. In a classic study of

contextualized learning of language, Miller and Gildea (1987) showed that when children

learn vocabulary out of context it is often misused and not retained whereas vocabulary

learned in context is both useful and retained. Language is a particularly good model to

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look at when considering science learning. They are similar in that they are both

comprised of fairly simple ideas and rules that become very complex when combined.

As Nunberg is credited with writing in 1979: “language use would involve an unremitting

confrontation with ambiguity, polysemy, nuance, metaphor, and so forth, were these not

resolved with the extra-linguistic help that the context of an utterance provide” (Brown,

1989). The words themselves have little or endless meaning without a context to place

them in. Without a context any knowledge is of limited use and incomplete (Spiro,

1988).

Despite this, much of what is taught in schools is decontextualized or is associated

with very minimal contextualization (Choi & Hannafin, 1995). In this way, the facts and

their meaning are dissociated, leaving the ideas open for confusion or misapplication

(CTGV, 1990). In many educational settings, context is seen as a constraint that must be

overcome: the socio-economic status of the students, the lack of resources, poorly trained

teachers, etc. Where we do see learning and context positively associated in the research

literature, it typically involves generating a descriptive narrative around an idea to help

students connect the contexts of their out-of-school lives with what is happening in the

classroom. There is little recognition of learning that relies on existing contexts for

support. In a telling quote, even researchers who study learning in context express

troubling ideas on the role of the complete context for learning: “the physical

environment does not so much increase learning when it is excellent as inhibit when it is

poor” (Tessmer & Richey, 1997, p. 96). If this is true, then DIAL is of little merit.

Rather, I contend, the quote reflects a very limited view of learning environments that

considers little beyond a traditional classroom.

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Though contextualization has been shown to support learning, it can also be a

detriment when learning is over-contextualized. In an experimental study, Son and

Goldstone (2009) created three computerized lesson treatments of technical information

to compare a lesson with a third-person, direct instruction perspective to instruction built

around a celebrity context and another built around a first-person perspective. Though

the lessons were short and overly simplistic, and the authors only looked at short-term

results, they did find that the two context treatments led to the introduction of personal

perspectives that were in contrast to accepted ways of knowing. In a more in-depth look

at learning in context Lave (1988) also found that learning in context could hinder

transfer. In her look at how “just plain folks” learn and use math, she found that people

tend to devise ways of calculating that work well within their own professional contexts

but do not transfer well to other applications (Lave, 1988).

Personally contextualized learning can be problematic as it can be more difficult

to transfer information when it is learned through that personal context. DIAL, however,

does not reposition the content into a personal context. Rather, it takes the learner into

the context so that they can use individualized perspective to pick out personally relevant

but actual cues and use the context in conjunction with academic instruction.

Context in School

As with the “just plain folks” of Lave’s (1988) work, students in schools are

asked to do the opposite task of taking what is learned in school and hopefully applying it

to their lives outside of school. The same disconnect is present moving from formal to

informal though. Students struggle with applying the clean, perfect, “compliant

knowledge” (McCaslin & Good, 1992) of the classroom with the unruly and messy

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applications of the real world (Choi & Hannafin, 1995). Resnick (1987) describes how

very few people, including highly trained professionals such as engineers and doctors,

use mathematics as they were taught in school, instead inventing their own situation-

specific algorithms that work for the contexts in which they work, or borrowing them

from others within their community of practice. However, Resnick (1987) also points out

that formally trained workers can more easily generate a new algorithm or apply a

different approach than can people who learned a math skill entirely in context (e.g.

Brazilian black market lottery bookies). It seems, then that a compromise is needed

between the formal and informal. Students need to learn formal knowledge and big

picture ideas but they must also learn how those ideas fit into the messiness of the real

world by experiencing those ideas within a real-world context.

There are two broad approaches to contextualizing education: introducing context

into the classroom and bringing the class out into context. Gilbert (2006) describes and

evaluates 4 pedagogical models of science education that have been touted as “context-

based curricula,” three of which fit the approach of introducing context into the

classroom. The following list is paraphrased from Gilbert (2006):

(1) Context as the direct application of concepts: a post-hoc approach of trying to

describe examples that illustrate the formal teaching. It does not include a

community of practice, nor language, nor behaviors common to the real life

application of the knowledge and requires very little background knowledge.

(2) Context as reciprocity between concepts and applications: the concept is

taught within an interdisciplinary approach framed in a societal or social need.

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The concept and application give each other meaning. Shifting meaning can be

confusing.

(3) Context as provided by personal mental activity: narrative based. A reader

empathizes with a story about someone in a community of practice using the

concept. Language from the community of practice is used and requires student to

develop an empathetic connection.

(4) Context as the social circumstance. Learning is considered to take place as

experiencing an authentic setting. Students participate in a community of

practice.

DIAL is most closely associated with the final category as students are enmeshed

in a real context rather than relying on the assumption that their previous experiences

give them the understanding to make sense of a hypothetical context. Of course DIAL

also takes into account many contextual details beyond the social.

Bulte, Westbroek, de Jong, & Pilot (2006) also studied different versions of

contextualization through ’need to know’ curricula and determined that there is an

important difference for a student between what a teacher might perceive as “need to

know” information and what a student considers relevant to his life. Context and concept

must be truly related and not just linked artificially through a narrative connection. A

narrative or couching of a problem within a greater societal context is not automatically

relevant for a student and thus it may not truly be contextualization for them (Bulte, et al.,

2006).

In a large-scale, pretest/posttest study of secondary students, Gerber, Cavallo, &

Marek (2001) examined the role of various types of contextualization on students’

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scientific reasoning abilities. They found that students who had regular access to

contextually enriched, informal learning environments outside of school showed greater

science reasoning ability than did students whose outside-of-school environments were

contextually impoverished. This suggests an important role for real, lived experience in

understanding even the formal science learned in school. Contextually rich inquiry

environments in science classes were also associated with higher scientific reasoning

ability than were more direct instruction models.

In a related study, Adey and Shayer (1990) showed that middle and high school

students who developed more extensive experiential knowledge bases also had higher-

order schemata regarding particular science concepts. This positioned the students to

achieve new understanding with less learning than was true for students without the

experience and schemata. Another large-scale project involving about 2500 secondary

students in Detroit public schools examined contextualized science learning designed

specifically to address learning standards (Rivet & Krajcik, 2004a, 2004b, 2008). One

finding of the project was that:

Those students observed in class relating both their personal experiences and the

science concepts to the driving question, anchoring events, and overall

contextualizing theme of the project appeared to have a stronger performance on

the pre / posttest assessment. Likewise, students who were not observed engaging

with the contextualizing features of the project during classroom observations did

not achieve strong pre/posttest gains. (Rivet & Krajcik, 2008, p. 95)

Rivet and Krajcik (2004a) also found that students in the project were more able

to transfer information and describe relationships between concepts as a result of

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contextualization. A drawback to the Rivet and Krajcik (2004a) study and one that is

common to most of the work that has been done on contextualization, is that it relied on

the assumption that students’ past experiences were applicable to the classroom work

they are doing. The Rivet and Krajcik (2008) study, for example was built around the

idea of the importance of bike helmets in understanding force. It assumed that the

students have experience riding bicycles and falling off of them, an assumption that was

probably not valid for all of the 2500 inner city kids in the study. Even if all of the

students had ridden and fallen off of bicycles, there was an assumption that that

experience had contextual clues that related to the present study of force. This also seems

problematic. We cannot assume that the details of the bike-riding experience that were

important during the event shared any commonality with the details that were important

for understanding force. The context may be hollow or confusing for students. For this

reason DIAL presents a very different approach to contextualization by providing

instruction and context simultaneously.

There is a real danger in moving a context from the real world to the classroom

where aspects of the context most important for learning are lost. There is also an

assumption that the teacher or curriculum developer knows which aspects of the context

are relevant and important for any given student, a dubious assumption at best. Brown

(1989) addresses these concerns well:

In the creation of classroom tasks, apparently peripheral features of authentic

tasks- like the extra-linguistic supports involved in the interpretation of

communication- are often dismissed as "noise" from which salient features can be

abstracted for the purpose of teaching. But the context of activity is an

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extraordinarily complex network from which practitioners draw essential support.

The source of such support is often only tacitly recognized by practitioners, or

even by teachers or designers of simulations. Classroom tasks, therefore, can

completely fail to provide the contextual features that allow authentic activity. At

the same time, students may come to rely, in important but little noticed ways, on

features of the classroom context, in which the task is now embedded, that are

wholly absent from and alien to authentic activity. Thus, much of what is learned

in school may apply only to the ersatz activity, if it was learned through such

activity. (p.34)

Past research has shown that contextualization of content knowledge can advance

learning in a number of ways, particularly with helping students make connections and

build schematic knowledge. There are also real dangers with over-contextualizing

information or with making assumptions about the connections between authentic

context, classroom context, and content knowledge. The next sections of this chapter

explore the role of experience in context and how that affects learning.

Experience in Authentic Settings

In DIAL context should be a contributor to learning as it was in many of the

studies cited in the previous section. Experience, then, is the student’s interaction with

context, the vehicle that bridges the gap between self and environment. In this section I

present a review of studies that have investigated the role of experience in learning,

particularly experience in authentic contexts. Few of the studies are focused on what

could be called DIAL but we can begin to see the outlines of DIAL when we trace around

the periphery. A broader look at the literature than might be desired was needed to

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examine the relationship between experience and learning. Evidence was drawn from

studies on day-long or shorter field trips, longer field experiences, science, and

geography, all at the elementary through college levels. The lack of deep immersion and

the wide range of developmental levels limit the applicability of these studies to DIAL

and to the present study but they do provide some insight as to how learning in authentic

environments manifests.

Much of the work cited in this section originates from outside the United States

where field-based pedagogies seem to be more popular and utilized. Outdoor learning in

general is examined along with a focused look at experiential science education. Again,

DIAL need not take place outdoors but that is where the literature base is and was the

setting of the cases reported through the present study. Some of the work stems from

international experiential geography immersion learning though it should be noted that

the curricula described in those studies would align well with Earth Science curricula in

the United States.

Two bodies of research were heavily reviewed for this project but included at

only minimal levels due to limited parallels. Adventure learning, such as what happens

on Outward Bound type courses, has some similarity to DIAL in the use of deep

immersion but the goals as well as the measured results of this type of learning are almost

always affective or social as opposed to cognitive in nature. The affective domain is

reviewed here but only as it affects the cognitive domain. Adventure learning does not

tend to have strong, if any, academic components. The literature on museum visits is also

compelling and while museums can be incredible learning environments, the presentation

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and control of knowledge is much closer to classroom learning than it is to authentic

learning environments.

Experience and Activity

Without going too far afield, a few studies on the outcomes of general experiential

curricula are worth discussing. The first was a very large study conducted by a physics

professor in response to an emerging crisis within his field (Hake, 1998). It was

becoming apparent that most college physics students finished their courses with very

little practical understanding of the concepts being taught. They could solve complex

physics equations but could not answer simple questions about the application of the

concepts. In searching for solutions Hake (1998) conducted a study that included 6542

college and high school students that had taken a validated measure of practical physics

knowledge. Of the participants, students in classes with any level of interactive

engagement scored two standard deviations above students in traditional lecture classes!

It should be noted though, that Hake (1988) collected test results from teachers and

professors who volunteered the information post-hoc and so there was likely to be an

underrepresented group at the bottom of the performance scale (Hake, 1988).

In a more dated look at 27 experience-based educational programs, Conrad and

Hedin (1982) determined through a meta-analytic process that the programs overall had a

significant positive impact on the social, psychological, and intellectual development of

the adolescents involved. A common claim of experiential education programs is that

they foster long-term, deeper knowledge yet very few studies have tracked long-term

effects. In one simple study 96% of respondents (n=128), including adults and children,

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could remember some details of a field trip they had taken in elementary school,

regardless of how long ago that might have been (Falk & Dierking, 1997).

Cognitive Learning

Anecdotal reports on the positive effects of experiential education abound.

However, in order to justify the use of DIAL or other experiential practices in a

standards-based environment, there must be empirical evidence of significant content-

focused cognitive learning as a result of using these pedagogies. This study contributes

to a growing body of research that does so, though focusing specifically on DIAL.

In a review of outdoor experiential learning, Dillon et al. (2006) concluded that

“fieldwork, properly conceived, adequately planned, well taught and effectively followed

up, offers learners opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills in ways that add

value to their everyday experiences in the classroom” (p. 107). Because most

experiential education trips into authentic contexts require small student groups and

teachers who are passionate about the approach, studies of them tend to be small scale

and difficult to reproduce (e.g. Knapp & Benton, 2006; Lisowski & Disinger, 1991;

Plante, Lackey, & Hwang, 2009). A notable exception tracked students for a year in 11

California schools that used experiential curricula and matched the schools either to

demographically analogous schools, or in a few cases matched experiential/non-

experiential classrooms within a school (SEER, 2000). Student performance was tracked

across a number of parameters including standardized test scores in reading, science, and

math as well as attendance rates, grade point averages, and other measures of engagement

(SEER, 2000). Students in the experiential schools scored higher in 72% of the

categories suggesting that the experiential approach had a multi-faceted impact including

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an impact on academic performance (SEER, 2000). Similar positive impacts on

cognitive learning have been documented in smaller scale studies in which learning was

measured with content tests following day trips to nature centers (Eaton, 1998; Milton &

Cleveland, 1995; Prokop, Tuncer, & Kvasničák, 2007). Knapp and Barrie (2001)

instructed 500, 4-6th grade students in a half-day immersive nature program and recorded

ecology knowledge gains regardless of whether the students took part in an ecology-

based lesson or an issues-based lesson. MacKenzie & White (1982) showed that students

taught the same earth science content were much more likely to retain that content three

months later when they were taught in an experiential manner in an authentic

environment than if they were taught in a traditional classroom.

Affective Learning

Although DIAL is focused on cognitive learning, there is a clear link between the

affective and cognitive domains, both in theory and in practice. The former was

reviewed above. Perhaps the closest link between the cognitive and the affective

domains is through engagement. A number of studies have shown that experiential

curricula lead to greater engagement in students (Ballantyne, Fien, & Packer, 2001;

Chapman, et al., 1992; Jakubowski, 2003; Shellman & Ewert, 2010). In one in-depth

look at an experiential program, O’Connor (2009) studied not just increased student

engagement in a number of Canadian, indigenous experiential education schools, but the

source of the engagement. He found that community partnerships; alternative forms of

evaluation; field studies; incorporation of indigenous culture, spirituality, and language;

alternative structuring and scheduling; and surprisingly, an acknowledgement of teacher-

centered curricula all had positive effects on student engagement. In other words, the

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positive effects of engagement were not simply a function of doing rather than listening,

they resulted from a multifaceted interaction with the full spectrum of the students’

context.

Within the environmental education literature, a primary interest is the role of

experience in natural environments on changing students’ beliefs about or relationship

with those natural environments. In one such study in Switzerland, Bogner (1999)

reported on a program in which students studied endangered migratory birds, built nest

boxes for them, observed them in the field, and communicated with students in Senegal

where the birds winter. He found that the students became emotionally invested in the

project, which led to the desire to build content knowledge and positive long-term effects

on the students’ attitudes toward the environment. Ballantyne et al. (2001) found similar

lasting attitudinal changes in students following a one-day visit to a nature center in

Australia. Though these affective changes may not be recorded by a standards-based test

or be directly linked to any science curricula in the U.S. it does seem reasonable to

assume that students who care about an environment would be more inclined to learn

more about it as Bogner (1999) reported.

Along those same lines, students who feel empowered, connected to their learning

community, and take ownership of their learning are more likely to learn more and more

deeply (Mink & O'Steen, 2003; Shellman & Ewert, 2010; Shirilla, 2009). In one report,

based on the assessment of two independent experiential education school programs,

Shirilla (2009) showed a positive effect of the programs on social skill development

though the effect attenuated in one of the schools after one year. After a similar

evaluation of a middle school program based on the Outward Bound model, greater

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behavior ownership, personal efficacy, and community involvement as well as much

higher scores on standardized tests compared to local and statewide control groups were

found (Mink & O'Steen, 2003). When students are challenged either physically or

academically in the course of experiential education experiences, and overcome those

challenges, they are often left with a heightened sense of empowerment (Shellman &

Ewert, 2010) which has ramifications for cognitive learning.

Novelty

The rich sensory environments of authentic contexts and DIAL specifically, offer

endless sources of multi-sensory information to the learner. This is the primary reason

for utilizing DIAL. Although our brains filter out much of what we experience

(Bransford, et al., 2000), novel experiences bypass much of that filtering as we take in

and try to make sense of the new information (Bransford, et al., 2000). The negative

repercussions of that are that students can be easily distracted in novel environments

(Burnett, 1996; Falk & Balling, 1982; Falk, Martin, & Balling, 1978; Martin, Falk, &

Balling, 1981; Orion & Hofstein, 1994). One could argue that the highly controlled

environments of the traditional classroom have developed in response to minimizing

student distractions from the world around them and this too is both good and bad for

learning. Much attention has been paid to the idea of novelty in experiential education

and it directly informs an understanding of DIAL. Openshaw and Whittle (1993)

suggested that successful pedagogy in these sensory enriched environment requires a

balance between “the students’ desire for a structure within which they can feel

comfortable and not threatened and the added excitement caused by the unexpected” (pp.

63–64).

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Most of the work that has been done with what Orion & Hofstein (1994) refer to

as the “novelty space” has been done with day-long field trips. In the seminal paper on

novelty, Falk et al. (1978) showed that elementary students who were unfamiliar with

forest environments spent much more time “off-task” and attending to exploration of the

environment while students who were familiar with the environment were able to focus

more readily on learning content knowledge. A pretest/posttest design showed that the

unfamiliar students scored as well as the others on setting-related questions but not as

well on content questions. In a follow-up study Falk and Balling (1982) compared

degrees of novelty and age differences, finding that the relationship between novelty and

learning was curvilinear and opposite such that at very low and very high levels of

novelty learning was lowest as students were bored or over-stimulated. Age had an effect

as well in that older students needed greater novelty to remain engaged and younger

students were engaged at lower levels of novelty.

Orion & Hofstein (1994) studied a construct called novelty space, a measure of

familiarity with the destination environment. They found that the educational quality of a

field trip is determined by its structure, learning materials, teaching method, and the

ability to direct learning to a concrete interaction with the environment. Learning

performance was higher when the novelty space was reduced with pre-trip lessons, a

practice that left students spending less time familiarizing themselves with the

environment once in the field. In their study Orion and Hoftein (1994) found that the

novelty space was a more central determinant of learning for students than were typical

variables such as teacher experience, grade level, or class size.

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It can be assumed that novelty plays a role with DIAL but it is not clear how the

novelty attenuates over time. It is interesting that students seem to be more focused on

the environment than on instruction at first but that this changes with greater familiarity.

More research is needed in understanding this evolving but seemingly predictable

relationship between the learner and her environment. Perhaps the heightened

exploration phase at the beginning plays an important role in learning when students have

the time to pass through that phase and into one in which they are more ready to be

instructed.

Immersion

The length of time that students spend in authentic environments does seem to

have an impact on other learning factors. Within the environmental education literature,

time is repeatedly cited as an important factor in changing student attitudes toward the

environment. In one such program, students in Belize spent five days in a residential

environmental education program in which that duration was seen be an important factor

in allaying fears and generating a positive attitude toward the environment (Emmons,

1997). In another study in Switzerland that looked at similar affective qualities along

with cognitive content knowledge, Bogner (1998) compared one-day and five-day

programs and looked at short term as well as long-term (one month) changes. He

determined that there were clear relationships between attitudes and knowledge and that

five days was the minimum duration for lasting affective and conceptual shifts.

Knapp and Benton (2006) interviewed students of a five-day, fifth grade,

residential ecology program in Yellowstone National Park, one year after their

experience. All of the students had retained content knowledge. Students’ recall was

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highly associated with actions the students had taken during the course; such as hikes and

games; and emotional events they had experienced, such as dramatic wildlife encounters.

The program in the Knapp and Benton (2006) study fits the definition of DIAL as do

reports from two other studies I found for this review.

One of these DIAL programs involved three different, seven-day marine biology

courses in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands in which students were focused on learning

the content knowledge and deeply immersed in the context. Liskowski & Dissinger

(1991) used a pretest/posttest/post-posttest design to measure content learning in the

short- and long-term (one month). The students did show significant growth without any

interactions including gender, age, identity, and even interest level. There was a

correlation between the emphasis teachers placed on a topic and the degree of learning of

that topic.

In a final case that can be called DIAL, Nundy (1999) conducted a study to

compare the learning of students in two “geography of rivers” classes, one of which took

place through a five-day residential experience in a field environment and another that

took place in a traditional but “active” classroom. Both cases involved students aged ten

and eleven in the United Kingdom. Both groups achieved gains in cognitive

development but the experimental group was significantly greater. The experimental

group alone gained significantly on their self-perceived academic ability and the authors

hypothesized that there may have been a causal relationship between the two findings.

Novel events were very closely associated with students’ recall of content knowledge

whereas the traditional school group cited only events that were focused on peer

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relationships. The process of learning also held meaning for the experimental group in

that the experiential process was important to them.

Environmental Components

The conceptual framework (Figure 1.1) guiding this study outlines elements of the

environment predicted to influence how students contextualize their knowledge when

engaged in DIAL experiences. These categories were developed based on the theoretical

foundations presented earlier in this chapter as well as the existing research on authentic

learning environments. Although much of the evidence leading to the conceptual

framework has been presented already, the connections to each of these environmental

components or categories are made in this section.

Social Contributions to Learning

As highlighted in the theoretical foundations above, the social component of a

learner’s environment should be a substantial contributor to learning in DIAL. Through

language as a mediating device, communities of practice, and abstraction, social means

are an efficient way to learn and otherwise process information. In the research literature

related to DIAL, the social milieu is shown to be both a positive and a distracting force in

learning.

In one New Zealand school camp study, a setting in which secondary students

spend a week at an environmental science camp, Smith, Steel, & Gidlow (2010) found

that student respondents focused heavily on social interactions and peer-networks,

building temporary but supportive communities that did not exist in the schools from

which the groups came. In the previously cited study of a five-day residential camp in

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Belize, the researchers found that students’ learning was facilitated by their shared and

direct experience of the surroundings, as well as their teachers’ role-modeling of their

interests and likes about the forest environment (Emmons, 1997).

Even on day trips to authentic learning environments there is some evidence to

indicate that relationships and power structures between teachers and students may

change. Dewitt and Hohenstein (2010) showed through discourse analysis that students

in their study asserted more authority temporarily while on field trips while teachers

tended to ask more open-ended questions of students. Lai (1999) found that the freedom

experienced in field learning changed the social relationships between teachers and

students for the day. Students were more proactive and felt like they had better rapport

with their teachers. Students also took more responsibility for their learning.

While students may feel freer to loosen power structures that dictate the flow of

knowledge, they may be more tightly bound by social structures within their peer groups

in these open-ended learning environments. For example, a study by Anderson, Thomas,

& Nashon (2009) showed that 11th grade students who spent a day at a nature center

working on collaborative projects were hindered by social power structures that limited

cognitive tasks. Argumentation and discourse were avoided if they threatened social

harmony, even amongst groups that appeared to be on task (Anderson, et al, 2009). The

authors reported that “there existed metasocial, metacognitive factors that influenced and

shaped cognition in ways counterproductive to the effective learning of science…” also

reporting “that students are highly aware of their social status within groups and of their

individual group's social conditions and that this awareness affects cognition and

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behavior” (Anderson et al, 2009, p. 511). This seems in keeping with other learning

environments but in outdoor settings students may be further from adult intervention.

There may be a contrast between what occurs over extended time periods as in

DIAL and what is reported from these one-day experiences but existing research does not

make this clear.


As reported above, there seems to be a general sentiment in education that the

physical learning environment can set a general tone but does not contribute directly to

cognitive learning. Borrowing from the adventure education literature, one study

reported that participants ranked the wilderness setting as being the most significant

component of the trip in terms of personal growth (Daniel, 2010). The wilderness in

some way encouraged introspection, reflection, and the construction of metaphors as well

as providing a source of challenge (Daniel, 2010). Even in this example, there is no

mention of direct learning from the environment. Indeed, there was no research

precedent found at all that addressed the role of the physical environment in contributing

to the learning of content knowledge.

The theoretical work on which this study is based does not provide much

guidance either. Vygotsky’s (1978) work suggests that our relationship with the

environment changes when we can interpret it through language and put labels on it,

bringing it into our awareness. Within situated learning theories there is a sense that the

physical environment is definitely part of the learning system but I am unaware of any

theorist that has addressed exactly what role the physical environment should or does

take in learning, with the exception of when elements of the environment are used as

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tools or the general idea of the environment limiting experience through affordances.

Because there are no available data to suggest that the physical environment does not

contribute directly to learning, I am left with the conclusion that it simply has not been

investigated, leaving an important gap in the literature.

Tools

Although tool use is well understood in school settings (e.g. CTGV, 1990), and

addressed heavily in situative learning theories (e.g. Pea, 1993; Wertsch, 2007), to the

best of my knowledge it has not been studied in the context of authentic learning

environments. Resnick (1987) offers some insight into the difference between tool use in

the real world versus the heavier focus on mentation that is seen in school settings. She

wrote,

Outside school, actions are intimately connected with objects and events; people

often use the objects and events directly in their reasoning, without necessarily

using symbols to represent them. School learning, by contrast, is mostly symbol-

based; indeed, connections to the events and objects symbolized are often lost.

(Resnick, 1987, p. 14)

It would be interesting to know if students engaged in formal learning in authentic

contexts tend to operationalize tools and symbols in scholastic or real-world patterns.

Affective and Individual

The roles of the emotional environment, along with the affective, and the

reflective components of the individual learner are all closely related. Experiential

Learning Theory describes the individual’s role in learning largely as one of reflection on

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experience to make sense of it and connect it to past learning. The more comprehensive

view that follows from situated constructivism is that the individual also has the role of

representing knowledge through memory and indexing the knowledge by recognizing the

places in the environment where the knowledge can be found and applied. These

functions have been shown in the research presented thus far as students learn and recall

discrete facts along with more schematic knowledge. The role of affective learning was

also apparent in some of the experiential education and the environmental education

literature presented above. There is a clear tie between interest, motivation, and

connection to the environment that leads to greater cognitive learning.

Culture

For this study and its basis in part in a situated view of learning, it is useful to

think of culture as funds of knowledge (Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993): information that

is historically and socially built up over time, collectively constructed and shared within

groups of people that share some element of commonality. Because culture is so all-

encompassing it would be difficult to pinpoint specific contributions that culture can

make to DIAL learning. It certainly seems possible that specific cultural mores and ways

of knowing could have an impact on learning but again it would be difficult to

disentangle the cultural elements that each individual student brings with them and those

that are in the background of a new learning context. Perhaps one cultural influence that

could be somewhat universal across DIAL experiences could be the transition from a

scholastic culture to the dominant culture of whatever context in which the students are

immersed. Brown (1989) addresses this well, along with the related use of academic

tools:

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Although students are shown the tools of many academic cultures in the course of

a school career, the pervasive cultures that they observe, in which they participate,

and which some enter quite effectively are the cultures of school life itself. These

cultures can be unintentionally antithetical to useful domain learning. The ways

schools use dictionaries, or math formulae, or historical analysis are very different

from the ways practitioners use them. (p. 34)

In two Australian studies, researchers looked at the role of cultural identity in

learning outcomes of outdoor education trips. Purdie, Neill and Richards (2002) found

that learning outcomes varied significantly with individuals’ cultural identities: “Most of

the gains were made by students who rated themselves as totally Australian, and not by

students who expressed somewhat of a lesser affiliation with an Australian identity”

(p. 38). They recommended that outdoor educators “need to devise strategies to counter

the psychological discounting and disengagement processes that are typical of how

individuals attempt to cope with stereotype threat” (p. 39). In a preceding study, Purdie

& Neill (1999) also found differences in affective changes based on cultural identity;

briefly summarize. The implications of these studies are that assumptions made about

goal setting and the link between cognitive and affective learning have cultural

foundations as well.

Facilitated Versus Peripheral Learning

The final piece of the DIAL framework is the distinction between facilitated and

peripheral learning opportunities. Although past research has not specifically framed

these learning opportunities in this way, there is ample research into the role of the

directed and undirected learning.

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Although hyperbolic in their approach, Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark (2006) lump

inquiry, problem based learning, experiential learning, and discovery learning together as

“minimally guided instruction” and compare the results of experimental studies of them

to practices that use “guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing

necessary for learning” (p. 76). They found that guided instruction has been shown to be

more effective than the broad group of minimally guided instruction. The finding is

compelling but the rigid selection criteria for Kirschner et al’s (2006) review biased the

results toward studies that were experimental and therefore limited to studies that showed

short-term, somewhat shallow learning. In one such study a group of young students

learned better through direct instruction than through discovery learning but again, the

treatments were very rapid and the study assessed only declarative knowledge (Klahr &

Nigam, 2004). Proponents of more open learning environments suggest that the process

takes more time but produces more lasting results. Mayer (2004) conducted a more

detailed review of discovery learning and came up with similar results - pure discovery

learning pedagogies did not hold up to scrutiny.

In a more compelling test of the role of direct instruction on learning, Novak &

Musonda (1991) conducted a twelve-year longitudinal study of students throughout their

primary and secondary school careers. The researchers provided an experimental group

with audio-recorded lessons of basic science concepts periodically throughout each year

of their schooling. Instructed students performed much better on science assessments

than did a control group, suggesting that this periodic direct instruction and early

intervention had important and lasting effects (Novak & Musonda, 1991).

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In response to the previously cited Klahr & Nigam (2004) study, Dean and Kuhn

(2007) recreated the Klahr & Nigam study but extended the amount of time given for

instruction and retention of the learned information. They concluded, “in this longer term

framework, direct instruction appears to be neither a necessary nor sufficient condition

for robust acquisition or for maintenance over time. The patterns of attainment observed

here point instead to a gradual and extended process of acquisition and consolidation”

(2007, p. 384). The work cited above has looked at the role of direct instruction in

general versus more open-ended instruction methods, all of which happened in

classrooms. This is informative as it relates to and is encompassed by the idea of

facilitation in the DIAL framework but it is not synonymous. Direct instruction is one

manifestation of facilitation but peripheral learning opportunities are not the same as

“minimally guided instruction”. Rather peripheral refers to learning directly from the

environment without any intervention at all from the teacher. One would expect that this

would be minimal or non-existent in a contextually impoverished learning environment

but may manifest in a contextually rich environment. A number of studies have

examined elements of the roles of facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities in

authentic settings.

In the previously described MacKenzie and White (1982) study, the authors

compared three treatments with students learning about physical features of coastal

environments: a traditional classroom delivery, a passive excursion to a natural area

where students were largely instructed, and an active excursion in which students learned

through participatory activities. Both of the excursion groups scored better on a content

knowledge test than the control group immediately following the learning events.

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However, twelve weeks later the active excursion group retained 90% of their knowledge

while the control and passive excursion group maintained around 50% (MacKenzie &

White, 1982). While the study did not specifically examine peripheral contributors to the

students’ knowledge, the results did suggest that students’ direct involvement with the

environment significantly enhanced their long term recall of the content.

Ballantyne & Packer (2010) reported on a study conducted with students aged 8-

17 in Australia who took one-day field trips to various sites. Before the trip the

secondary students reported getting out of school as the biggest thing they looked

forward to (33%) followed by equal parts experiencing nature, specific programmatic

elements, and learning about the environment (~20% each). All of the students were

least interested in "boring" elements such as facilitated talks and worksheets. Following

the trip students were asked what had contributed most to their environmental learning.

They reported that observing and experiencing the animals or the environment (33% of

students), instructors or guides (34% of students), seeing the consequences of

environmental mismanagement (22% of students) had been the most significant

contributors. Those elements that were emotionally engaging proved to be the most

compelling. Worksheets and note taking were unpopular with students and were not

associated with gains in content knowledge. Again, this study did not specifically

categorize facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities but one can see the influence

of clearly facilitated opportunities and assume that at least some of the wildlife sightings

and the affective connections were probably peripheral. One of the authors’ conclusions

speaks to the one potentially peripheral element:

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If one of the aims of learning in natural environments is to stimulate students to

reconsider their environmental attitudes and behaviour, there may be more to be

gained by allowing students to engage emotionally with the environment than by

attempting to enforce a more cognitive response. (Ballantyne & Packer, 2010, p.

229)

One additional finding that came out of the Ballantyne & Packer (2010) study was

that students who had received instruction related to and prior to the trip had higher levels

of anticipation for the trip. The role of facilitated lessons before and after a trip has been

studied by others as well. One such study found that a relevant follow-up activity after a

field trip but in the classroom led to higher gains on related content test scores than did

irrelevant follow-up activities or no follow-up (Farmer & Wott, 1995). Uzzell (1999)

emphasized the need for clear links to be made between outdoor activities (‘the world of

our physical surroundings’) and indoor activities (‘the world of the school’). Orion and

Hofstein (1994) provide a strong rationale for preparatory work that introduces students

to the cognitive (field trip concepts and skills), geographic (field trip setting), and

psychological (field trip processes) aspects of fieldwork, showing that such preparation

reduces the novelty space and increases learning.

The study that best informs the role of facilitated and peripheral learning

opportunities in field settings was conducted in Hong Kong and tracked students

throughout a day-long trip to a remote island to study geography (Lai, 1999). The day

was divided into one half that was very heavily guided by teachers and another half that

was much more open-ended and self-directed. Lai (1999) found that “while some

(students) preferred the teacher-guided tour of local physical features in the morning,

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others were much happier with the student-led field investigation in the afternoon when

they could ‘work on their own and hence have more freedom’ (p. 248).” That is, students

responded differently to the facilitated and the more peripheral elements of the trip.

Chapter Two Summary

In this Chapter I presented the findings from a review of the literature pertaining

to DIAL. The information was presented in four parts outlining the theoretical

foundations, understandings of context and contextualization, evidence concerning the

role that experience in authentic environments plays in learning, and a look at past studies

that have compared facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities.

To summarize the theoretical foundations, an understanding of DIAL is best

accomplished with a view that encompasses the individual mental representations

described through schema theory, and a more holistic account of how the schemata and

higher-order thinking of the person-solo interact with innumerable external physical and

social elements to result in a system of learning that is distributed throughout the

environment but centered around an individual. Experience becomes a person-solo

perspective of a learning environment and provides the connection between the

individual learner and her environment. Knowledge is constructed as an individual gives

meaning to information that is processed by and distributed throughout the physical and

socio-cultural environment. The theoretical background predicts that learning should be

greatest when learners have ready access to experience with contextually rich learning

environments.

Reviewing work that has been done with the relationship between context and

learning, a number of points were highlighted. First, contextualization has been

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repeatedly shown to increase learning, transfer and schematic knowledge but it comes

with the danger of over-contextualizing to the point where learners cannot accurately

transfer their knowledge to new settings. It was also shown that there is typically a

disconnect between real life context and school context and as such overly-simplified

contextualization in schools may lose important information by filtering out what seems

to be noise.

Experience in context has also been shown to increase both cognitive and

affective learning. Long-term immersion experiences into authentic contexts seem to

increase that learning and to overcome learning thresholds in ways that are not seen with

shorter trips to authentic environments. Novelty is a factor that has been shown to both

increase awareness and decrease learning (when too great). There is a strong theoretical

and empirical literature base that can explain the role of social interactions and affective

factors in DIAL. Less clear is how the physical environment, tools, and culture are likely

to impact DIAL.

The chapter closed with a look at facilitated and peripheral learning environments.

Many studies confirmed the advantages of having facilitated lessons within the

curriculum to preface a trip, reflect on it, or to stand alone. Other studies also showed the

value of peripheral learning opportunities, if indirectly. There was no evidence to

suggest that entirely discovery-based curricula were effective.

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Chapter III

Method

Overview

In this chapter I describe the research design, methods, and procedures of the

study. The study incorporated both quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve the

objectives. Those objectives were largely exploratory: to (a) assess student learning

during DIAL experiences and (b) describe the environmental factors that influence

students’ learning during DIAL experiences. The study used the conceptual framework

presented in Chapter One (Appendix A) to test the role of facilitated and peripheral

components of the learning environment as contributors to individual student’s structural

knowledge change following a DIAL experience. Two research questions guided the

study in addressing the research objectives:





These questions frame the structure of this chapter. Question 1 (Q1) was

addressed through a predominantly quantitative method, a pretest/posttest assessment of

student learning, described later in this chapter. The results for that part of the study

(called Part 1 hereafter) informed Part 2, a multiple case study focused on the second

research question (Q2). Student and teacher interviews, field study, and analysis of

student work also informed this research. Four high school science classes participating

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in DIAL served as the cases for the study. The qualitative methods are described in the

second part of this chapter. The overall research design could be described as a

sequential mixed methods design (Leech & Onwuegbuzie, 2007).

The study was guided by a pragmatist approach, which is characterized by “the

rejection of the dogmatic either-or choice between constructivism and postpositivism”

(Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009, p. 86). Pragmatism uses inductive, deductive, and

abductive logic and holds an ontological view that an external reality exists but cannot be

abstracted from personal belief and understanding (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004;

Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009). Guided by pragmatism, mixed methods can be seen as a

third research paradigm that has some commonality with both quantitative methods and

qualitative inquiry but that also requires some new approaches to research (Johnson &

Onwuegbuzie, 2004). In addition, a mixed methods approach balances the strengths and

weaknesses of qualitative and quantitative approaches, potentially resulting in a more

complete understanding of the problem being investigated (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009).

In this chapter I first describe the participants, including case selection, sampling,

and settings. The overall research design is then presented, followed by procedures

specific to each research question, including the data collection, preparation, and analysis

procedures. Specifics of bias/reflexivity and validation/legitimation close the chapter.

Participants and Settings

Case Selection and Sampling

Yin (2009) urges caution in using the word sample in case study research as the

implications of a statistical sample and statistical generalizabilty do not apply. Rather,

there is an intentional case selection and analytical generalizability (Yin, 2009).

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However, similarity can be found between case selection and what others describe as

sampling such as critical case sampling, defined as “selecting a single case that is

particularly important to the understanding of a phenomenon because it permits

maximum application of information to other cases” (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009, p.

175). Throughout this work I use case selection when describing the carefully selected

participant groups and sampling to describe the more objective selection of students

within those classes to be interviewed.

In this study science classes served as cases and were chosen based on their

participation in learning environments that best exemplify DIAL. To select these cases, I

compiled a list of public and independent schools in the Rocky Mountain West that

regularly incorporate into their curricula experiences that fit the DIAL definition. The list

was compiled from my conversations with experiential educators within my own

professional network and from an extensive internet search. I communicated with (via

phone or email) administrators at the secondary schools on the list and asked for

recommendations of highly qualified science teachers whose classes could be observed in

the DIAL process. Telephone or live interviews were conducted with recommended

teachers to determine qualifications and the appropriateness of their class/DIAL

experiences for this study. Criteria for selection included clear science learning goals,

science as a primary focus of the class, and extended student immersion into a context

that was intentionally selected to support the learning goals. Through this process, four

high school classes were invited to participate in the study. The characteristics of these

cases are described in the subsequent sections of this chapter.

Within each case, students were selected to participate in an interview process. A

stratified random sample approach was used when possible though this only worked out

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for one of the four cases. All available students were interviewed in the other three

classes. The goal was for eight interview students to be selected from each class. In two

cases this meant the entire class was interviewed and in a third case, most of the students

were interviewed. In the fourth class (Case 2) a group of 42 students was divided by the

school into two, three, or four groups depending on the nature of the learning activity.

That case was randomly sampled for the interviews from the two classroom groups, but

maintaining equal representation by gender.

For the field study portion of this project, an observational study of Case 4, four

students were chosen to be targeted informants in order to maximize diversity across the

variables of gender, grade level, and ethnic background. However, all students and

teachers were observed and became informants on some level. This sample is described

more later.

Similarities Across the Cases

Four high school classes were selected to participate as cases in this study. They

will each be described in the next section. Each case was a science class DIAL

experience that was either a stand-alone course (Cases 1 and 4) or part of a broader

semester course (Cases 2 and 3). In all cases, the course and DIAL experience were part

of the curriculum for which students earned credit, rather than extra-curricular activities.

Each of the schools associated with the cases is an independent (private) school, three of

which are tuition-based (Cases 2, 3, 4) and one that is foundation funded and free to

students (Case 1). A fifth case, a public school, dropped out of the study when the DIAL

experience was cancelled for logistical reasons. All of the schools are located in the

Rocky Mountain West. By coincidence, rather than by design, all of the classes were

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focused on some aspect of ecology and included immersion into an appropriate outdoor

environment. The names of schools, people, and place names that would compromise the

confidentiality of participants have been assigned pseudonyms in this report.

Case 1, Winter Ecology

The School, Case 1

Case 1 was a five-week class in winter ecology, taught at the Bald Mountain

Academy (BMA), a residential school in a high mountain valley bordering a national

park. The school campus itself is also a park-like setting with modern facilities scattered

throughout a ponderosa pine forest, rolling hills, and dramatic rock outcrops. Residence

halls, classroom buildings, and other small structures are scattered around two central

administration and dining/gathering buildings. The grounds include extensive holdings

of forest and different ecological communities.

The school is funded by a private foundation allowing all students to attend for

free. BMA is designed to serve high school students from around the country who “were

not successful in previous attempts at school” (school representative). Many of the

students have struggled with addictions or other high-risk behaviors in the past but the

school is not ostensibly a rehab or therapeutic program. Their mission, rather, is to help

students “have the desire and preparation to make a difference in the world" (school’s

mission statement). This is largely achieved through a robust academic program with

much individual support for the students and a strong socio-emotional curricular focus.

Students are expected to contribute to the community by helping out with cooking,

cleaning, and maintenance tasks. Students tend to come into the school having given up

on education and often leave bound for post-secondary schooling.

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BMA does not use a grade-level system, instead requiring all students to

successfully complete classes with a predetermined curricular formula, a credit system.

Students can complete this within a couple years of three trimesters (year-round school)

or it may take them five or more. In any given trimester students are enrolled in a

number of different classes of their choosing, covering the traditional academic

disciplines and often interdisciplinary foci. Students are required to present their learning

in an oral defense style periodically throughout their school careers.

The school supports a strong socio-emotional curriculum that begins with a

wilderness orientation trip and is maintained implicitly and explicitly through residential

house communities, and regular, deliberate attention paid to the health of the whole

community. Each class is also charged with having a deliberate socio-emotional

component. Most of the classes include some level of experiential education.

The Students, Case 1

Many of the students at BMA come from urban areas and the population is

intentionally diverse across race, ethnicity, geography, and gender identity and is

probably representative of the national population. The teachers report a wide diversity

of ability levels and learning disabilities as well, though the school claims to avoid

labeling students in this way, preferring to meet the needs of each individual student in

whatever way is needed. In the Winter Ecology class the teacher described

differentiating by offering students multiple options on most assignments including

“mild” (easier) and “spicy” (more difficult) options for most readings. BMA has a

capacity of 96 students and enrollment is determined by a good fit between student and

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school rather than ensuring all seats are filled so the student population can vary from

trimester to trimester.

There were eight students in the Winter Ecology class with three girls and five

boys, all of whom were interviewed for this study. The students came from all over the

country including California, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, and Indiana. One student

recently emigrated from the Middle East. The teacher of the class estimated that the

reading levels of the students (an admittedly faulty proxy for general ability) ranged from

third or fourth grade to undergraduate levels. None of the students had previously taken

an ecology class nor did any of them have much experience in the outdoors, other than

their wilderness orientation trip at the beginning of their BMA experience. All of the

students selected the winter ecology class but did so for different reasons. Some cited the

need for a science credit, while others reported being attracted to the skiing or outdoor

elements of the class.

The Teacher, Case 1.

Jacob, the teacher of the winter ecology class has been teaching at BMA for 15

years and teaching the winter ecology class for seven to eight years. He is not trained as

a science teacher but has co-taught the class with others who were and he has a

background/teaching role in the school in exercise physiology and experiential education.

Despite the lack of a formal educational background in ecology, numerous

conversations/interviews with Jacob have demonstrated that he has a command of the

subject. In addition to Jacob, a teacher intern participated in the class, teaching one or

two lessons and joining the group for outings. Other school faculty also joined the group

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as additional adult support for the outdoor excursions but did not have an explicit

teaching role.

The Class, Case 1

The Winter Ecology class focused on the adaptations that plants and animals

have acquired and that enable them to survive the montane winter environment. The

learning goal of the class was that students could use specific examples from the winter,

montane environment to articulate how plants and animals have developed evolutionary

adaptations to survive in a particular environment. Learning how to travel on skis in the

backcountry and take care of oneself in the harsh environment were also big parts of the

class. The curriculum relied on the study of very specific examples to connect to broader

themes in ecology and biology. For example, deciduous plant adaptations to the winter

environment such as the phytochrome clock and the release of abscisic acid to signal the

shedding of leaves were studied with the intent of a broader connection to photosynthesis.

For the assessment of concept knowledge, described later in this chapter, the following

concepts were chosen by Jacob as representing the depth and breadth of the class:

montane ecosystem

adaptation tree animal winter

deciduous coniferous aspen ponderosa lodgepole

phytochrome clock

dormancy food storage hibernation body insulation

subnivean elevation abscisic acid desiccation photosynthesis

The class met three times per week for five weeks through January and February.

Two two-hour sessions each week were devoted to classroom instruction though there

were many occasions where the class left the classroom and entered the natural areas

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immediately adjacent to the building to focus study on the local environment. Once per

week the class left campus for the entire afternoon, often traveling to the local national

park or national forest land to ski into the backcountry and study the ecology in-situ.

Students were assessed via a variety of means including traditional quizzes, brief reports,

graphic organizers, creative writing, and simple group projects. The final assessment was

through a complete notebook of the class.

The DIAL Experience, Case 1

The mix of classroom instruction and day trips out into a natural environment

does not necessarily fit the definition of deep immersion. However, taken with the

residential nature of the school and the setting of the school immediately within the

context being studied, the overall effect did give the sense of deep immersion and this

was confirmed by students through the interview process. Even the classroom time itself

was punctuated by lessons/activities in the adjacent natural areas and as some students

described, a visit from a bobcat that walked up to the window while the students were

sitting in class. The day trips added an element of much deeper immersion into the

context as students explored and viewed the areas of study in addition to experiencing the

harshness of the environment first-hand.

Case 2, Winter Environmental Science

The School, Case 2

The Western Semester Program (WSP) is a nonprofit organization that enrolls

high school juniors from around the United States for an intensive residential academic

program. WSP is one of the growing numbers of semester programs in the country

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though it is one of the more established. These programs accept high school students

from around the country and immerse them in focused, contextualized learning

environments for a semester. The WSP program incorporates traditional delineated

academics into immersion experiences and so there are elements where the science

content is more highlighted and other times where it is more in the background. Students

enroll in either a fall or spring program intended to provide an alternative to one semester

of their high school career. Students continue to earn high school credit through their

home institutions and so WSP is charged with providing equivalent curriculum, albeit

within a very different context. Students take classes in the traditional academic

disciplines, complete homework assignments, and are assessed in a variety of traditional

and more progressive ways. Students also learn and practice wilderness travel, safety,

and ethics as well as leadership and group-building skills. Arguably, the science class the

students take is the one class that is closely related to the context the students are learning

in.

Throughout the semester students are living and learning either at the residential

base campus or are out in the field for extended expeditions in the mountains or desert

canyons. The sprawling campus is located in a high elevation, mountain setting adjacent

to extensive swaths of national forest and, like Bald Mountain Academy, it is built within

the montane ecosystem, giving students direct access to the science context they are

studying. Students live in modern cabins but are required to chop their own wood to heat

them and must walk, often through subzero temperatures, to use the central bathhouse,

restroom, classrooms, and dining hall.

Also like BMA, students are expected to contribute to the community by helping

with cooking, cleaning, and maintenance tasks. During three extended periods (ten days

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to three weeks) spread throughout the semester, students dive more deeply into the

wilderness by participating in extended backpacking or ski expeditions. During these

times students are in smaller groups (eight to ten) with two adult leaders and must survive

off of what they can carry. During the winter expeditions students live in igloos that they

build themselves and otherwise live in tents. Direct instruction is minimal during the

expedition periods as teachers are divided up amongst the groups but all students are

expected to complete defined, self-directed or group projects related to each of the

academic disciplines in which they have classes.


WSP students are recruited from throughout the United States and due to the high

tuition, they tend to be affluent or have the support to apply for available scholarship

funds. Student diversity is negligible. In order to enroll a student the WSP must work

extensively with the sending school to ensure that credits earned in the program will

transfer back to a student’s home school. The program reports that independent schools

tend to be much more accommodating in this regard than public schools they have

worked with. Because of this there is a collection of independent schools on the East and

West coasts that have built relationships with WSP and tend to send the majority of

students to the program. Although student ability levels are variable, the history of

supports that most of the students have received in past schooling is evident. All of the

students had previously taken a biology class and a few had taken some version of

environmental science.

Forty-two students were enrolled in the program at the time of this study and all

but one chose to participate in the pretest/posttest part of the study. An additional student

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was not present for the posttest. Sixteen students were selected for interviews via a

random sample, stratified by gender. Eight students were selected from each of two

identical classes within the program.

The Teacher, Case 2

Ryan, the teacher of those classes holds an undergraduate degree in geology and

at the time of the study was completing a master’s degree in experiential science

education from an institution with a long history in that field. He left the program early

to take the job at WSP with the intention of finishing the degree remotely. Despite being

a first year teacher, Ryan’s content knowledge and leadership skills, likely developed in

his previous position as an Outward Bound instructor, gave the impression that he had

been teaching for much longer. The class also had a teacher intern who taught occasional

brief lessons.

The Class, Case 2.

The curriculum of the Case 2 class was intended to complement the typical high

school science classes participants had taken, and also to fully utilize the outdoor

environment in which they were learning. The curriculum was a place-based view of

environmental science and ecology focused on the relationship between abiotic and biotic

factors and the specific conditions/adaptations to be found in the places the students

would be living in throughout the course. The curriculum also followed the seasons,

focusing on winter adaptations, snow science, patterns of orographic precipitation when

appropriate, and transitioning to migration, geologic foundations of ecology, and

ecological events later in the semester. Two learning goals drove the curriculum. The

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first goal was that students could describe the thermodynamics of an ecosystem including

the abiotic factors that drove thermal changes in the environment and how thermal stress

led to different organismal adaptations. The second learning goal was that students could

articulate with specific local examples how plants and animals have adapted to the

environments in which they live including obtaining energy, travel, and predator

avoidance. Ryan selected the following concepts for use on the pretest/posttest:

geology biology seasonality animal energy

survival strategies

plant abiotic biotic community

conifer migration resistance hibernation snow

subnivean metamorphism thermal conductivity

sage orographic precipitation

Assessment of the class content was done primarily through homework

assignments and the results from the expedition assignments.


For the purposes of the present study I looked at one 18-day segment of the

science course where students were living and learning at the high elevation campus.

During the time on campus students had 90-minute class meetings two times per week

and one half-day outdoor lab once per week (three in the time span of the study). WSP

was similar to BMA in that the curriculum developers found a way to produce a science

DIAL experience that did not require a hiatus from other subjects but still resulted in

deep immersion into the context being studied.

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Case 3, Crane Migration Study

The School, Case 3

The Roosevelt School is an independent day school serving students in a mid-

sized Western city in grades 6-12. The school is tuition-based but offers varying levels of

scholarship funds to at least 50% of the students. While committed to “educating the

whole person”, the school has a clear academic focus and college-prep mission. This is

achieved through innovative teaching and curriculum including place-based and

experiential approaches. The small student body and focus on a socio-emotional

curriculum give the sense of a tight community.

The curriculum model is very similar to the Expeditionary Learning model

(www.elschools.org) though they do not have a formal relationship with that

organization. Content is taught largely through learning expeditions in which students

spend each semester engaged in developing an understanding of a topic from an

interdisciplinary perspective. For example, they might be following the guiding question

“what does it mean to be human?”, and develop an answer based on biology as well as

philosophy, literature, and religion. While there is no requirement that a class ever leave

the classroom for an expedition, it would be rare that a class would not venture out into a

contextualized environment periodically or participate in a DIAL experience at some

point within the time span of the expedition.


The students at Roosevelt tend to enroll when looking for a strong alternative to

the public school choices available in the city. They are often looking for pedagogy that

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is more in line with their own perceived learning styles, including but not limited to the

extensive trips that students take or a more socially supportive environment. The school

has about 30 students each in the middle and high schools. While there is low diversity

overall, there is a wide variety of ability and motivation within the student body.

There were five girls and five boys enrolled in the class that served as a case for

this study. All were in ninth or tenth grade. Of those students, two were absent for the

pretest and two were absent for the posttest, leaving six to be interviewed- three boys and

three girls. The students do not have a choice in the classes or expedition in which they

enroll as only one class/expedition is offered per semester for each grade level. A few of

the students reported ambivalence toward the study of cranes or their migration though

others were very excited about it.

The Teacher, Case 3

Jennifer had been a math and science teacher for seven years at the time of the

study and holds a master’s degree in education. Though entirely responsible for the

science aspects of the course, Jennifer was co-teaching the expedition with another highly

experienced educator. During the DIAL experience an art teacher and a parent also

participated as chaperones. In addition, Jennifer arranged for the class to work with a

local expert on cranes, a biologist from the Audubon Society, for much of the DIAL time.

The Class, Case 3

The expedition (class) associated with the DIAL experience was an integrated

studies class exploring human and animal migrations across time and space. This

included a focused case study on the sandhill crane migration across North America.

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Students were intended to learn about some of the crane physiology and behavior but the

major learning goal was that students could articulate the relationships between crane

habitat and human agriculture and development. Before the DIAL experience students

studied these topics through projects, discussions, readings, and films. Students were

assessed in the pretest/posttest on the following concepts:

Subspecies Sandbars Wet Meadows Roosts Unison Call

Reproduction Dancing Display Predation Migration

Preening Feeding Agriculture Habitat Behavior

Assessment was done primarily through a journal/notebook that each student kept

throughout the class and DIAL experience with some guided assignments and writing

prompts and at times, the expectation of self-directed journaling.


As part of this study the class traveled to the Platte River in Nebraska, which is a

major stopping point for tens of thousands of sandhill cranes as they migrate north in the

spring and south in the fall. The group spent three days immersed in the environment of

the crane habitat and also in the culture of the biologists and birders that gather to observe

the cranes. For much of the time students worked directly with and were instructed by a

biologist from the Audubon Society Crane Center. Students spent a significant amount of

time in bird blinds near the river, observed the birds foraging in corn fields, and visited a

local museum that focused on the cranes.

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Case 4, Everglades Ecology

The School, Case 4

The Walton School is a residential independent school that sits in a 300 acre

mountain valley ranch in the western U.S. The school has a long history for a western

boarding school, having been in existence for almost 60 years. The school follows a

traditional curriculum for the most part, including a selection of AP courses, but also

offers 8-day interim courses as a break within the winter semester. These courses are

stand-alone courses that may or may not reference other classes students have taken and

can and do range to just about any subject. The school has a strong science program,

offering the traditional science classes (biology, chemistry, physics) along with a number

of additional options including geology and AP Environmental Science.


The school enrolls 155 high school students from around the world (20%

international students) resulting in wide cultural diversity and while there is some socio-

economic diversity due to scholarships utilized by 41% of students, the majority of the

student population is affluent. Most of the students are boarders though some are day

students from the surrounding community. There is a diversity of abilities and the school

provides dedicated learning specialists for students who need additional support.

There were six boys and two girls who participated in the interim class that was

the DIAL experience in this study. Three of the boys were in ninth grade, three boys and

one girl were in eleventh grade, and one girl was in twelfth grade. One of the girls was

from Germany, the other was from China, and the boys came from all over the United

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States. The older students had all studied biology and a few of them had taken AP

Environmental Science prior to enrolling in the class. The ninth grade students were

enrolled in Biology during the semester in which interim fell. All of the students

specifically chose to enroll in the class.

The Teacher, Case 4

Paul had been a math teacher at the Walton School for 15 years at the time of the

study and holds a master’s degree in math education. He is also heavily involved in the

school’s wilderness education program. Through interim classes he has co-taught a

number of ecology classes with other educators, including a previous iteration of the

Everglades Ecology course. Based on the pre and post teacher interview, he seems to

have a command of ecology big ideas, if not always the detailed content knowledge.

Paul is also an interested learner of science, something he did throughout the course by

reading books, talking with the guide, and studying the environment directly. It was clear

that Paul had a good sense of the big picture ideas important to high school ecology as he

often discussed how small details connected to the broader ideas.

In order to provide a more learned perspective on Everglades ecology as well as

to ensure a safe and logistically clean trip, Paul contracted with a local guide to provide

most of the equipment, suggest routes, and co-lead/co-teach the course. Kevin, the guide,

had trained with and worked for Outward Bound before running the guide service he

currently works for. Kevin was not formally trained as a scientist but had an extensive

naturalist’s understanding of the local ecology, which he readily shared with students.

Kevin was a member of an Everglades preservation consortium that included scientists

and politicians.

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The Class, Case 4

Following one pre-trip meeting, the entirety of the Everglades Ecology course

happened during the DIAL experience. The learning goals of the class included

developing a deeper understanding of the abiotic factors that led to ecosystems’ niches

and the plant and animal adaptations to those niches, as well as understanding the past

and current role of humans in shaping the Everglades ecosystem as it currently exists.

There was very little in the way of assignments for the students other than a brief research

project that students completed in about an hour before the trip and presented at an

appropriate time during the course, along with open-ended reflective journals that Paul

asked students to write in a couple times but were otherwise up to the students to use or

not. Most of the content was delivered orally or via demonstration during the trip. The

following topics were assessed on the pretest/postest:

ecosystem adaptation water flow food web shell midden

human impact tides invasive species air plants niche

marine mangroves biomagnification pneumatophore mercury

filter feeding elevation hardwood hammock

cypress swamp parasitism


As mentioned, almost the entire course occurred during the DIAL experience.

Over the course of eight days the students traveled from their Western school by plane

and then van to the Florida Everglades. Camping each night, students first visited the

Everglades National Park, using park boardwalks, trails, and interpretive centers to better

understand the flora, fauna, and ecology of the area. Students walked within a meter of

the wildlife including alligators and endemic birds. Switching to canoes for five days,

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students travelled through the freshwater swamps of the inland Everglades, through the

estuaries and mangroves that transitioned to the marine ecosystem, and then out into the

Gulf of Mexico and the barrier islands that form the edges of the ecosystem. Finally,

students spent a day hiking off trail through cypress swamp and sawgrass prairie in a

Florida state park. Much of the time was spent canoeing or hiking from one place to

another but Paul and Kevin, the teacher and guide, would stop occasionally to deliver a

brief natural history lesson or demonstration. There were a few times when the group

would get together for more lengthy, formal lessons where students would participate in

discussions and take notes.

Research Design

In this study I used a sequential mixed methods design. In order to answer the

first research question of whether students learn science content concepts during DIAL

experiences, an assessment of science knowledge structures was administered in a

pretest/posttest design (Part 1). Building from the results of Part 1, I used a multiple case

study design in Part 2 to further explore the nature of that learning and the environmental

contributors to it (Q2), as outlined in the conceptual framework (Appendix B) described

in Chapter One. The case studies included the four previously described cases using

individual students as the embedded units of analysis. The procedures used to investigate

each research question are described in the following sections of this chapter. The

synthesis of this research was conducted through cross case analysis of the data from the

case studies, along with the test results from Part 1. The flow of how the various data

contributed to the synthesis is diagrammed in figure 3.1.

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Procedures- Research Question 1

To answer the question, “Do students’ knowledge structures reflect greater

understanding of science concepts following a DIAL experience?”, Pathfinder Network

Analysis (Dearholt & Schvaneveldt, 1990), a network analytical tool, was used to

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measure students’ concept knowledge structures before and after their DIAL experience

by comparing both to an expert referent. The underlying assumption behind Pathfinder

and other measures of structural knowledge is that knowledge of a domain can be

reflected by an understanding of the relationships between concepts important to the

domain (Branaghan, 1990; Goldsmith & Johnson, 1990; Schvaneveldt, Durso,

Goldsmith, Breen, & Cooke, 1985). As described in Chapter One, the DIAL approach

focuses on content knowledge within a given domain but it remains open to indefinite

contingencies in which the material may manifest in different ways, contexts, and

emphases. An assessment of structural knowledge allows for an assessment of domain

knowledge that is less confounded by contextual differences between assessments and

experiences (Goldsmith & Johnson, 1990; Schvaneveldt, et al., 1985). As the goal of this

study was to explore change in student understanding of big picture concepts within

domains rather than discrete facts, the Pathfinder process provided a measure that

illuminated change in conceptual knowledge while simultaneously being open to a wide

variety of ways in which that knowledge could be contextualized.

Pathfinder is a graph theoretic algorithm that considers either similarities or

distances between a series of pairs of items in a network and arranges them into a PFnet

graph (Dearholt & Schvaneveldt, 1990). Figure 3.2 shows an example of a PFnet from

this study.

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PFnet Example

Figure 3.2. Example of a PFnet generated from relatedness responses on the Everglades assessment.

These PFnets arrange all of the nodes of the network in an economical network

graph such that (a) every link (edge) between two nodes is assigned a weight that reflects

how closely associated the two nodes are; (b) the sum of the weights of the edges that

must be passed through to move from one node to another is the path weight and

therefore the lower the path weight, the closer the connection between two nodes; and (c)

any edges are removed if the path weight between the two nodes is less when following

an alternate route through the graph (Dearholt & Schvaneveldt, 1990). The result is that

the graph shows the most salient relationships, a more intuitive positioning of nodes, and

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more accurate local relationships than do other measures of structural knowledge such as

multi-dimensional scaling or cluster analysis (Dearholt & Schvaneveldt, 1990).

Goldsmith, Johnson, & Acton (1991) sum up the justification and the nature of both

Pathfinder Analysis and the associated C measure:

If it is assumed that knowledge implies the understanding of the interrelationships

among the important concepts in a domain, then the methods that best capture this

structural aspect of knowledge will possess the greatest validity. In this regard, the

Pathfinder algorithm considers each concept's proximity to all other concepts in

the proximity matrix in determining its location in the network. Similarly, the C

measure assesses global similarity of networks by considering the relationships

that each concept has with other concepts in the network. It is in this manner that

Pathfinder and C can be seen to capture the configural character of domain

knowledge. (p. 94)

C is a set theoretic measure used to determine the closeness between two PFnets

by comparing the “neighbors” of each of the nodes in the two PFnets (Acton, Johnson, &

Goldsmith, 1994; Goldsmith & Davenport, 1990) and therefore it requires common nodes

between the two PFnets. When used together, C can show the degree of similarity

between two PFnets (Acton, et al., 1994). Values for C range from 0 to 1 where a 1 is a

perfect match between the two graphs and a 0 indicates no relation between them.

In testing this procedure as a predictor for student test performance, Acton et al.

(1994) compared students’ PFnets representing their conceptual knowledge structure on a

given topic to a series of different referent PFnets to determine which one was the best

predictor of student test performance. They found that an average of experts’

representations was the best predictor. Pathfinder results are a good indicator of

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conceptual understanding within a given domain (Acton, et al., 1994). Thus, for this

study, student responses to the Pathfinder assessment were compared to an averaged

expert referent both before and after the DIAL experience and the similarity was

expressed as C. A further manipulation corrected C for chance by subtracting the value

that could be achieved through random answers on the Pathfinder assessment and this

was represented as similarity corrected for chance (csim). The csim measure accounts for

differences in the number of pairs being compared, allowing for comparison of csim

values between different sets. For each case’s assessment a referent was generated by

averaging the relatedness scores judged by three experts: the teacher of the class and two

ecologists.

Preparing the Pathfinder Instruments

For each class/case, a new instrument based on the target science concepts for

their DIAL experience (shown in class descriptions earlier in this chapter and

representing the learning goals of each class) was created in order to serve as the PFnet

nodes for each student’s concept knowledge structure. Results of the Pathfinder process

have been shown to be a reliable representation of student knowledge (Durso & Coggins,

1990; Gammack, 1990; Goldsmith & Johnson, 1990; Goldsmith, et al., 1991; Rubin,

1990; Schvaneveldt, 1990; Schvaneveldt, et al., 1985) but each individual instrument

needed to be created to assess the specific concepts of each individual class.

The student interviews conducted after the posttest were used to validate each

instrument for the purpose of accurately representing students’ understanding of the

relationships between concepts. The students were asked to describe their understanding

of the relationships between concepts that were captured by the PFnets and for each class

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at least one concept was common for all interviewed students (Case 1 = elevation, Case 2

= thermal conductivity, Case 3 = habitat, Case 4 = tides). With one exception (Case 1,

Student 104) students were able to describe relationships to the concept in a manner that

reflected the structure and weights shown on the student’s PFnet and what would be

considered canonically accurate domain knowledge. That is, the arrangement of concepts

within each PFnet matched their descriptions of the relationships between concepts. The

interview process is discussed later in this chapter. Because student interviews were not

conducted prior to the pretest, the instruments were not validated only for the purpose of

representing knowledge structures and not for the purpose of showing change from the

pretest to the posttest. Students were able to describe these changes post-hoc.

The “Knowledge Network Organizing Tool” (KNOT,

http://www.pathfindernets.com/KNOT.html) software program was used to generate the

PFnets for each student. To do so, the program requires that the subject(s) rate the

relatedness of each target concept to every other target concept. A rating scale of 1-7 was

used such that a 1 indicates the two concepts have no relationship, a 7 indicates a very

close relationship between the two concepts, and a 4 indicates that the student does not

know if a relationship exists, likely because they do not know one or both concepts

(Acton, et al., 1994).

Determining how many pairs of concepts to include required a balance between

validity and workload for the students. If n is the number of concepts, then n(n-1)/2 is

the number of relatedness scores that a student must consider. For example, for n=20

concepts, a student would need to consider 190 different concept pairs. Goldsmith et al.

(1991) found a linear relationship between the number of concept pairs considered and

the predictive validity of the tool, finding no asymptote even at n=30 (435 pairs).

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Therefore, the greater the number of concepts, the greater the accuracy of the assessment.

Although Goldsmith et al. (1991) did not report problems with longer tests, it can be

assumed that increasing the number of pairs and the amount of time would also increase

fatigue and ennui amongst students taking the test. For this study, the number of

concepts to be used was determined in conjunction with the teacher for each class, with a

goal of 20 and a minimum of 10. For Cases 1, 2, and 4 we used 20 concepts, while for

Case 3 we decided on 15 to focus on the most salient concepts for that course. The

concepts, listed earlier in the chapter, were determined in a pre-DIAL interview with the

teacher. The criteria were that each concept needed to be relevant and important for the

DIAL part of the class and taken together, the concepts needed to cover the diversity of

the content to be taught. Taken together, student understanding of the concepts needed to

reflect achievement of the learning goals for each class. Using lesson plans and

supporting materials, each teacher was given the opportunity to generate a list of concepts

prior to the interview and then we negotiated the finalized list in the interview.

Once the list of target science concepts (TSCs) was complete for a class, the pairs

were randomized and printed in numbered rows with an associated series of 1 through 7

for the students to circle. An abbreviated example is shown in figure 3.3. All of the

concepts were listed at the top of the first page. Students were asked to first create

“anchors” by choosing the pair that was most similar and assigning a seven to that pair,

choosing the pair that was least similar and assigning a one to it, and then using that as a

scale for the remainder of the relatedness judgments (Acton, et al., 1994). Students were

intentionally not given any further instructions on what “relatedness” meant as it is

important for them to decide that on their own (Acton, et al., 1994).

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How Related are These Concepts?

Name:______________________________________ School:________ Date:________

Instructions: Please rate how ‘related’ each pair of words or concepts is. A 7 indicates that the two concepts are very closely related and a 1 indicates that the two concepts are not related in any way that you can think of. Use a 4 if you do not know one or both of the concepts. The remaining numbers are gradations so a 2 is only a tiny bit related and a 5 is definitely related but not as closely as a 7. It is helpful to create ‘anchors’ for 1 and 7. To do this, look at the words/concepts listed below these instructions. Pick the two that are definitely the most related-‐ this pair will be a 7. Pick the two that have the least in common-‐ this pair will be scored a 1. It is important that you ‘go with your gut’ and don’t second guess-‐ go with what feels right at first and don’t over-‐think it. For each of the pairs listed below, circle the relatedness score that you associate with that pair.

Word/Concept Bank

ecosystem adaptation water flow food web shell midden

human impact tides invasive species air plants niche

marine mangroves biomagnification pneumatophore mercury

filter feeding elevation hardwood

hammock cypress swamp parasitism

Circle the number that indicates how related each of these concept pairs are (1) hardwood hammock and food web

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

not related not sure very related

(2) cypress swamp and biomagnification

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

not related not sure very related

(3) human impact and shell midden

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

not related not sure very

Figure 3.3. Example of Pathfinder assessment used for Case 4. Each concept is paired with every other, resulting in 190 pairs.

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Creating the Referent

The most consistently predictive referent for this procedure is an average of the

ratings of several experts (Acton, et al., 1994). To do this, three content experts were

recruited to rate the relatedness of each pair of concepts, exactly as the students did. One

of the experts for each assessment was the teacher for each class. Two ecologists were

also asked to complete the assessment for each of the four cases. For each pair of

concepts, the experts’ scores were averaged (mean), and the referent PFnet was generated

as described in the next section. For example, if the three experts rate the relatedness of

“plant” and “animal” as 5, 5, and 7, the referent used the averaged and rounded score of

6. The rounding is necessary so that it would be possible for students to show an exact

match where appropriate.

Administering the Assessments

The assessments were printed on double-sided paper and distributed to students

during regular class time. In most cases I administered the assessments to all students

within one day of beginning or ending the DIAL experience and up to three days in two

instances. One student in Case 2 opted out of the study. Students were given as much

time as they needed to complete the assessment and ranged from 15 to 30 minutes to do

so.

Data Analysis for Q1

Due to the requirements of the Pathfinder software (KNOT), each student’s

response data were first entered into an excel spreadsheet that was programmed to

generate a matrix in text form (.txt). The excel step allowed for more accurate data entry

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and quality control. In the text matrix form the Pathfinder software could process the

data and generate a PFnet as well as values for C, csim, and coherency (described below).

Pathfinder determines the similarity or closeness (C or sim) between two PFnets

by determining the number of links in common between the two PFnets and dividing that

figure by the total number of unique links in both PFnets, showing the proportion of links

that the two PFnets share (Goldsmith & Davenport, 1990). Pathfinder also calculates a

value showing the similarity or closeness between two PFnets that is corrected for the

similarity predicted by chance (csim), a figure that expresses the difference between

actual and random predicted values. This was the primary value used in comparing

PFnets for this study.

€

csim =links in commontotal unique links

"

# $

%

& ' ×1+ probability of links in common by chance

Csim scores were first compared from pre to post to look for change in each

student’s knowledge structures (∆C). The PFnets were also qualitatively examined as it

was possible to have a change in structure that did not necessarily make the PFnet more

similar to the expert referent but represented an important semantic difference. These

differences could then be examined through the student interviews. Descriptive statistics

were calculated on students’ pre and post C scores to determine the distribution of

content knowledge structure changes and where each individual fell within that

distribution (Z score). This also allowed for a stratified comparison through the grouping

of individuals based on their pre-existing knowledge. That is, through the pre-test, it was

possible to determine if there was a difference in learning for those whose content

knowledge structure was already close to the experts’ as compared to those who started

with a more rudimentary knowledge structure. Inferential statistical analysis on a case

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level was not possible due to insufficient sample sizes and therefore insufficient power.

A Wilcoxon Matched Pairs test was run across the entire sample (n=65) to determine if

there was significant growth from pre to post. A-priori power was determined to be .97

(very high) with this sample size and an alpha level of .05.

Procedures- Research Question 2

In order to answer the second research question, “do students’ interactions with

the components of a DIAL environment contribute to change in their conceptual science

knowledge structures? ” the data generated in Part 1 of the study were considered in

conjunction with qualitative data in a multiple case study format. Table 3.1 shows the

data that was collected and analyzed across the four cases in the study. All cases used the

Pathfinder data (Part 1), pre/post teacher interviews, and student interviews that followed

the DIAL experience. For two of the cases student notebooks/journals were available and

used. In Case 4, the Everglades experience, I conducted a full field observation of the

DIAL experience as well. The procedures for the collection and analysis of these data are

described in this section beginning with the common elements and concluding with the

field study.

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Table 3.1

Data Used to Inform the Multiple Case Study

Data Used

Case 1 Winter Ecology

Case 2 Winter Environmental Science

Case 3 Crane Migration

Case 4 Everglades Ecology

Teacher pre-‐DIAL interview X X X X

Teacher post-‐DIAL interview X X X X

Pathfinder pretest X X X X

Pathfinder posttest X X X X

Student post-‐DIAL interviews X X X X

Student notebooks/journals X X

DIAL field notes X

DIAL video recordings X

DIAL audio recordings X

DIAL photographs X

DIAL on-‐the-‐spot teacher interviews X

DIAL on-‐the-‐spot student interviews X

Teacher Data

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teacher of each class prior to

the DIAL experience. The interviews were open conversations lasting about one hour,

intended to guide the teacher in laying out his or her expectations for how they planned to

use the DIAL experience to facilitate their target content. Each interview was driven by

the goal of co-creating these final products:

• A list of science concepts to be used with the Pathfinder analysis.

• A collection of course materials.

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• An outline of the anticipated facilitated events of the DIAL experience and

their related target concepts.

• A list of the teacher’s predictions of peripheral contexts that could influence

students.

The teacher interviews were digitally audio recorded, transcribed, and coded using

HyperRESEARCH qualitative data analysis software (http://www.researchware.com).

These data were primarily used to later categorize students' descriptions of events as

either facilitated by the teacher or peripheral to their instruction/facilitation.

Following the DIAL experience teachers were interviewed again in a semi-

structured format, and again recorded, transcribed and coded for facilitated/peripheral

events. The post-DIAL interviews followed the outline of anticipated events created in

the pre-DIAL interview to discuss additions, deletions, and deviations from the plan as

well as events that the teacher thought to be particularly valuable to learning. Teachers

were also asked about learning events for the group or individuals that they did not

anticipate. Though the teacher interview data were used predominantly to frame and

reference the student data, their perspectives on learning events did inform some aspects

of the case analyses and cross-case analysis.

Student Data

Student interviews were conducted within a few hours to a day after students took

the posttest and so they fell within a few days (usually just one day) of completing the

DIAL experience. With the exception of Case 2, all available students were interviewed

for this study. Case 2 was randomly sampled, though stratified by gender.

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The 30-minute interviews followed a semi-structured, two-part format based on

an interview protocol (Appendix C) and the student’s pretest and posttest PFnet

knowledge maps. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and notes were

recorded and digitized. In the first part of the interview students were asked to discuss

any changes that occurred in their pre to post PFnets including significant changes in

individual relatedness scores and, more importantly, significant changes in the more

global structure of their concept knowledge representation. I identified the most

significant changes before the interview and a list of salient pattern changes was

generated to discuss with each student. For each of these pattern changes the following

general questions were asked, although the actual wording was altered to promote the

conversational nature of the interviews:

1. “According to your relatedness responses, the concept mapping program

organized your ideas like this before the trip and like this after the trip

(showing the PFnets to the student). If you look at the second one, you can

see how it changed here. Does that seem accurate?”

2. “Can you tell me about your present understanding of this concept or this

connection”?

3. “Why do you think that relationship/understanding changed for you? (or)

How did you learn that?”

Often, additional follow-up questions were asked to further probe a student’s

understanding or learning process. An excerpt from one interview can be found in

Appendix D. This question pattern continued for the first 15 minutes of the interview.

The second half of the interview was also used to both probe for more depth on

the answers from part one, and to ask targeted questions about the components of the

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learning environment outlined in the conceptual framework of this study (Appendix B).

Though the conversation was allowed to go in any direction that continued to inform an

understanding of the student’s learning experience, questions were asked or adapted from

a predetermined list when the conversation stalled or when prompted by the student’s

previous answers:

• Did you have any aha! moments during the course?

• Where there any places or settings that you found particularly educational?

• Did you learn from any other students in the course?

• Did the field and classroom components work well together or did they feel

separate?

• What was (Teacher’s/Guide’s/Expert’s) role in the course?

• Did you have any personal discoveries; something you noticed or realized without

being taught?

• Were there any concepts for which it was helpful to see it, experience it, or hear

about it multiple times or in multiple settings?

• Was there any part of the course that you had/have a strong emotion associated

with, either good or bad?

• Were you nervous or scared about anything on the trip? Was it resolved?

Data Preparation, Coding and Analysis

All of the interviews were transcribed from the audio recordings and both the

original audio files and the transcriptions were uploaded and aligned using

HyperRESEARCH qualitative data analysis software (http://www.researchware.com).

This program was used for all of the transcript, video, audio, and image coding.

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Descriptive Codes

The interview coding began with descriptive a-priori codes aligned with the

conceptual framework for the study (Figure 1.3) and was further developed as emergent

codes reflected patterns I was observing in the data. For example, the code of Social

Interactions was originally used to indicate any reference a student made to a social

interaction associated with their learning. This was later refined to include more specific

codes such as Group Discussion, Peer-to-Peer, and Guided Observation. Any of the

broader codes were later revisited and recoded with the more specific codes if

appropriate. Some codes were later condensed back to more general codes if there were

few references across the cases, such as Good Emotion. The codebook for descriptive

codes is shown in Table 3.2. All of these codes in this first level of coding were

descriptive codes rather than pattern codes or interpretive codes as they simply labeled

what the students were directly reporting (Miles & Huberman, 1994). These codes were

applied to any segment of text that fit the code’s definition with the purpose of later

defining pattern codes within specific units of analysis and clarifying aspects of those

patterns. In order to focus on a small group of codes at a time, I typically made six

passes through each transcript in the original coding process. Before any manual coding,

each transcript was auto-coded by the software through a word search feature. The auto-

codes were used exclusively to show references to the target science concepts selected for

the Pathfinder assessment. Please see Appendix D for an example of a coded transcript.

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Table 3.2

Codebook for Qualitative Analysis: Descriptive Codes

Category Code Definition Application Level

Use / Justification

Change in Concept Knowledge (from Pathfinder)

Extreme .14 < csim

Student (entire transcript)

Provides reference to results from Part 1 of the study, the Pathfinder assessments

High .07 < csim < .14 Moderate .02 < csim < .07 Little or no -‐.02 < csim < .02 Moderately Negative

-‐.07 < csim < -‐.02

Highly Negative

csim < -‐.07

Learning Factors: Social

Interactions

Teacher said…

Teacher conveying verbal information, usually in the form of “X said…”

Phrase

All used to indicate how social factors contribute to the learning of TSCs. Reflect the social component of the conceptual framework

We talked about…

Any reference of the form “we talked about”, “we discussed”, etc.

Phrase

Group action Action that the group performed together

Phrase

Group discussion

Specific description of a facilitated, academic, participatory discussion

Phrase

Teacher Any reference to words or action of the teacher of the class

Word

Local expert Any reference to words or action of a science expert recruited to participate in the class

Word

Guided observation

Teacher or expert draw attention to some aspect of the environment and describe it or solicit student thoughts on it

Phrase to paragraph

Lecture Specific reference to lecture or description of teacher formally speaking, often with visuals

Phrase

Peer to peer Peer teaching/learning between students

Phrase

Heard generally

Something student remembers hearing but can’t remember source

Phrase

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Table 3.2 (con’t.)

Category Code Definition Application Level Use / Justification

Learning Factors: Social Interactions

Small group Reference to any discussion or action in student groups divided from whole class

Phrase

All used to indicate how social factors contribute to the learning of TSCs. Reflect the social component of the conceptual framework

Demonstra-‐tion

Teacher/expert provide visual or kinesthetic demonstration of TSC

Phrase to paragraph

Teacher and individual

Discussion or action between just the speaking student and the teacher or expert

Phrase

Teacher said…

Teacher conveying verbal information, usually in the form of “X said…”

Phrase

We talked about…

Any reference of the form “we talked about”, “we discussed”, etc.

Phrase

Learning Factors: Physical Environ-‐ment

Field Mention or description of learning in the field

Phrase

Inform the role of the physical environment component from the conceptual framework as well as the facilitated/peripheral designation

Classroom Mention or description of learning in the classroom

Homework Mention or description of learning via independent assignments

Visual evidence of concept

Saw an example of a TSC within the environment

Phrase to paragraph

Describe the role of the physical environment component from the conceptual framework. Inform how students use the physical environment to learn TSCs

Visual of process in action

Saw a process associated with TSC take place within the environment

Illustrated relationships

Saw an example of the relationship between TSCs within the environment

Connection to specific place

Refers to s specific, geographic place as associated with learning

Embodied experience

Refers to physical interaction with environment associated with learning

Moving through environment

Refers to movement or travel through environment as associated with learning

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Table 3.2 (con’t)

Learning Factors: Tools

Books or Readings

Reference to book or reading, assigned or otherwise Phrase

Describe the role of various tools, one component of the conceptual framework in the learning process

Board or Projections

Reference to information presented on white board, projected slides, videos, posters, etc

Phrase

Worksheet/ prepared materials

Reference to worksheets or handouts prepared by the teacher

Phrase

Notebook, journal or similar

Use of notebooks or journals

Phrase

Non-‐academic tools

Any other object described as a tool but not specifically intended to aid learning

Phrase

External educational resources

Any signs, pamphlets, books, posters etc intended to support learning but not presented by teacher

Phrase

Measuring devices

Any reference to tools used for measuring or aiding scientific observation

Phrase

Learning Factors: Individual Learning Processes

Developed deeper understanding

Specifically mentions developing a deeper, more meaningful, etc. understanding during DIAL

Phrase to concept unit

These codes emerged from the transcripts as important for the study. They account for more than internal dialog and expression’ to include students’ descriptions of their learning processes they were experiencing beyond reflection and expression. They also address an emergent element of the conceptual framework.

Linking across events

Ascribes learning TSC to multiple, connected events or conceptually connects multiple events

Phrase to concept unit

Connections to past learning

Describes a connection between learning on DIAL experience and past learning any time prior

Phrase to paragraph

Application of knowledge

describes putting TSC to use in an applied way

Phrase to paragraph

Personal discovery

Learning related to TSC through un-‐facilitated observation or realization

Phrase to paragraph

Individual reasoning

Describes a personal reasoning process that led to understanding of TSC

Phrase to paragraph

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Table 3.2 (con’t)

Category Code Definition Application Level Use / Justification

Learning Factors: Individual Learning Processes

Internal reflection

Specific reference to thinking about or reflecting on a topic

Phrase to paragraph

See above cell Writing Mention of writing as processing of TSC

Phrase to paragraph

Verbal articulation

Process of articulating an idea to another person

Phrase to paragraph

Individual Learning Factors:

Motivational and

Emotional

Anticipation or need-‐to-‐know

Describe motivation to learn TSC due to anticipated future need

Phrase to paragraph

Describe the role of the emotional and motivational environment as related to the learning of TSCs and as described in the conceptual framework. Also Indicate the student’s more internalized emotional emotional reactions to the process of learning the TSCs

Curious/ Interesting

Expressed interest or curiosity in some aspect of the TSCs or learning environment

Phrase

Engaged Described engagement with learning/TSC

Phrase to paragraph

Challenged Expressed physical, emotional, academic challenge in some way

Phrase to paragraph

Bored/ disinterested

Described disengagement from learning/TSC

Phrase

Good emotion

Otherwise uncategorized positive emotion (fun, happy, etc)

Phrase

Sense of accomplish-‐ment

Pride in completion, overcoming obstacles, accomplishment Phrase to

paragraph

Amazement, Fascination

Expressed amazement or fascination associated with TSC

Phrase to paragraph

Surprise Expressed surprise or astonishment at an idea/event

Phrase

Bad Emotion Otherwise uncategorized negative emotion (anger, frustration, etc)

Phrase

Nervous/ scared

Expressed fear or nervousness regarding some aspect of experience

Phrase to paragraph

Confused Described confusion or lack of clarity on TSC related idea

Phrase

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Table 3.2 (con’t)


Use / Justification

Concepts

Autocodes (n=75)

Individual codes for each of the target science concepts (TSCs) in the Pathfinder assessments

Word or phrase

Automatically assigned to searched keywords. Helped define concept units and assess most important concepts

Related science

Student refers to a related science concept not listed in Target Concepts

Phrase Accounts for related science learning not addressed on Pathfinder assessment

Related non-‐science

Student refers to a non-‐science but related academic concept

Phrase Accounts for other learning conceptually but not scientifically related to TSCs

Distal science Student refers to a science concept that is not directly related to course curriculum

Phrase Accounts for other science learning unrelated to TSCs

Misconception or naïve conception

Student expresses a view of a science concept that is counter to canonical knowledge

Phrase + Shows error in or incomplete learning process

Environmental components/ learning factors descriptive codes. The codes

associated with the components of the learning environment were the most heavily used

and important to the later pattern coding and inferences made in the cross-case analysis.

As such, they are described in more depth here. A code category was created for each of

the environmental components of the conceptual framework (Appendix B): social

interactions, physical environment, internal dialog and expression, tools, emotional

environment, and cultural environment (Table 3.2). In the process of early analysis and

assigning descriptive codes, it became clear that these environmental components were

better defined as learning factors as they were internal to the learner as well as external

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environmental contributors to learning and so they are listed in the descriptive codebook

(Table 3.2) as “Learning Factors”.

Codes within each of these categories were created as trends emerged in the way

students discussed their learning. For example, within the code category of the physical

environment many students discussed seeing visual evidence of a target concept within

the environment and this became a code. As more students mentioned this, it became

clear that there was an important distinction between seeing a static visual reference and

observing a process that was occurring, or being able to detect a relationship between

TSCs within the physical environment, and so these became independent codes. When

more specific codes emerged in this way, I would revisit text formerly coded as visual

evidence to see if it also fit the more specific codes, recoding as needed.

In the case of the code category internal dialog and expression it became clear

that the group also needed to include more elaborate but internalized learning processes

that the students were describing. This addition is described in Chapter Five.

Conversely, the category of the Cultural Environment resulted in almost no references in

the interviews and this will also be discussed later. The categories of Academic Tools

and Non-academic Tools were combined into a single group due to the difficulty of

reliably making the distinction between the two in the coding process.

Pattern Codes

Once the descriptive codes were assigned to a transcript, I assigned pattern codes

to indicate the thematic elements relevant to the research question (contributors to change

in knowledge structures). The descriptive codes were used in conjuction with broader

patterns within each unit of analysis to determine the application of the more inferential

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pattern codes. These pattern codes are shown in Table 3.3. The first step was delineating

concept units or sections of the transcript that tracked a student’s discussion of a target

science concept (TSC) or relationship between TSCs and the student’s description of how

they learned about the concepts. At times these were brief sections of one question and

one answer and at other times they were extended discussions and dialog. These concept

units served as an embedded unit of analysis that allowed me to individually track the

learning process for any given concept for each student. An example of one of the

shorter concept units is shown in Figure 3.4 and a more extensive example is shown in

Appendix D.

Table 3.3

Codebook for Qualitative Analysis: Pattern Codes


Use / Justification

Concept Unit: Unit of Analysis

Section of transcript that follows student’s discussion of a concept or relationship between concepts, and associated learning process.

variable-‐ 1+ ¶s. Can overlap speakers

Embedded unit of analysis to track student’s description of a TSC or relationship between TSCs

Learning Opportun-‐

ities

Facilitated Refers to learning process that teacher specifically provided for, either through planning or spontaneously

Concept Unit

Describe fundamental distinction in conceptual framework between facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities of the learning environment. Determined based on analysis of descriptive codes within concept unit.

Peripheral Refers to learning process that teacher did not anticipate or specifically facilitate but still addressed TSCs

Facilitated/ peripheral interaction

Refers to learning process in which both played a specific role

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Table 3.3 (con’t)

Category Code Definition Application

Level Use / Justification

Context-‐ualization Scores

X-‐CS No TSC is mentioned in concept unit

Concept Unit

Relates to the “context vehicle” in the conceptual framework. Describes how much student relates learning and knowledge to real, experienced contexts or isolates them as abstract ideas. Determined based on analysis of descriptive codes within concept unit.

0-‐CS TSC is mentioned or discussed with no reference to context

1-‐CS TSC is mentioned or discussed but is incorrect in some way

2-‐CS TSC is mentioned in relation to unelaborated, generalized context

3-‐CS TSC is described in relation to generalized context or secondary source context

4-‐CS TSC is mentioned in conjunction with direct, personal experience in/with the context

5-‐CS TSC is described in conjunction with direct, personal experience in/with the context

6-‐CS Direct, personal experience is in/with the context is explicitly credited with elaborated TSC

Figure 3.4 shows a screen shot from the coding window of the HyperRESEARCH

qualitative data analysis software I used to code interview transcripts. The codes are

displayed on the left side of the screen and can be highlighted or hidden as needed within

the program, showing which codes overlap each other and fall into each concept unit.

This example shows the concept unit highlighted and displayed with the embedded

pattern and descriptive codes for that excerpt.

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Learning opportunities. Learning Opportunities and Contextualization Scores

were the two pattern code categories. The learning opportunities codes (Table 3.3) were

used as an overall characterization indicating how the students described they had learned

a given TSC or relationship between concepts: Facilitated, Peripheral, or Both. This

code group indicated whether the student had described learning opportunities that were

entirely facilitated by their teacher, that they had encountered on their own without the

specific facilitation by the teacher, or some combination of these opportunities. At times

these judgments were made with other data outside of the concept unit being considered.

For example, a student may have described the same event multiple times in the

interview and provided information beyond the given concept unit. To preserve the

Figure 3.4. Screen shot of a coded transcript excerpt using HyperRESEARCH qualitative data analysis software. Highlighted text indicates one concept unit, the unit of analysis.

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perspective of each informant, data external to the interviewee were not considered for

these judgments.

Contextualization. The contextualization score codes were used to judge the

degree to which students were relating their understanding of a given concept unit to their

real-world experience. These scores were adapted from Rivet & Krajcik (2008) who

present a rubric, designed for use with Project-Based Learning applications, that allows

the researcher to analyze a learning event and determine a relative measure of how a

student relates target knowledge to their environmental contexts. The process focuses on

how a student refers to anchoring events from the learning context, the relationships the

student detects between target concepts and contextual events, and the student’s own

contextual experience outside of class. For example, a student might explain inertia by

referring to a class lab or to an experience he had falling off of his bike (Rivet & Krajcik,

2008). Their scoring system includes a scale of 0 to 5 that simultaneously measures

student participation (e.g., speaking up in class or in a group discussion), level of

expressed understanding, and contextualization. A 0 indicates no student participation

and therefore no way to measure contextualization, while the rarely scored 5 (in the Rivet

and Krajcik study, 2008) indicates a detailed explanation of the science content in

conjunction with a clear example of the concept that is related to the learning context.

For the present study, a modified version of the Rivet and Krajcik (2008)

contextualization scale was used that expands the range by one level and removes the

participation aspect. This latter adjustment was possible because the scale was used on

student recollections of their own experiences and student work and so participation is

implied but not possible to differentiate. This revised contextualization scoring scale is

presented in the pattern codebook, Table 3.3.

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Student Notebooks

Student notebooks/journals were available for Cases 1 and 3 and varied in their

extent of use. The teacher in Case 1 required a complete notebook from each student as a

final assessment piece and so they were generally complete, well-developed, and

provided an accurate view of the work generated by the students throughout the class.

Case 3 was more variable in the quality and extent of the work. Each notebook was

scanned into digital image files, entered into the HyperRESEARCH database/program

and coded with the same scheme as used for the interviews (Tables 3.2 and 3.3).

PFnets

The results of each student’s Pathfinder assessment was coded as a categorical

level of change from pretest to posttest, and assigned to a student’s entire transcript. The

categories ranged from highly negative change to exceptional learning (Table 3.2).

Although no formal scale exists with which to correlate Pathfinder similarity values (C,

or csim) to level of mastery or learning, Acton et al. (1994) found that the experts in their

study of Pathfinder referents tended to show C values of .30 between experts. In the

present study, between-expert values were closer to .35. In another study, college

undergraduates ranged from an average similarity (C) with their instructor of .24 at the

first week of class to .32 by the 15th week, a change of .08 C (Goldsmith & Johnson,

1990). Though future work is needed in this area to further explore valid levels of

mastery and learning, these existing studies provided some guidance on creating the scale

presented here, though note that the csim values used in this study are an average of 50%

less than the raw C values. Based on these numbers, a ∆ csim value of about .04 should

be average and this was indeed the case for the values found in this study (mean = .046).

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Using the standard deviation of this sample (.079) as a loose guide, a classification of

∆ csim-based learning levels was developed and is presented in Table 3.2. This allowed

for analysis by degree of learning as a variable. In addition the images for each student’s

Pre and Post PFnet were entered into the HyperRESEARCH program along with the

referent for each class, to be used for analysis of the nature as well as the degree of

change for each student.

Field Study

In addition to the assessment and interview processes, I also conducted a full field

study of Case 4, the Everglades group. There were three goals behind this additional

layer of data collection: (a) to triangulate by adding an outsider’s perspective of the DIAL

experience to the insider’s perspective gained through the interviews, (b) to capture in-

the-moment experience, lost after time and reflection, and the details of the experience

that are not easy to capture through interview, and (c) to test the validity claims of the

interview process by triangulating those data with the data collected through field study.

To conduct the field study I traveled with the teacher and eight students of the

Everglades group throughout their eight-day DIAL experience. I met the group at their

school, flew with them to Florida, traveled with them in the field and camped with them

at night. The group knew my purposes as a researcher but did not know the specific

research questions I was asking, nor which behaviors and interactions I was observing

most closely. My role in the educational aspects of the experience was non-participatory

in the sense that I did not do any instruction, answer science questions, or plan any aspect

of the experience. However, I did participate in camp chores and other “expedition

behavior” as well as being a social member of the group rather than an entirely separated

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observer. Another important difference between the approach I used with this field study

and participant observation was that I was not tuned in to my own experience of the

events, nor recording them, rather I was trying to record the experience of the students;

albeit through my own interpretations, along with their in-the-moment observations that

they shared with me (e.g. Stake, 2010).

The observations and recordings that I made were all focused on evidence of

learning and the roles of the environmental components outlined in the conceptual

framework. The observations and recordings were made on a number of levels. An

attempt was made to video or audio record lessons, discussions, demonstrations, and

group activities when possible. Extensive field notes were made in both descriptive and

interpretive forms (Anderson-Levitt, 2006). The descriptive notes captured my

perspective on actions, relationships, conversations, settings, and on-the-spot interviews

(often one or two questions) as well as time and place stamps. Interpretive notes

involved preliminary analysis of trends and patterns I was beginning to see in the nature

of the learning process within the contextualized environment.

During the majority of the trip the group was traveling by canoe and would

become spread out, gathering periodically for mini lessons, breaks, or discussions. The

teacher and guide were paddling the same canoe. I traveled by kayak in order to paddle

along with different sets of students, write field notes in a waterproof notebook, catch up

to the group, and so on. During the mini lessons I tried to video or audio record as much

as possible in addition to writing field notes on the events. I did not interrupt students or

teachers during learning events but would record audio, photo, and video evidence;

practices that the group quickly became comfortable with. I would often follow-up with

them shortly afterward, asking about those recent experiences. An effort was made to

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also engage students in casual conversation in order to diffuse the sense that they were

being scrutinized. At times students would offer their unsolicited reflections or thoughts

on an idea or an event, or they would have conversations with each other about the

content or events. On land, the process was similar though I used a notebook and pen

that simultaneously recorded a digital as well as a physical copy of the notes

(www.livescribe.com).

Each night, I transcribed all of my notes onto a laptop computer, completing

thoughts and adding interpretative and analytical comments while the experiences were

still fresh. This process was useful for early analysis, creating an audit trail, and guiding

the next steps of data collection during the DIAL experience (Esterberg, 2002).

Throughout the experience all of the students, the teacher, and the guide became

informants for the study. However, four students were asked to participate more heavily

in order to ensure more complete and consistent perspectives from a subsample. These

students were chosen through purposive sampling, representing the two girls on the trip

(11th and 12th grade), a high performing 11th grade boy (based on the pretest), and a low

performing 9th grade boy. Having these focus students helped me to choose which

groups to track when they were spread out and provided a structure/reminder to make

sure I spoke with them about their experience at least twice per day, even if briefly. In

addition I conducted at least one, sometimes two, more formal interviews during the trip,

asking about specific learning events and students’ individual learning experiences.

Conversations with the teacher and guide throughout the trip helped to delineate aspects

of the day that were facilitated and those that were peripheral.

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Following the field study all of the digitized notes, videos, photos, and audio were

added to the HyperRESEARCH database to be coded and analyzed with the other data.

The mid-trip formal interviews with the focus students were transcribed.

Analysis

This study was driven heavily by the research questions and the conceptual

framework. As such, the qualitative analysis was best addressed through an overall

approach of pattern matching logic (Yin, 2009), or the similar prestructured case

analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Through this process, the data and patterns within

the data are compared to expected outcomes, relationships or a conceptual framework.

Similarities, differences, and unanticipated phenomena are explored (Miles & Huberman,

1994; Yin, 2009).

Analysis proceeded by asking a series of iterative, analytical questions that were

based on the conceptual framework and contributed to answering the second research

question, “do students’ interactions with the components of a DIAL environment

contribute to change in their conceptual science knowledge structures? ” Using selective

sorting of the assigned codes within HyperRESEARCH, various data displays illustrated

the data germane to these analytical questions at multiple levels. These data patterns and

trends were saved and displayed in matrices for further analysis. As potential answers to

the analytical questions emerged, they were recorded along with the evidence from each

data source and then checked for consistency or important differences across the

individual informants and the four cases.

To illustrate this process, we can look at one example. If we start with the very

broad question of “how did students use the physical environment in their learning?” I

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first looked at code frequencies and displayed the frequencies of the physical

environment code group as a percentage of all of the environmental component codes, by

case, by individual students, by Pathfinder results, by facilitated or peripheral

opportunities, or by any combination of variables. I would also look at the sub-codes

within the physical environment code group to tease out which aspects of the

environment were most heavily referenced.

Looking at code frequencies across or within cases was a first step but it was not

assumed to be equated with importance. Rather, the code frequencies indicated places to

begin analyzing the relationships between learning and the components of the learning

environment. The relative importance of the data was also determined by how the

students discussed the learning within a concept unit, the importance that the informants

assigned to a given learning event, their measured learning (Pathfinder), and the way in

which their connections between the TSCs and the learning factors suggested deep

understanding.

Once some direction was established through code frequencies, I would ask more

specific questions and use the QDA software to display various groupings of text based

on the code references. For example, if the code frequencies indicated that seeing visual

evidence was often described as a way that students learned through the physical

environment, I could ask more specific questions such as “was the visual evidence

usually facilitated or peripheral?”, “did the evidence confirm learning or initiate it?”,

“Was this an important factor across all cases or just one or two?”, “how did students

describe how this contributed to their understanding?” and so on, calling up custom

displays to highlight each of those questions. Because the displays include hyperlinks

back to the original text sources, it was possible to quickly toggle back and forth between

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the summary displays and the context of the students’ more complete thoughts,

developing a better connection between patterns and context.

Based on the co-occurring codes and the way that students talked about the topics,

patterns were identified, described and tested within and across cases by looking for

confirming and disconfirming examples. As these supporting sub-questions were

answered, additional questions developed and were pursued through the same technique.

This process continued until saturation was reached and no further patterns emerged. The

results of each query were recorded in a series of matrices for big picture, cross-case

analysis.

Field study data analysis

There is little or no separation between data collection and data analysis with a

field study approach (Anderson-Levitt, 2006). Data is constantly analyzed in the head of

the researcher and within the pages of the field notes. That being said, further analysis

continued beyond the event and was conducted using the HyperRESEARCH program.

For consistency, fidelity to the research question, and smoother cross-case analysis, the

same coding and questioning scheme was used on the field study data as it was for the

interview data. The text associated with those code references tended to be richer than

what was possible to elicit from the half hour interviews.

Synthesis

The final level of analysis for this study was a cross-case analysis using the

method of pattern-matching logic by examining the data as compared to the predicted

pattern (Yin, 2009), in this case the conceptual framework (Appendix B). Cross-case

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analysis highlights patterns and differences amongst the cases studied, allowing for

triangulation of the data (Yin, 2009). Patterns that agree with, conflict with, and expand

beyond the conceptual framework were identified. As shown in Figure 3.1, there are

three clusters of data that informed the cross-case analysis: (a) the case analyses for each

class experience that are, in turn, generated from the PFnets, contextualization scores,

student work samples, and interview data; (b) the rich descriptions from the field study of

the focus class DIAL experience; and (c) the statistical analysis of the student knowledge

development (∆C) across the four cases. In addition to the previously described data

displays produced through HyperRESEARCH, a content analytic summary table (Miles

& Huberman, 1994) was used to help facilitate the data analysis. This type of table

displays data in a meta-matrix by highlighting characteristics of two variables that have

some commonality across multiple cases (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

At times, variables were substructed as described by Miles and Huberman (1994).

Through this process, two of the analytical questions described earlier were placed

opposite each other on a matrix, along with potential answers. Cases that met the

resulting criteria within the matrix were listed within appropriate cells. The purpose of

this process is to help clarify an overly general variable (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

The final level of analysis and the transition to interpretation was facilitated

largely through the process of writing the descriptive multiple case report (Wolcott,

2009). Interpretive notes were maintained as comments within the evolving text and

were later collected and synthesized for more global interpretation.

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Data Handling and Protection of Informants

The anonymity of all informants was maintained throughout the study.

Pseudonyms were used for all students within field notes and computer files. A hardcopy

of the key is stored in a secure location. Class level PFnet data was provided to the

teacher of each class for the purpose of generalized formative assessment but the data

were aggregated across the class, removing any personal identifiers of the students.

All participating students signed a document of assent (Appendix E) and were

provided with both verbal and written briefings on the project. Parents of the students

and teachers also signed consent forms (Appendix E) that included a description of the

project and how the data were to be used. It was made clear to all participants and

guardians that any participant could choose to not participate in the study or withdraw

without any academic or other penalty. All participants were given pseudonyms that are

used in this dissertation and any other communication regarding the study. The protocol

for this project was subjected to review by the University of Colorado Denver’s Human

Subjects Internal Review Board. The approved version of the protocol was followed

throughout this study (Appendix F, approval letter). All of the data for the project were

digitized and organized using the HyperRESEARCH database. All of these files and the

database itself are backed up to an external hard drive and to a disaggregated cloud site.

Validity / Legitimation

Assessing what is called validity in quantitative research, trustworthiness in

qualitative research (Morrow, 2005), and legitimation in mixed-methods research

(Onwuegbuzie & Johnson, 2006) becomes difficult when the use of both quantitative and

qualitative data are part of a study. Although the goals are similar, these constructs are

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not the same things and do not measure exactly the same things. Onwuegbuzie &

Johnson (2006) describe these goals as assessing the ability to make inferences that are

credible, trustworthy, dependable, transferable, and/or confirmable. Because each of

these research traditions also has its own vocabulary to address these constructs, an

additional tension is added to the problem of communicating them.

The validity framework offered by Yin (2009) and specific to case study research,

helps alleviate some of that tension as the vocabulary should be recognizable to most

researchers and the categories are defined broadly enough to encompass both quantitative

and qualitative data. Yin’s framework was used in this study to assess validity. An

important idea within this framework is in considering each case to be akin to a single

experiment rather than a single subject or sample. In this multiple-case study, we can see

the cases as four replications testing a theory rather than a sample size of four. Within

each of those cases there are embedded units of analysis comparable to multiple subjects

in an experimental design.

Construct Validity

A number of factors were used to establish strong operational measures for the

constructs being explored in this study. First, the measures, including the Pathfinder

assessments, interview protocols and observational focus were tied very closely to the

theory upon which they were built, linked through the conceptual framework. Second,

multiple sources of evidence including student and teacher interviews from four distinct

cases, student notebooks, field observations, and a pre/post test were used to converge on

and establish chains of evidence that support the developed constructs, what Patton

(2002) refers to as “data triangulation”. Four cases, each comprising numerous

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informants, provided perspectives through multiple means. One case added an outsider

perspective through the field study.

“Methodological triangulation” (Patton, 2002)also added to the construct validity

of the study through the utilization of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies

where appropriate. An established construct of knowledge was assessed through the

quantitative measure of knowledge structures before and after the experiences. This

provided a more objective framework on which to base the qualitative inquiry within the

study.

Some member checking (Stake, 2010) added to the construct validity as students

were able to confirm or disconfirm that their PFnets accurately represented their states of

knowledge before and after the DIAL experience. In one case, students did not feel that

they did, which allowed me to identify and correct a problem with the generation of the

PFnets for their class and prior to the interviews. Member checking of the constructs

produced through the qualitative leg of the project would have strengthened the study but

were not logistically possible as most students were no longer associated with the classes

or schools following the analysis of the data.

Internal Validity

Although this study was non-experimental and not intended to make causal

inferences, a number of structures were in place to increase internal validity of the

relational inferences that were made, as described by Yin (2009). Again, the cross-case

analysis relied heavily on the convergence of evidence across cases and from multiple

sources/types of sources. In addition, the inferences were drawn predominantly from the

informants’ actual descriptions of their experiences rather than interpretations of their

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words. The patterns in the qualitative data presented in Chapter 5 are supported heavily

by the direct quotes of the informants. While I cannot claim that there are no rival

explanations for the inferences made, much consideration was given to considering and

ruling out rival explanations in the data analysis process, predominantly in the cross-case

analysis phase, as presented in Chapter 6. All inferences were based on patterns across

the cases rather than single instances.

External Validity

In the statistical measure used (Wilcoxon matched pairs test for Pathfinder data)

the assumptions of the test were met, the sample size was sufficient for appropriate

power, and the results were significant.

The case study approach relies on “analytical generalization” rather than

statistical generalization (Yin, 2009) and thus, external validity relies on the ability of the

data to consistently support the theory upon which the study is built rather than on

statistical significance. The greater the number of cases (equated to experiments) that

support the theory, the greater the external validity (Yin, 2009). This study used four

cases with embedded units of analysis for that purpose. The study’s results delineate

which aspects of the theory were supported across multiple cases and which were not. As

explained in Chapter One, we need to be cautious about comparing learning experiences

across only loosely similar learning environments and pedagogies. The external validity

of the inferences made in this research becomes increasingly limited as applied to more

dissimilar cases. It would be inappropriate to apply the results reported here to science

education, or experiential education, or informal education, or outdoor learning writ

large.

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Reliability

While a case study can never truly be replicated (Yin, 2009), measures can be

taken to maximize the ability of others to review the work. To this end, the data for this

study are centrally stored in a database with easy and replicable access via the qualitative

data analysis software HyperRESEARCH. In addition, the protocols used for interviews

and field observations are shared in Appendix C .

To further enhance the reliability of the work, the process of researcher debriefing

(Onwuegbuzie, Leech, & Collins, 2008) was used following the field study in order to

help interpret the results and examine issues of reflexivity, bias, and legitimation. In this

process, the researcher is interviewed by a knowledgeable party who asks the researcher

questions,

that pertain directly to bias including those that tap the researcher’s interview

background and experience; perceptions of the participant(s); perceptions of

nonverbal communication; interpretations of interview findings; perceptions of

how the study might have affected the researcher; perceptions of how the

researcher may have affected the participant(s); awareness of ethical or political

issues that might have arisen before, during, or after the interview(s); and

identification of unexpected issues or dilemmas that emerged during the

interview(s). (Onwuegbuzie, et al., 2008, p. 6)

The debriefing was conducted with Dr. Deanna Sands of the University of

Colorado and was audio recorded. The data from this debriefing session helped to guide

further analysis and was used as a filter to reconsider early analysis that I had conducted.

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Researcher Bias and Reflexivity

Though an attempt has been made to reduce researcher bias in this study there are

still some elements that must be acknowledged. First, I have been working in

experiential science education and using DIAL for the majority of my career in

education. As such I am committed to its success and this could have the potential to bias

the results. Recognizing this, the study is not aimed at defending or challenging the

practices but at better understanding the machinations of them. This bias has also been

reduced through much of the research design. The quantitative measures used to

determine knowledge development remove some of the potential for bias. For the

qualitative portions of the study, a heavy reliance on direct quotes and insider

perspectives was used to balance my own perceptions and interpretations.

It should be noted that Case 3 took place through a school where I was formerly

employed. As such, I knew the teachers and some of the students who attend, but I did

not know any of the students who took the class I studied.

The field study aspect of the research was probably both benefitted and

compromised by my past experience with DIAL. Having led many such experiences, I

had a better sense of what key events and interactions to look for and was able to both

anticipate and understand student actions from a perspective of past experience. Of

course, this could have also been a detriment as it may have limited an openness to

interpreting the events. One mechanism for evaluating and minimizing bias in the field

study was the process of researcher debrief described above.

It is likely that the Pathfinder assessments, my presence during the Case 4 DIAL

experience, and the nature of being studied changed the experience for students and

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teachers somewhat. A couple of the students specifically mentioned being more keyed in

to thinking about some of the TSCs after taking the pretest. When they did hear them,

they paid more attention. While this may have affected the results slightly, it is unlikely

that this had a big impact and all of the TSCs were ideas that the teacher had intended to

teach before knowing about the study. Because the combination of the Pathfinder

assessment and the follow-up interviews tended to elicit understanding much deeper than

awareness of an idea, again this problem was mitigated. My presence on the trip did not

seem to have a big impact on learning either. The teacher, guide, and students all acted

very naturally around me and did not seem to be trying to prove their teaching or learning

prowess. Still, we must assume there was some effect.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter I described the design and implementation of the study, outlining

the sequential, mixed-methods case study design. The methods behind three key aspects

of the study were described: an assessment of student learning via Pathfinder Network

Analysis, a student interview process to explore the contributors to that learning, and a

field study investigation of one of the cases. The collection of supporting data was also

described. The multiple levels of analysis were explained, including the statistical

analysis of the pathfinder data, pattern-matching analysis of the qualitative data, and

cross-case analysis that encompassed all of the data from all of the cases. Finally

validity, bias and reflexivity were addressed.

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Chapter IV

Pathfinder Results

Overview

The findings for Research Question 1, “do students’ knowledge structures reflect

greater understanding of science concepts following a DIAL experience?” are presented

in this chapter. In other words, was there evidence to suggest that the students in the

study learned as a result of their DIAL experiences? Descriptive data of the Pathfinder

assessment results across all four cases are first presented along with a statistical analysis

of these data. Some analyses of the emergent patterns are then presented.

Pathfinder Results

The results for the Pathfinder assessments, measured as the similarity to the

expert referent and corrected for chance (csim), were recorded for each student’s pretest

and posttest. The distribution of the sample was somewhat positively skewed. To

address this, the pretest/posttest pairs were compared using the Wilcoxon Matched Pairs

Test. The test indicated a significant difference between pretest and posttest (Z = 4.24, p

< .001) across the full sample. This shows that students’ content knowledge structures

did become more like the experts’ over the course of the DIAL experiences, and therefore

it suggests that the students developed a deeper understanding of the concepts . Though

the test was also run for the four cases individually, the small sample sizes of Cases 1, 3,

and 4 lacked the power for a robust comparison. Like the full sample, Case 2 showed a

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significant positive difference from pretest to posttest (Z = 4.24, p < .001). These data

are presented in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1

Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Test: Results of Pre to Post Assessments

n min csim pre/post

max csim pre/post

median1 csim pre/post

SD pre/post

W Z p

All Cases 55 -‐.01/.02 .36/.31 .1/.15 .07/.06 1012 4.24 < .001

Case 1 7 .01/.02 .06/.17 .05/.12 .02/.05 28 n/a2 = .01

Case 2 37 .02/.04 .36/.31 .12/.18 .07/.06 440 3.32 < .001

Case 3 6 0/.07 .20/.15 .13/.10 .07/.04 -‐3 n/a2 > .05

Case 4 5 -‐.01/.11 .06/.22 .02/.17 .03/.04 15 n/a2 n is too small

1 Wilcoxon test uses assigned ranks and median rather than mean 2 For n < 10, Wilcoxon test uses exact sampling distribution

Despite the small sample sizes, the pretest and posttest medians for each case,

along with the W values, show a trend of positive change for Cases 1,2 and 4, suggesting

positive learning for these students. In other words, following the DIAL experience,

these students structured their ecology knowledge in a more expert manner. Case 3

showed a negative trend, though the small overall change seems more in character with

no change than with backsliding. In some respects this is not overly surprising.

Pathfinder measures knowledge structures as relationships between concepts that are

often complex and full of subtlety rather than the declarative knowledge more often seen

in assessments. Case 3 was a brief, three-day DIAL experience which served as a

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capstone to previous learning and so the degree of change would not be expected to be as

great as for an extended and stand-alone DIAL experience such as Case 4. This is

discussed in more depth in Chapter Six.

Learning Levels

Although no formal scale exists with which to correlate Pathfinder similarity

values (C, or csim) to level of mastery or learning, Acton et al. (1994) found that the

experts in their study of Pathfinder referents tended to show C values of .30 between

experts. In the present study, between-expert values were closer to .35. In another study,

college undergraduates ranged from an average similarity (C) with their instructor of .24

at the first week of class to .32 by the 15th week, a change of .08 C (Goldsmith &

Johnson, 1990). Though future work is needed in this area to further explore valid levels

of mastery and learning, these existing studies provide the reader with some limited

guidance on interpreting the results presented here, though note that the csim values used

in this study are an average of 50% less than the raw C values. Based on these numbers,

a ∆ csim value of about .04 should be average and this was indeed the case for the values

found in this study (mean = .046). Using the standard deviation of this sample (.075) as a

loose guide, a classification of ∆ csim -based learning levels was developed and is

presented in Table 4.2 along with the distributions for each case. As indicated by the

standard deviation, there was a wide spectrum in the distribution of change in knowledge

structures that students made following the DIAL experiences with some far exceeding

what would be expected based on past studies, and some actually becoming less like the

referent.

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The results presented in Table 4.2 further elucidate the degree of learning for the

students in the study. Again, some caution needs to be used in comparing across the

cases due to small sample sizes. Broadly we see that almost 70% of students showed

growth over the course of their DIAL experiences and that almost 40% showed high or

exceptional levels of growth. Case 4 is particularly interesting in showing high or

exceptional growth in all cases. Note, however, that three students’ data were not

included for this analysis, as described below.

Table 4.2

Learning Levels and Distributions Within and Across Cases

Distribution of Levels Within Cases

Learning Level Definition All Cases Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4

Highly Negative csim < -‐.07 7% 0 5% 17% 0

Moderately Negative -‐.07 < csim < -‐.02 9% 0 8% 33% 0

Little or No Change -‐.02 < csim < .02 15% 29% 16% 17% 0

Moderate Learning .02 < csim < .07 31% 14% 40% 17% 0

High Learning .07 < csim < .14 31% 43% 24% 17% 80%

Exceptional Learning .14 < csim 7% 14% 5% 0 20%

n Number of students included

55 7 38 6 5

n results not included

rejected when posttest coherence < .20

8 1 2 2 3

Some student test data were excluded from the statistical analysis. There is

always a danger that students will randomly rather than purposively complete the tests.

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The Pathfinder software provides a measure of Coherence that indicates the consistency

of the data by considering the network level of relatedness scores (Goldsmith &

Davenport, 1990). For example, if A is very closely related to B and B is closely related

to C, we would usually expect A to have some relationship with C, although this is not

always the case. If random values are used, we would see very low coherence, usually

below .2 (Goldsmith & Davenport, 1990). For this reason, any student score pair with a

posttest coherence value below .2 but a pretest that was greater than .2 was excluded

from these data. This resulted in the exclusion of one student from Case 1, two from

Case 2, two from Case 3, and three from Case 4.

Distributions of Student Learning

Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4 show the pretest-to-posttest change in csim for

individual students in each of the four cases. Individual students are shown on the Y axis

(e.g. “S104”) and the csim values for both their pretest and posttest are shown on the X

axis. For each student and within each case we can see the level of learning from pretest

to posttest. For example, Student 101 started the class with a very low similarity to the

expert referent and this did not change by the end of the course while Student 103 also

started out very low but exceeded all other students by the end of the class. As measured

by this assessment and the Pathfinder algorithm we can assume that learning was greatest

for student 103 in this case. The patterns of learning in Cases 1 (Figure 4.1) and 4

(Figure 4.4) were what one would hope to see: low levels of target knowledge before the

experience and moderate to high levels afterward.

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0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4

S108

S101

S103

S102

S106

S107

S105

csim

Individual Students

Case 1 Students' Change in Knowledge Structures

CSIM Pre

CSIM Post

Figure 4.1. Case 1, Winter Ecology 5 week course, individual students’ pretest and posttest values for similarity to the expert referent, corrected for chance (csim).

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Figure 4.2. Case 2, 2.5 week portion of residential course in Winter Env. Sci., individual students’ pretest and posttest values for similarity to the expert referent, corrected for chance (csim).

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Figure 4.3. Case 3, 3-‐day immersion to study crane migration, individual students’ pretest and posttest values for similarity to the expert referent, corrected for chance (csim). S308’s pretest csim value was 0.

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Negative Change

Case 2 (Figure 4.2) also shows some interesting patterns. Like Case 3 (Figure

4.3) there are examples of students who seem to regress, in that their PFnets are more

similar to the referent before the DIAL experience than after it. In most of these cases we

see students who already seem to have a solid understanding of the material who then

show big changes to their knowledge structures following the experience. Student 224 is

an extreme case of this, starting with a csim value of .36 and ending with a csim of .11. A

Figure 4.4. Case 4, 8-‐day immersion to study Everglades ecology, individual students’ pretest and posttest values for similarity to the expert referent, corrected for chance (csim).

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look at Student 224’s PFnets (Figures 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7) helps us understand this pattern.

In Figure 4.5, the student’s pretest PFnet, we see patterns that do match pretty well with

those in the expert referent (Figure 4.6). In both cases energy, snow, plant, and

seasonality are central, highly inter-related ideas, indicating that they are important and

unifying ideas within the topic of winter ecology. In contrast, the concepts orographic

precipitation, conifer, and community are less important on the referent and on Student

224’s pretest.

Figure 4.5. Pathfinder network graph showing relative relatedness of concepts as judged by student 224 before the DIAL experience

PFnet of student 224’s Pretest.

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What we see when we move to the student’s posttest PFnet (Figure 4.7) is that

some of these have shifted. Some TSCs such as energy and snow remain central.

However seasonality and plant, for example, move to the periphery while orographic

precipitation and community both become more interrelated to the other concepts. While

PFnet of Case 2 Referent

Figure 4.6. Pathfinder network graph showing relative relatedness of concepts as judged and averaged by three expert ecologists

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these two concepts are not as important as other ideas for an understanding of winter

ecology writ large, they were topics that were important and heavily covered in the

course during the time between tests (as indicated by lesson plans and teacher

interviews). Seasonality and plants are important to an expert level understanding of

winter ecology but they were not well covered in this segment of the course.

PFnet of Student 224’s Posttest

Figure 4.7. Pathfinder network graph showing relative relatedness of concepts as judged by student 224 after the DIAL experience

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What can be seen for these students who are decreasing in their levels of

knowledge is that they seem to be shifting their focus from a fairly well-developed

understanding of the overall topic, learning more, and then apparently assigning an undue

importance to a few of the new ideas. It is not clear if the students are reacting to the

novelty in the short term or if these will become lasting knowledge structures. The

pattern was true for all of the students in this study who started out relatively close to the

referent on the pretest, and then were less so on the posttest. There were two students in

Case 2 who started out low and moved lower but these students did not seem to have the

same shift in focus to newly introduced ideas and their interview data confirmed that they

did not have a command of the content.

Growth in the Middle

The larger sample size of Case 2 allows us to examine patterns that cannot be

detected in the other cases. One such pattern is that students in the middle two thirds of

the distribution of pretest scores tend to show more change in knowledge structures than

do the students who scored well on the pretest or those who scored low on the pretest

(Figure 4.2). As discussed in the previous section, some of the top performing students

decreased substantially while others only changed by small amounts. Because these top

tier scores are very close to what we would expect for between-expert PFnet similarity, a

ceiling effect is possible. Another possibility is that the material these students were

exposed to in the course was all review for them. There would be little change if they did

not have an opportunity to learn new information or understand new relationships

amongst the concepts.

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Students at the low end of the pretest csim range also tended to show less

dramatic change than those in the middle (Figure 4.2). If they started low they tended to

stay low, or as mentioned, move even lower. Again, it's not clear why this is but it could

be due to ability levels or it could be related to a threshold of required background

knowledge that these students did not have at the outset of the course and did not make

up along the way.

For those students in the middle of the pretest distribution, who accounted for

most of the growth across the case, we see again what might be a ceiling effect. Despite

what they scored on the pretest, students in the middle and upper ranges all seemed to

score within a fairly narrow range around the average of .15 csim on the posttest (Figure

4.2). This could be the limits of sensitivity of the assessment, a ceiling effect, or an

indicator of the limits to the learning opportunities the students in the class had.

Patterns in the Other Cases

When one looks at the other three cases: 1, 3, and 4, we do not see the patterns of

negative change in csim at the top of the pretest distribution, the most change in the

middle, and very little change at the bottom. Rather, Cases 1 and 4 showed positive

change for all students and fairly even distribution across the groups. If anything, the

Case 1 data suggest that learning was greater for students at the bottom as they caught up

with those students who started ahead. In Case 4 all students started out with low csim

scores and ended up much higher, showing the greatest and most consistent gains of the

four cases. Recall though that some students were dropped from the analysis for lack of

coherence in their posttest scores and these scores would have been less positive.

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Chapter Summary

The results presented in this chapter address the question: “Do students’

knowledge structures reflect greater understanding of science concepts following a DIAL

experience?” A Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Test of the Pretest and Posttest Pathfinder

assessments suggest that students’ knowledge structures of targeted science content did

change significantly over the course of their DIAL experiences. Descriptive statistics

suggest that positive learning occurred in three of the four cases. Some patterns

identified in the data suggest that the Pathfinder assessments may have a ceiling on their

sensitivity. Qualitative analysis of the PFnets helps to illuminate patterns in the data that

were not apparent in the statistical analysis. There also may be differences in patterns of

learning across cases. These are examined further in Chapter Five.

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CHAPTER V

RESULTS, CONTRIBUTORS TO LEARNING

Overview

The results presented in this chapter address the second research question of this

study: If (students’ knowledge structures reflect greater conceptual understanding), do

students’ interactions with the components of a DIAL environment contribute to change

in their conceptual science knowledge structures? ” The conceptual framework outlined

in Chapter One (Appendix B) presents a theoretical answer to this question, suggesting

six environmental components that might contribute to learning: the social environment,

the physical environment, the cultural environment, tools, the emotional environment,

and internal dialog and expression. Based on the conceptual framework (Appendix B) all

of these components have the potential to influence learning through either facilitated or

peripheral means. Qualitative data from a number of sources, predominantly student

interviews, were analyzed through pattern matching logic to determine if they aligned

with the conceptual framework. Thus, the chapter is organized according to the

conceptual framework but diverges according to the patterns that emerged from the data

and deviated from the conceptual framework. Data on the role of learning opportunities

(facilitated, peripheral) are first presented followed by data explaining the role of the

various environmental components to student learning in these four cases.

In this chapter an attempt is made to present the data as authentically as possible,

resulting in extensive use of the direct language of participants. Quotes presented are

from student interviews unless otherwise indicated. In those interviews students

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described either their understanding of a given topic or they described the learning

process that led to that understanding. Again all of the names have been changed to

pseudonyms for this report.

Learning opportunities

The fundamental dimension of the conceptual framework guiding this study is the

distinction between learning opportunities in DIAL that are facilitated by the teacher and

those learning opportunities that are available within the learning environment but are

more peripheral and accessed without the direct intervention of the teacher. These

learning opportunities have the potential to support learning of the targeted science

concepts. The student interview transcripts and work samples were coded to indicate the

opportunities students used to learn each of the concepts mentioned. Students were not

asked to make these judgments themselves. Rather, pattern codes were assigned after

consulting a list of activities/events that the teacher described as facilitating and through

cues in how students described their learning (e.g. “I think I noticed a lot of examples by

myself” Student 401, Everglades Trip) within a given “concept unit”, the unit of analysis.

The resulting code frequencies are presented in Table 5.1. Overall 53% of the

concepts that students discussed were learned through exclusively facilitated

opportunities while 15% were learned through exclusively peripheral opportunities.

Another 32% of learning processes were described by students as involving an interaction

of both facilitated and peripheral opportunities such as when a student would learn

something from the teacher and then develop that knowledge further through interaction

with the environment. The percentages in the table represent the proportion of

frequencies within the column categories such as the percentage of codes that were

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facilitated, peripheral, and combinations across all cases. Because the number of students

per case and the number of concept units per student varied by case, percentages provide

a more useful comparison that raw counts. Also shown in the table are the percentages of

learning opportunities that are associated with the achieved learning levels of students.

Meaningful statistical analysis was not possible with these data due to small sample sizes

but the patterns in the data suggested areas to focus the qualitative analysis.

Table 5.1

Frequencies of Learning Opportunity Codes Across Cases

Learning Opportunities

Facilitated Peripheral Both

All Cases 53% 15% 32%

Case 1 41% 11% 47%

Case 2 68% 7% 24%

Case 3 55% 8% 38%

Case 4 45% 32% 23%

Negative, Little, or No

Learning 54% 12% 35%

Moderate Learning 49% 15% 36%

High or Exceptional

Learning 64% 7% 29%

These pattern codes were assigned at the ‘concept unit’ level

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The data suggest that facilitation was an important element for student learning as

85% of the learning opportunities involved some level of facilitation and 53% involved

facilitated opportunities alone. Peripheral opportunities alone accounted for only 15% of

the learning but almost half of all the learning described, when considered in interactions

with the facilitated opportunities. This latter finding on peripheral opportunities suggests

that these DIAL experiences were creating opportunities for students to learn targeted

content knowledge in ways that were not anticipated by the teachers. Students were

developing a proportion of their knowledge through peripheral means. It is also clear

though that those peripheral opportunities were not as powerful alone as they were in

conjunction with facilitated aspects of the course.

The bottom portion of Table 5.1 shows the relationship between student learning

(based on Pathfinder data) and how often students at each of those levels used facilitated

and peripheral opportunities. There is not a big difference between students at the lower

and middle levels but we do see a slightly greater reliance on facilitated over peripheral

opportunities for the learners with the greatest gains. How these opportunities

contributed to student learning is discussed in the next sections.

Facilitated Opportunities

The data in Table 5.1 show that the teachers and the facilitation they provide have

critical roles in DIAL. Learning did happen without those opportunities but it was less

common. The teacher’s role will be discussed further in the Social Interactions section

of this chapter but in this section I show how (F1) guiding observations, (F2) providing

instructional resources, (F3) facilitating assignments and activities, (F4) making

connections, (F5) demonstration, (F6) providing expertise, (F7) direct instruction, and

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(F8) synthesis all played important roles in students’ knowledge development. Each of

these manifestations of facilitated learning emerged as patterns from the interviews, field

study, and student work samples. To be included in this report, each of these forms of

facilitation were described as important for learning by multiple students across all four

cases.

F1 Guiding Observations

Students engaged in DIAL are operating in an environment where much of the

surround has the potential to support their learning of TSCs. Examples of the content

they are learning exist throughout the environment. However, these environmental cues

may not be obvious to the untrained eye. Students in this study often described how a

teacher, guide, or local expert helped them to see examples of TSCs in the environment.

In one such case, a student in the Everglades class (Case 4) describes a situation where

the teacher led the group up to and into a copse of trees on an otherwise grassy plain in

order to illustrate the concept of hardwood hammocks and how those plant communities

are a function of the physical conditions of the environment:

I definitely didn't know what a hardwood hammock was before we went on the

trip. And then within the second day or so when we pulled up in the van to go

check out the hardwood hammocks and stuff, then Paul explained how even 2 feet

of elevation can create this whole different ecosystem for plants to live in…. Once

you're inside, then you... he pointed out how it was on the limestone, I think it

was. And so then you could, I could see the elevation change and then he

explained how the elevation change allows for the water to not totally cover the

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hardwood hammock. And the sawgrass prairie still has water flowing through it.

(Austin, Student 405, 11th grade, Case 4)

As in this case, the teachers across the cases would address the whole group in

this way as they pointed out and described aspects of the environment. The teachers and

students described numerous occasions like the one Austin describes above where

spontaneous occasions or “teachable moments” would present themselves. Teachers

would recognize some element of the environment that was a good example of one of the

TSCs and capitalize on the situation through guided observation. Other times the pattern

seemed to start with the teacher asking students to generally observe the area and then

ask a series of more focused questions until the illustration of the TSC was clear.

Students described this pattern in all of the cases.

Guided observation was also important as teachers interacted with individual

students through impromptu lessons. Mei, a 12th grade student, described such an event

on the Everglades trip of Case 4:

When Kevin (guide) was talking about the white mangrove, he pulled out the leaf

to see that on the roots of the leaf, you have two little black dots, and he was

saying that the ants are eating the sugar (excreted at the dots) but then the ants are

keeping away other insects. I think that's another time that I had a deeper

understanding of it (Niche). (Student 408, 12th grade, Case 4)

Some of the guided observation reported by students and teachers was more

planned, as in this series of events from Case 2, the Winter Environmental Science class:

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Ryan will show us a PowerPoint and then we'll also go outside. Like today we

went outside for a couple minutes and Ryan was just showing us certain things.

Even today he just went outside today to show us that surface hoar had formed on

top of the snow and I think it was yesterday we went out and Ryan dug a pit

earlier so we could just look at the snowpack and examine the different snow

crystals and certain things like that. (Kelsey, Student 230, 11th grade, Case 2)

In this series of events, the teacher prepared the lesson and then dug a pit in the

snow. He later used the pit by bringing the class out to see it and illustrate the point he

was making in the lesson about crystal formation and snowpack. He prefaced both

lessons by bringing students outside first thing to see a crystal feature that would

disappear shortly. These guided observations were a function of the teacher both

planning ahead and reacting to evolving conditions. Many of the students in Case 2

reported this lesson sequence as being helpful to their understanding of snow

metamorphism.

Most students in the study described guided observation as being important for

their understanding of at least one TSC, though which one was highly individualized,

despite the more or less common experience within each case. For Mei the relationship

between the ants and the mangrove became clear to her through the process while for

Kelsey the digging of the snow pit was important. There was no way to measure how

many of these guided observation events took place but it was clear that their

effectiveness was dependent on more than the fact that they occurred. Based on my field

observations of Case 4, these guided observation events happened very frequently and

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while some were described by multiple students as being influential learning events (e.g.

the hardwood hammock lesson), others were not mentioned at all.

F2 Providing Instructional Resources

Like most teachers, the participant teachers in this study provided learning

resources to their students and, in turn, students often reported these resources as being

useful for developing understanding. An important difference in DIAL learning is that

once immersed, resources can be hard to come by. Students cannot necessarily do an

internet search for a topic of interest, particularly in the outdoor settings where much of

the experiences in this study occurred. Across the cases the teachers provided

photocopied handouts and/or had resources available for students in the field. In Cases

1,2, and 3 which had some classroom components, students also reported videos shown

by the teacher as being useful for learning. A student from Case 3, the crane migration

group, described the role of handouts in understanding some of the crane behaviors they

observed:

Before we left we got a couple different handouts. One was just about flight and

function of the different birds, and you know sort of the internal. And the other

one was about behavior, which sort of allowed me to grasp the more complex

behavioral attributes that the cranes have. (Nate, Student 309, grade 9, Case 3)

Many of the students in Cases 1,2, and 3 reported that their understanding of some

topics changed from the pretest to the posttest as a result of new information that was

made available to them via these types of resources given as intended assignments. In

other instances teachers or guides facilitated resources to be available as students needed

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them as on-demand information. The teacher of Case 4 did not provide any handouts or

other resources at all to the students. However, the local guide brought a waterproof

bucket full of guidebooks, maps, and other resources for students to use. Some students

used them regularly and others did not. During my field observations of this group, I

often observed the teachers reading or looking up information in the books as well.

Similar to the process of guided observation, teachers often expected the students

to make observations of their environments with the aid of resources such as

dichotomous keys or field guides to help them interpret, as in this case:

Well the first time we stopped and looked at some trees, a student and I were

partnered up to find, to identify, two different trees and we had these books and

going through the books, we could tell what they are. Like “oh there's a lodgepole

because it has the same consistency trunk throughout”, you know, and “oh the-the

needles are in packets of two or three.” You know, stuff like that. I definitely

think that helped us have a greater understanding of trees. (Jason, Student 103,

Case 1, no grade levels)

The teachers of Cases 1 and 4 described a part of their role as helping match the

right resources to the right students, particularly around ability and interest. They

described their students as having a wide range of ability levels and grade levels that

were best served by choosing specific resources that best matched those abilities.

F3 Facilitating Assignments and Activities

Even when teachers were not directly involved with the social interactions of

instruction, the role of facilitation remained important. Assignments and planned

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activities were both cited by students as important for their learning. In Cases 1 and 2,

the residential programs, students were assigned homework to be completed outside of

class time, though still within the context of the immersion experience. Students often

described the role of these assignments as priming them for what they would experience

during instruction time or helping them to process their learning in a way that they could

relate to.

The teachers in Cases 1 and 2 also set up more activities that were bounded and

targeted (but still allowed the students to build a sense of discovery) than did the teachers

in Cases 3 and 4. In these activities students would be given instructions and a goal and

then sent out to accomplish it, as was described above with the students using field guides

to identify trees. Another student described how they were sent out following a

classroom lesson to look for real examples of what was diagramed on the board:

So subnivean is the environment under the snow, between the ground and the

snow. I guess there are a few ways we learned about it. We talked about it in class

a fair amount. And then actually, we did an activity where we went out and we

were looking for tracks and we found, or my group found, 6 or 7 burrows that

went all the way down to the ground. It was a pretty good idea of what subnivean

actually looked like for me. (Mitch, Student 207, 11th grade, Case 2)

These facilitated discovery activities were important for a number of students but they

were also a gamble. The teachers predicted what the students would experience during

these activities but they did not always happen as planned. In the case described above

many students did not see any burrows and did not have the opportunity to link the

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classroom lesson with the field observations. They were still able to describe the TSC

“subnivean” and link it to other contexts they had experienced but they did not seem to

have the same appreciation for the idea nor the level of detail in their descriptions as did

the two students who described seeing the burrows.

Interestingly, the students in Case 1 described activities that the teacher, Jacob,

facilitated much more often than information that he simply said. The opposite was true

for the other cases. When students did describe Jacob speaking, they usually referred to

his questioning rather than what he directly told them. The students of Case 1, with one

exception, also described themselves as not being very good at learning in traditional

settings. While it is possible that Jacob used less direct instruction and more facilitation

of activities, this was not the impression he gave in his teacher interview. That

proportion was on par with the other cases. It seems likely that this particular group of

students learned more through facilitated activities than through direct instruction.

Daniel described how this distinction was important to him:

Instead of being told that coniferous trees have these (adaptations), we'd actually

go out, look at trees, draw them, like literally taste them. Just anything we could

to like learn more about the tree in the field and get a better understanding of why

trees adapt to what environments or anything like that. It was really fun. (Student

102, no grade levels, Case 3)

F4 Making Connections

Whether living in a subalpine environment, traveling through the jungle-like

Everglades, or being surrounded by the cacophony of tens of thousands of cranes, the

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students who participated in these DIAL experiences were generally not in familiar

environments. The teachers helped bridge the gap between the exotic settings and the

students’ personal experience. Similarly, the teachers helped the students bridge the gap

between their own experience and the also unfamiliar science content. One way teachers

did this was by helping the students to see the immediate connection between the

environment, content, and the students’ experience. In teaching about tides, the teacher

and guide in Case 4 elicited the students’ experience in paddling against the tides and

then paddling with the tides to illustrate how the force of the tides was a geometric

function determined by the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. Reversing the

process, they used the students’ new understanding of tidal flow to plan canoe travel the

next day. I observed this sequence during the field study of the case and then both

students and the teacher described aspects of it in their interviews, most of whom

described it as a first time they truly understood what tides were. In a similar process, the

teacher in Case 2 built interest in learning about the subnivean environment (under the

snow) by making the connection to the knowledge students would need when they were

living out in the snow themselves, as one student recounts: ”With the snow unit we talked

about our application of making (igloos) during the winter trip, those being insulated and

that being really the same way animals can use underneath the snow to stay warm”

(Andrew, Student 211, 11th grade). There was, however, a downside to this metaphoric

teaching style as it may have led to some misconceptions. This is explained at the end of

this chapter.

By making connections between experience and the TSCs teachers harnessed the

excitement of novelty to serve the learning of the TSCs. An alligator sighting a few feet

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from one’s canoe is certainly attention-getting but the teacher and guide I observed in the

field often acknowledged the excitement and then linked it to a lesson. In this case,

pointing out how the animal had created a niche for other organisms by keeping bank

areas clear. A student described another case of her teacher connecting novel experience

to a TSC, snow metamorphism:

There was one day where we went out and tested out our skins (traction devices

for skis), sort of in the backcountry… and we sort of looked at the snow and

sometimes when we would walk on it, or like, break a trail, it would "whump",

make noises and stuff like that, and Ryan took the opportunity to be like, “hey,

snow, it's probably faceted because it's making that noise”. (Amy, Student 240,

11th grade, Case 2)

Helping students understand their experiences was important but experience is

also limited in that some concepts are too broad or abstract to encompass within personal

experience. Understanding tides through personal experience is possible on one level but

to understand the role of gravitational pull and global movement of the ocean requires

some abstraction. In that case I observed the teacher using an effective kinesthetic

demonstration to help the students make the conceptual jump. In another case the guide

on the Everglades trip was trying to help students see the entirety of Southern Florida as a

single interactive system. Dante recalled that lesson:

I remember Kevin saying one time, when they put all the those dikes up, he said

it was pretty much blocking all the arteries of the heart. Once you do that, nothing

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can go anywhere from there and it dies. I thought that was a good analogy.

(Student 406, 9th grade, Case 4)

F5 Demonstration

Demonstrations are used by most science teachers and these DIAL experiences

were no exception, as illustrated with the kinesthetic tide demonstration. As in other

settings, students found demonstrations useful to help them build content knowledge and

make connections. We often see demonstrations in classrooms or lab science used to

model natural phenomena that are inaccessible from within the classroom. In these DIAL

cases teachers could rely on guided observation to illustrate many concepts that could not

be shown in a classroom setting and so they would not need to model them. Still, they

used demonstration and modeling to illustrate more abstract ideas, as described above. In

these DIAL environments scientific apparatus were not readily available as they might be

for a laboratory demonstration. Note that this need not apply to DIAL in general.

Instead, the teachers would co-opt other materials or students to serve as models within

the demonstrations.

In the tides demonstration mentioned above, Paul (teacher) used one student to

represent the Earth and two more to represent the Moon and Sun, showing the two

different orbital patterns. Two more students held hands and encircled the “Earth”

representing the water on the surface. As the Moon revolved around the Earth and they

both revolved around the Sun, the two water people moved their arms to show how the

water bulged out in response to gravitational pull. This demonstration could be effective

in the classroom but in the DIAL setting Paul could also use guided observation to point

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out the high tide line on the mangrove roots, note how the area they were standing in was

under water a few hours before, and discuss the impact of tides on people trying to paddle

against them, all of which I observed in the field. Austin (Student 405, 11th grade)

reflected on this during our conversation:

Austin: On tides, I knew generally they came in every once and a while and went

back out, and it had something to do with the moon and gravitational pull. But

yeah, after Paul’s demonstration on the beach, that kind of... that was sort of like

an “aha moment”… I realized what caused all of that and how it looked on a

global scale.

Mike: What does it look like?

Austin: Depending on where the sun and the moon are, the oceans can be

stretched and so like in on one side of the earth and out on the other side. Or just

since the sun and the moon are in different places all the time, the tides are all

over the place, basically.

Ryan, the teacher in Case 2 used a surprisingly similar set-up to demonstrate to

his students the role of Earth’s angle in relation to the sun in creating seasonality while

students directly experienced the resulting cold.

There were a number of other events where teachers used demonstrations that

could work in the classroom but made them more salient by using the local context to

support the learning, as in this example from Case 2:

I think the thing that registered most for me was that he put outside two water

bottles, one that was open and had a fan on it, and one that was closed and deeper

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in the snow and also with a black wrapper around it. And he asked us.... The

temperatures were very different and they've been there since the same time of

day, and he asked us why the temperatures were different. We talked about all of

the ways that one had lost heat and all the ways one had kept its insulation and

that really registered on a lot of different levels I think. (Rachel, Student 204, 11th

grade, Case 2)

By conducting the experiment outside, Ryan was able to reduce one layer of

abstraction and put the students within the experimental conditions. Through that set up

hee was also able to make the connection to how a person or an animal can reduce heat

transfer.

F6 Providing Expertise

We would hope that every science teacher has some level of expertise to share

with their class. In these cases of DIAL, that expertise seemed to manifest in more ways

than it might in a typical classroom. Students described teachers as not only sharing

knowledge through lessons but also helping students to interpret their environments and

responding to questions inspired by the surround. In addition, students experienced or

witnessed the modeling of an expert as he or she became interested in notable

observations and communicated about the environment as an expert would. This was

apparent in the observations I made of Case 4 and was also described by students in the

other cases, particularly Case 3 as Jennifer, the teacher pursued her own interests in

learning more about the Cranes, as she led the class. In Cases 3 and 4, the teachers

recruited local experts to assist with instruction/interpretation and thus modeled for

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students conversation between experts. Two quotes from students reflect the contribution

the local experts made: “He's (Kevin, the guide) really knowledgeable I guess in his

field. He knows this stuff about the Everglades. He really knows like a lot about all the

plants and animals. He obviously is really enthusiastic about it all.” (David, Student

404, 9th grade, Case 4). “The two things that taught me most of this was....a little bit of

stuff that I learned in the classroom that was mainly just in general about all birds and

just talking to Kelly who was the bird...the crane expert.” (Nate, Student 309, 9th grade,

Case 3). Many students expressed awe at the knowledge of the local experts and

commonly discussed times where they gained clarity on a topic based on a question

answered by the teachers or the local expert.

A number of students in Cases 3 and 4 discussed how their teacher’s role

changed rather drastically when the local expert was brought on board, how the teachers

would become more like parent figures or administrators while the local experts delivered

the knowledge. I detected a more subtle shift in my observations of Case 4. Before

Kevin, the guide, joined the group, Paul, the teacher, readily dispensed facts, prompted

students for interpretations of what they were seeing, and guided the learning toward the

big ideas and TSCs. After Kevin joined, Paul was more reserved, let Kevin share most of

the declarative knowledge, and typically asked for confirmation from Kevin when he did

share information. However, Paul also often made critical instructional moves to help

students move beyond natural history and develop big picture connections and schematic

ideas. It was clear that Kevin had much local knowledge but perhaps did not understand

why the information was important for the bigger picture. Also, Paul often modeled his

intrigue by asking Kevin questions or consulting a field guide and sharing his findings.

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While I did not observe Case 3, interviewed students reported some similar interactions

between the teacher and local expert.

Teachers acting as experts in context also seemed to help students understand

scientific language. Students were able to pick up vocabulary when the teacher as expert

used it in context. This was true for both scientific words and common words used in a

scientific way. The following quotes illustrate these ideas:

Robert: Well, Ryan (teacher)… I guess we've been talking a lot about snow and

snowfall and the snowpack recently, and those words just sort of came up and I

guess they're sort of vocabulary words that he kept on repeating. We all just

understood it eventually. At first I had no clue what he was talking about by

“orographic precipitation”, but he did a good job explaining it and how… what it

really means. (Student 215, 11th grade, Case 2)

Robert: Before I thought of resistance as...I didn't really understand it. I just sort

of understood it like the common definition of being stubborn or not really

moving. Then we talked a lot about survival strategies and how resistance is one

of them. It's like hibernation, migration, resistance. And how it's not really related

to the geology anymore, it's more related to snow and seasonality, because in the

snow it's an adaptation or an acclimation I guess, rather than just a common term

anymore. (Student 215, 11th grade, Case 2)

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F7 Direct Instruction

For the purposes of this study direct instruction refers to a teacher-centered

pedagogical approach defined by a direct transfer of information and learning supports

from teacher to student and that stands in contrast to a more inductive inquiry method of

instruction (Kirschner, et al., 2006). The use of the term “direct instruction” here

describes learning events rather than the overall pedagogical approach of any given

teacher. Of all manners of facilitation that students reported as helping them develop

understanding of the TSCs, direct instruction was one of the most prevalently coded

within the student transcripts. Quite often students reported that they learned a given idea

simply because the teacher or local expert had said it. At times students identified very

specifically what was said along with the context. More often they reported in

generalities such as “I think he just told us what it was” or “we talked about…” When

pressed on what “we talked about” actually meant or looked like students typically

described lecture with questions and answers or a teacher-focused discussion as Andrew

describes here:

That was generally Ryan (teacher) and sometimes the apprentice Andrea lecturing

about different types and we would generally take notes but it wasn't a full

lecture. There would be some class participation. We would shout out ideas about

why we thought certain adaptations would help. It was more of a team effort than

purely just note taking and lecture. (Student 211, 11th grade, Case 2)

The direct instruction led to a mix of both declarative knowledge, such as

describing an adaptation to a particular niche, and to schematic knowledge such as the

complex relationship in this description:

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He wrote thermoconductivity. he wrote a lot of the equations on how to figure out

what the thermoconductivity of an object or and animal is. And we sort of defined

it and explained it and sort of I guess reviewed how that actually affects animals

and basically everything in winter and summer, I guess. (Robert, Student 215,

11th grade, Case 2)

Direct instruction seemed to be prevalent in the field as well as when students

were actually sitting in classrooms. Teachers brought portable white boards, printed

photos, or drew in the sand to simulate classroom practices.

F8 Synthesis

A final and critical way that facilitation played a role during these DIAL

experiences was through bringing all of the lessons learned together to inform the big

idea(s) of each course. Because there was such a variety of experiences and many of

them were impromptu, it would be easy for students to come away with a collection of

disconnected information. Across all of the cases the students described many instances

of the teachers helping them to see how it all fit together. Interestingly, none of the

teachers identified this as a specific teaching goal. In the following quote, a student in

Case 3 describes how the teacher brought the field and classroom lessons together:

The layout of the class in the week… we would have a class on Monday, in class

to introduce concepts and then (Ryan would) say, “be ready, have boots and

gaiters on Wednesday, we're going to go trek around in the snow looking for these

tracks that we've talked about today in class”. And then generally the field classes

being three hours long, we wouldn't necessarily always be out for the full three

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hours, but we would come back to the class and rehash what we learned and

utilize the field knowledge and then translate them into note form and more

straightforward information. I think he did a good job of relating the two and it

never felt like a field class was totally disjointed from our unit, we were not just

going outside to go outside and take advantage of the time and do something else.

It was always pretty grounded in the unit that we were studying, which was good.

(Andrew, Student 211, 11th grade, Case 2)

This deductive process of learning a concept in a more formal setting and then

going out in the field to look for examples or to test a theory was commonly described by

students and seemed to empower them by making them feel like they were

knowledgeable about what they were observing. The opposite, inductive tack of moving

from observations to ideas was also reported by students as effective to help synthesize

knowledge, as in this example:

We went and dug snow pits and then we had to identify each storm that had

happened-like each layer of snow and then measure the temperatures. We learned

that and we went back to the class and the next day or something he gave us a

worksheet that had the different layers of snow and then he told us what they

were. So we learned-we did it and then we learned what it was. (Ashley, Student

105, no grade levels, Case 1)

All of the teachers described in their pre-DIAL interviews intentional plans to

create a blend of formal and informal lessons specifically intended to work together to

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help students learn the TSCs. They also all described wanting students to see how all of

the information fit together into a bigger scheme. In Case 1 everything came back to

adaptation, Case 2 was founded on the relationship between biotic and abiotic, Case 3

came back to habitat needs of cranes and humans and what happens when they clash, and

Case 4 was similar, in understanding micro-environments and their sensitivity to

disturbance.

In comparing teacher plans and student descriptions of their learning, much but

not all of the synthesis that students described when talking about their PFnets seemed to

happen as a result of the plans that teachers designed and enacted. Students reported that

as they moved from one lesson or activity to another, teachers would often help them see

how it all fit together either through direct instruction, synthesis assignments, or

reflection. Cases 1, 3 and 4 all used prompted written reflection to help students

synthesize information. The teachers in Cases 2 and 3 explicitly outlined the big ideas

for students as described here:

I remember our first homework assignment, he just asked us to answer a question,

what is energy? And just certain things to get us thinking about it ahead of time.

And then in class he'll kind of ask a central question to what we're gonna be

talking about at the beginning of the period maybe. Like maybe how something

relates and usually we'll discuss it a little bit and then he'll have a PowerPoint to

show us pictures and that sort of stuff. (Kelsey, Student 230, 11th grade, Case 2)

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Peripheral Opportunities

As indicated, peripheral learning opportunities were discussed in conjunction with

students’ learning of TSCs much less than were facilitated opportunities. Peripheral

opportunities in isolation accounted for few accounts of direct content learning. Rather,

peripheral learning opportunities accounted for a different class of learning built largely

around the affective domain, and at times an abductive learning process where students

began to form loose hypotheses based on their direct observations. There was a strong

supporting connection to academic learning as will be discussed in the following

sections. Four forms of peripheral learning opportunities were supported with evidence

from multiple students from each of the four cases: (P1) personal discoveries, (P2)

discordant observations, (P3) affective connections, and (P4) other resources.

P1 Personal Discoveries

In some instances students did seem to learn TSC-related content directly from peripheral

opportunities. It is difficult to know if these instances were truly without any facilitation

but a few students attributed some learning to ideas that they picked up entirely on their

own. One student in particular described a number of such cases. An 11th grade student

on the Everglades trip, Jake did not express any of these ideas during the course while I

was observing, nor did I hear others instructing him or mentioning these ideas

themselves. His impression that he discovered and internalized these ideas seems

credible. In the following exchange, Jake explains two interrelated ideas that he

discovered.

Jake: I didn't realize that the air plants relied so heavily on the mangroves.

Because 90% of the air plants were on mangroves it seemed. Like going through

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the tunnel, the mangrove tunnel, there was a ton of them so that was kind of, the

mangrove tunnel mainly was what made me really connect mangroves and air

plants… Tides and water flow I connected, I related those to mangroves because

they were so a part of that because the mangroves it seemed, were mainly in zones

that affected, that were affected by the tides.

Mike: was that something you just noticed (responding to an earlier claim)?

Jake: Yeah. It seems like once the water started getting brackish and there was… I

mean it started pretty early in the tunnels you could notice where the tide was

going up and down.

Mike: how could you tell?

Jake: just by like the mud, you could see where the water used to be and had come

down a little bit. You can't really tell that much at high tide… but I think when

you're going through it, the tunnels, that’s the part where I really noticed that.


Jake also described an experience of using an available resource to support an

observation he made:

There was one shell, I don't remember what it was, but I saw it when I was tide

pooling, or when we were tide pooling. I didn't really point it out but I looked at

it, and later on after the swamp hike, we had some books and I saw the shell and

that was kind of like a personal learning moment I guess. (Student 401, 11th

grade, Case 4)

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While Jake seemed to simply internalize this learning without applying or sharing

it, Rebecca, a student from Case 1, explains somewhat the opposite. She described taking

a lesson that she learned about her own relationship to the context of high altitude living

and was able to apply that on the Pathfinder assessment more broadly, making

connections to the TSC desiccation that she had not made before:

I think it's like how the moisture gets sucked out of you right? And so I know that

happens up here just being up here and (sigh)

Mike: Just from your personal experience?

Rebecca: Yeah, from my personal experience being up here and my hair and my

lotion...gotta oil every day and so… I just remember learning I'm pretty sure it

just sucks the moisture out of you which I know has to do with elevation.

(Student 106, no grade levels, Case 1)

In a final example of students making conceptually related personal discoveries

Shannon, a 9th grade student in Case 3 describes an idea that was not specifically

important to the big idea but indicated skill in observation and possibly set the stage for

future learning:

Seeing their...like how the cranes fly and their wing rhythms…. It was just their

call sounded so much like a goose, but their wing beats were so different.

Mike: Can you describe it?

Shannon: Instead of being a straight flap, like up and down and even, they took

their wings straight up and then lowered them slowly. (Student 302, 10th grade,

Case 3)

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The examples presented in this section were among a small set of such examples.

Overall, there was little evidence to support that much direct, conceptual learning

happened directly as a result of peripheral opportunities for most students. However, for

one student in each of the cases, this was a proportionally important avenue for learning.

These students seemed more anxious to talk about this peripheral learning than that

which was facilitated. For most of the other students the peripheral learning

opportunities became important as supports that led to or enhanced the conceptual

science learning. This is addressed in the remainder of this chapter.

P2 Discordant Observations

Another learning phenomenon that emerged and was, by definition, peripheral to

the teachers’ facilitation occurred when students were confronted with the situation of

having preconceived notions that were discordant with observations they were making.

No such events in this study were described by students in ways that could be considered

paradigmatic shifts or major conceptual changes for students but they seem to have

contributed to the students’ understanding of some TSCs or created a reason for the

students to become more interested. In the student descriptions that follow, all of the

information students report could have been simply told to them but based on their

descriptions, discovering it on their own seemed important to their learning processes:

Anna: On the first day we saw this alligator swimming and I never really thought

about it but they only swim with their tail. That was kind of surprising to me.

And even I don't know why that’s so surprising to me but I definitely thought

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they're using their feet and that was something I discovered just from looking at

them. (Student 202, 11th grade, Case 4)

Jake: We found that turtle on the swamp thing. I never realized when they go into

their shell, just how secure they are in there. I kind of thought they, I mean if you

really wanted it you could probably pull it out or something but that thing was in

there and that was kind of a learning moment, it was just like whoa!


Mei: I guess when I first imagined that kind of ecosystem, I couldn't picture,

because the creeks they're just narrow and running all the time and the ocean is

always that bluebird color, but like....like I would hate the color of black water

running, 'cause I would think of coffee. But then I actually understood it was

because the cypress turn the waters that color. And I guess it was just far from my

expectations. This was just really different from what I thought. (Student 408,

12th grade, Case 4)

This last quote implies learning that is perhaps broader than the first two. Before

the experience, Mei tried to imagine what a cypress swamp would look like but had

trouble reconciling her images of the ocean and mountain streams with this third potential

that was repugnant to her. Once she saw the cypress swamp and came to terms with it, it

was both more understandable and palatable. Had she maintained the schema of black

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water as repugnant it seems unlikely that she would have been as interested in exploring

that ecosystem.

P3 Affective Connections

The most important role for peripheral learning opportunities across all cases was

in students developing affective connections to the curriculum, as determined by both

related code frequencies and the manner in which students described their experiences.

Some students described these connections as helping them become engaged in the

curriculum and for others, emotionally stirring events seemed to create memorable

connections to examples of TSCs. Within their narratives of learning events they would

often weave together their affective memories with the concepts they were learning.

Most of the students involved in the study had a great deal of choice as to whether

or not to participate in these DIAL experiences. However, in Case 1 some students

enrolled simply because they needed a science credit and in Case 3, the students could

choose to attend the school or not but could not choose the class. Heather (Case 3) was a

student for whom crane migration was not an interesting topic. Her evolution of attitude

over the course of the brief DIAL experience that led to her becoming more interested in

the subject can be attributed to peripheral, affective events:

Heather: Actually seeing the cranes made me a lot more interested in them. So I

mean that's...besides all the factual stuff, like what we learned here (home) and

what we learned there (Nebraska), which are almost the same things. It really just

related because it makes me want to learn more about them…

Mike: Why do you think that is? Why do you think it is that seeing the cranes

changed that for you?

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Heather: 'Cause I've never liked birds and I just kind of stereotyped them into a

bird. Instead of like a specific kind of species. And so, you know, whenever I'd

go bird watching with my grandma, I'd always find it so boring and... So I thought

it was gonna be a super boring trip and it would just be sitting there for hours

watching cranes and I wouldn't have fun at all. But ...at first the noise that they

make was annoying, but then it's kind of hypnotizing, or entrancing after a while

and it's like, I don't know. It's almost close to meditation for me or something. It

was cool.

There was one moment. It was when we were in the blind, I think it was the first

night. And I saw Eva and George standing really close together and he had his

arm around her and they were looking out at the cranes and I just like...it was

really cool, 'cause it just kind of... I don't know how to describe the feeling. Just

made me feel really happy, because it just kind of made me realize that cranes are

so much like humans.

Mike: What do you mean?

Heather: That like when they mate for life, it's just... it's so much more important

than just having a bunch of different mates. So when you have one person you

depend on them, it's a lot bigger of a deal. (Student 301, 10th grade, Case 3)

In all of the cases, students witnessed awe-inspiring natural events that seemed to

become deeply seated in their memories. They were not, however, always well-

connected to the curriculum, and therefore did not come up in interviews in conjunction

with learning the TSCs. Rather they would be described when I asked students about

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general memorable events. One such event I will describe from my field notes rather

than student accounts for that reason.

The Case 4 group had been canoeing since mid-day through claustrophobic

mangrove tunnels that would occasionally widen into areas the size of a small pond. It

was dark and the group had not eaten nor had much of a break but we could not stop until

we reached the only suitable place to camp. One could barely see the canoe in front of

them and there was a real danger of taking a wrong turn, ending up separated from the

group. Students were nervous, tired, hungry, cold, and generally down. From the middle

of the group a student yelled and raised his hand in the air holding a glowing jellyfish.

Within a few minutes what were actually comb jellies began to luminesce all around us

and we could see that we had made it out into a wide body of water. For at least an hour

more every paddle stroke resulted in comb jellies lighting up. It was a truly amazing

sight to behold and this was not lost on the students. They acted excited by the find and

seemed reinvigorated for the trip. Surprisingly, neither the teacher nor the guide ever

referred to it again or turned it into a teachable moment. They did not use the event to

talk about pulse breeding, tidal influence on marine life, or any similar topic. It seemed

like a surprising omission. Students mentioned the event throughout the rest of the trip

but I never heard them refer to any associated science content. Events like this, with

strong emotional content, seemed to become spatial and temporal markers that students

used to index their experiences. While the comb jelly event was not used by students to

provide a context for the learning they described in the interviews, there were many other

events across all of the cases in which students did begin their recall of learning with

descriptions of these emotionally moving events.

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As with Heather and the cranes, students were keyed into wildlife encounters

which were necessarily peripheral events. A bobcat walked up to the window where the

students of Case 1 were working and numerous students reported seeing snowshoe hares

in both of the winter courses. More than any other topic, students reported wildlife as

prompting them to seek out more information about what they saw. Students in Case 3

reported emotional reactions to the noise and sight of 10,000 cranes. There were many

wildlife encounters that students reported as stirring on the Case 4 Everglades trip. Being

surrounded by dolphins, seeing rare birds, watching alligators face off for territory,

seeing giant orb weaver spiders in their webs, and following an endangered 6’ long

prehistoric sawfish as it patrolled the length of a beach were all described by students as

memorable events for which they had a visceral reaction.

Of course those visceral reactions were not always positive. In many cases the

novelty of perceived threat from the environment, including cold, drowning, avalanche,

spiders, alligators, pythons, or just a general sense of exposure were distracting elements

of the periphery. When asked about these feelings of fear or nervousness, every student

who brought it up also said that the fear was alleviated after some time in the

environment. Anna described her transition while walking through waist-deep water in a

cypress swamp:

When we started walking in the water, I was not like super scared but it was like

freaking me out with all the woody stuff around my feet and I didn't know what

was going on. We had just talked about pythons and what they are, they are

everywhere and we were like looking out for alligators I kind of knew I was safe

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but it still did not make me feel good. But in the end I liked it. Like I like when

stuff is not super comfortable to you. (Student 402, 11th grade, Case 4)

When students made this transition, it seemed to come with other important shifts.

Many students described a sense of empowerment over perceived threats and their own

emotions. In a few cases students described how the distracting affects of novelty were

reduced once they became familiar with some aspect of the environment that at first felt

threatening and how that familiarity allowed them to notice details about the environment

that they perceived inaccurately at first. This last point is illustrated by Teddy’s account:

There was one little moment when I was...when David and I were paddling...I

don't know which day it was, second day. Third day maybe. I don't know. But we

were paddling and I looked off to my left and I saw something chasing stuff in the

water. And it was like a fin and I thought it was a shark. My heart started

pounding and I then I noticed it was a dolphin. (Student 407, 9th grade, Case 4)

Having observed this event, I would add that it took place over several minutes

and the boys were somewhat panicked and paddling very fast to catch up to the group

before they realized it was a dolphin. With the panic dissipated, the boys noticed details

of the dolphin’s anatomy and behavior that they were previously closed to. I observed

this pattern multiple times during my observation of Case 4 as the group or individuals at

first reacted sensationally to alligators, spiders, swamps, etc. and then began to express

curiosity and observe details about the elements that were previously seen as a threat.

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P4 Other Resources

Though not prevalent, there were some reports of students using resources that

provided information but that were not facilitated by their teachers. Examples included

park signage, overhearing other park visitors talking, learning ski skills from other

students, and even a poster on a bathroom wall. Overall, these were minor and infrequent

events though present in all of the cases.

Interactions Between Facilitated and Peripheral Opportunities

In the DIAL cases presented here the development of conceptual science

knowledge was more associated with facilitated than with peripheral learning

opportunities. However, peripheral opportunities were more associated with affective

elements of student learning and with students building personalized relationships to the

content knowledge. A synergistic effect seemed to present when the two types of

opportunities were used together. In learning events in which students reported both

types of opportunities together, their learning also tended to take on characteristics that

were different than they were for either one alone. Four themes emerged across the cases.

Students described (B1) a sense of completing a picture which at times led to a much

deeper understanding of the TSC by filling in a missing but critical piece. There were

often (B2) critical events that led to a deeper understanding of a concept. The (B3)

application of knowledge in an undirected, personally relevant way was also cited as an

important learning process outcome for many students. Finally, some students described

situations where they were able to consider information gained through facilitation in

conjunction with peripheral observations to (B4) extend their conceptual understanding

beyond the intended curriculum.

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B1 Completing the Picture

Students often described an interaction between facilitated learning opportunities

and their own peripheral observations that they were making in the field. This typically

involved a process of taking a framework of abstract ideas learned through instruction

and filling in visual or conceptual cues learned through concrete experience. Jared of

Case 3 did an excellent job of describing this phenomenon:

It (a detailed lecture by the teacher) was before the trip and it was just pure facts.

And that was really cool and then kind of the duality of that was kind of the first

night we were on the trip, we were in the blind and we were watching the cranes

and the sun was kind of setting and all those facts that Jennifer had told us were

starting to just like come together and make sense. And then I was able to

visualize, put a face to all of those facts that she gave us. So that was kind of

cool. So the lesson… I don't think the lesson would have been important if I

hadn't ended up seeing that. And I don't think the blind experience would have

been quite as helpful if I hadn't learned all that. So those kind of come together

and I think learning and then visualizing was good. (Student 305, 9th grade,

Case 3)

As described previously, both inductive and deductive processes were at work.

For some students the peripheral would precede the facilitated and this would still lead to

significant learning. Rather than an idea being supplied with an illustration, an

illustration of a concept was given an explanation. Anna also described such a process

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when discussing how she came to understand the relationship between tides and

pneumatophores, a specialized root system found on mangrove trees:

The first time it actually came up was when we went through those mangrove

tunnels and that was just like the tunnel was impressive but I didn't really know

what was going on. And then the first time I actually understood that they were

actually living from the saltwater and that they use it was at the chickee thing (an

elevated camping platform). And I think we woke up the next morning and looked

at all the roots and Kevin explained that to us. (Student 402, 11th grade, Case 4)

Following that series of events, Anna continued to notice and be amazed by the

mangrove islands growing in the salt water. Because she had noticed the

pneumatophores peripherally, Kevin’s explanation made sense to her. She had a picture

that was completed by the explanation.

For other students and/or other ideas, the picture seemed to be filled in gradually

as more information or visual evidence was acquired. Students described noticing

multiple examples, subtleties amongst examples, and counterexamples to build deeper

understanding of a concept, as Jake describes:

I think I learned little by little about the niche, like I was talking about before, like

how I kind of knew basically what it was but as we kind of went along and saw

different animals and plants in their habitat I kind of realized what makes it, what

puts it into its niche more. (Student 401, 11th grade, Case 4)

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It was clear from student explanations of their learning processes that seeing an

actual event, object, animal, etc., was more powerful than seeing a recorded image and it

was more likely to help them develop a more complete conceptual understanding. This

was a common idea, though when pressed, most students had difficulty articulating why

that was an important difference. Student attempts to describe this are highlighted in the

following quotes:

Kelsey: I think it's really cool when we get to go outside and stuff like that,

because we learn about it in the classroom and we see pictures on the PowerPoint

which is really nice and you know what the information is and then going out and

actually getting to see what it looks like is kind of a cool thing to be able to say,

“oh well that's what that actually is.” So it's kind of a really good balance between

being able to learn outside and see what it is and getting to learn the information

in the classroom. (Student 230, 11th grade, Case 2)

Vern: You can only do so much in a classroom and talk about something of that

sort, and leave the rest up to imagination. But going out and seeing what it would

look like, it kind of implants a memory into your head a lot easier. (Student 107,

no grade levels, Case 1)

Robert: So we sort of learned the theoretical aspect of it in class “and this

happened because of this”, “how the sun affects the snow”. Then by going outside

and really experiencing it, it just proved to all of us that this really does happen

and here's the proof right in front of us. I guess just those two together it really

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makes an effective learning style for me I guess. (Student 215, 11th grade,

Case 2)

Jared: If you're writing an essay or if you’re trying to describe it, it's definitely

going to be a lot easier. It's going to come to you a lot more naturally after having

seen it rather than having heard about it…It would be a lot more difficult to

explain it because I heard it from an outside source but it's much easier to explain

it coming from the source. (Student 305, 10th grade, Case 3)

From these and other accounts, it seems that the difference between words or

pictures and personally seeing a phenomenon is not entirely a function of the type or

details of the information but the perspective that comes along with it. To consider crane

behavior, for example, a video would do a better job of highlighting specific behaviors

and seeing them up close but all of the students in the Case 3 reported that actually seeing

the cranes was more important for their learning than seeing the more detailed videos.

They seemed to trust their own observations and had a sense of ownership of their own

personal observations that made their peripheral observations more powerful than

provided images, videos, or other evidence.

Despite this apparent trust in personal, peripheral observation, students did not

seem to use their observations in opposition to the more abstract information they were

receiving, as is often the case with “folk knowledge.” Rather, they seemed comfortable

fitting their observations into the conceptual frameworks they learned from teachers or

fitting explanations into their observations. It is possible that the concepts were

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straightforward enough to mitigate that potential clash but a number of the topics,

including tides and thermal conductivity, are notorious for the common misconceptions

associated with them.

B2 Keystone Events

Some interactions between facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities led to

more than simply filling in details of a concept for students. The combination would lead

to a conceptual breakthrough for a student. A barrier to understanding would be lifted or

a much deeper level of understanding would be developed. I labeled these occurrences

keystone events as one event would complete and hold together a concept much like a

keystone in a stone arch holds everything else in place. In most of these instances, a

peripheral event would provide that one last piece of information or perspective that

allowed the student to fully understand a facilitated concept. Mei described how one

such keystone event helped her better understand the complexities of one natural system:

I read my research, I realized tides are related to pneumatophores, but not until

when Kevin explained this and really pointed that out for us. That visual really

helped me to remember it. But the day when we were at the Pavilion Keys, we

had the day off, I was laying right next to that red mangrove...actually a white

mangrove… I was writing in my journal and I was watching the tide, the high

tides just coming in on my right and I saw the high tides like slowly covered the

pneumatophores. I think that was the moment of like, yeah, this is how it works. It

just all makes sense suddenly. (Student 408, 12th grade, Case 4)

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In Mei’s case, the timing and sequence of the facilitated opportunities worked

well with her chance encounter and visual cue. As she described it, the facilitated

learning opportunities provided the critical information to understand the phenomenon

but the peripheral experience of seeing it in context provided the piece that allowed her to

truly understand the concept and the relationship between the concepts. For Robert and

situations similar to the one he describes below, the peripheral opportunity was more

embodied. Again the facilitated opportunity provided most of the information but

physically experiencing the concept helped him put everything together:

For example he (teacher) was talking about how the days change with how the

earth rotates in the winter time and how that affects the temperature and I guess it

just really... I guess, we were outside and it was sort of a cold day and because we

were experiencing a lot of those same conditions that he was talking about, it just

made that connection in my mind that oh, this is what he's talking about, and sort

of just really assisted me. 'Cause I guess I would have understood it if we hadn't

been outside, but definitely not as well, and it definitely helped me remember and

fully understand it. (Student 215, 11th grade, Case 2)

As in the previous two examples, in all of the students’ references to keystone

events, context was a critical ingredient along with the content knowledge and the

personalized perspective. For Mei it was not just a simple visual and the declarative

information she had received that led to the keystone event, it was the full experience of

having all of those pieces come together and seeing how all of the details fit together.

Similarly for Robert, he had surely had other experiences of being cold before but the

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contextualization of the lesson through the experience of being cold as a result of the

concept being taught helped him solidify his understanding. The students did not imply

that they could not understand the abstract ideas. Instead, they indicated that the concrete

experience helped them develop a deeper understanding that allowed them to then better

comprehend the abstract idea, and see how it manifested in actual contexts.

B3 Personal Application of Facilitated Learning

The application of facilitated knowledge was another way in which peripheral

experience added to a more complete understanding of concepts. In all of the examples

of application of knowledge within these cases, the application was also described as

physically embodied and there were indications that the students felt they were personally

relevant. As discussed earlier, students in Case 4 became acutely aware of the tides and

their influence on how hard their paddling would be. At the beginning of the DIAL

experience the students paddled with or against the tides without understanding what was

behind them but as they learned more those embodied experiences seemed to become

reminders of the lessons and the lessons informed the way in which they interacted with

the tides:

When we first started I kind of knew about the tides but I didn't really pay that

much attention to it and then when we were on the island (formal lesson on tides)

I understood it and then when we were on the last day, when we were paddling to

Chockoloskee it was really like applied to the situation so I think that went step-

by-step right there.

Jake (Student 401), 11th grade, Case 4

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Similarly, the students in Case 2 were able to apply their facilitated learning about

snowpack and crystal formation to peripheral situations when they were traveling on skis,

reportedly strengthening their understanding, as Nick describes:

We would go out skiing in the mornings and we would have class often in the

afternoons. We'd talk about avalanche danger and how that will impact us on

expedition. We talked about why the snow felt a certain way on our skis, for

instance, especially 'cause we had so much snowfall this week. With all the

powder we would be able to see the difference between skiing on the packed

down groomed surfaces, which is kinda promoted, destructive metamorphism, as

opposed to the fresh snowfall which is kind of a week layer in the snow pack.

(Nick, Student 201, 11th grade, Case 2)

In both of the winter courses, students discussed how their own experiences of

trying to stay warm and move on snow helped them to understand how organisms’

adaptations were useful for the winter environment and how they could take lessons from

those adaptations to better their own experiences. This also may have led to some

misconceptions by misapplying the metaphor, as will be discussed at the end of this

chapter.

The immersion aspect of these DIAL experiences seemed to be particularly

important as it provided opportunities for facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities

to work together. The application of lessons learned reportedly happened for students at

various times, not just when they were participating in facilitated activities. Rachel and

Amy from Case 2 explained how this immersion element worked for each of them:

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Rachel: I definitely started thinking about the concepts that we learned in class a

lot outside of class. Just living here I guess, I'm not used to this climate and this

environment. I think it's really cool, but we learned a lot about taking care of

yourself here properly and so I think it really registered learning about

thermoconductivity and then thinking about the layers that I had on. We had ski

week and I had to think a lot about if I was going to wear cotton then I would get

wet and if it was a cloudy day how I should protect myself that way. I think what

I learned in class, a lot applied to what I was doing every single day here.


Amy: It's not like we're learning about something that's really distant from us, it's

just right outside. And I felt like we would reference a lot of times to lab in class,

and so you could picture in your mind what you saw and sort of use that to help

think about new concepts or stuff like that. (Student 240, 11th grade, Case 2)

As with keystone events, the personal connection to the material seemed to attach

relevance to the learning as the previous two examples indicated. It was not simply a

matter of using the knowledge, it was important because the information was useful and

relevant. Students described need-to-know information such as reducing thermal

conductivity at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter as having a direct impact on their

immediate life. It was relevant because it had direct personal ramifications. In this way

students described an appreciation of facilitated science concepts when they could apply

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them to directly influence the quality of their own experience within the context in which

they were living and learning.

B4 Extension of Learning

A final theme that emerged from the analysis of the interaction between facilitated

and peripheral learning opportunities was that the combination led to students extending

their learning beyond the intended curriculum. Armed with facilitated knowledge,

students described using it to reinterpret their environments on their own, developing

hypotheses, questions and conclusions. In one of the more interesting examples, Nick

from Case 2 used his peripheral observations along with facilitated learning and came up

with a conclusion that has been a hot topic within ecologist circles in recent years,

unbeknownst to him:

I thought it was interesting to see when we went out on our tracking lab, the way

that animals did interact with manmade elements. There's snowmobile trails and

nordic skiing trails just out there and there would be birds that walked across the

groomed trail. There was a snowshoe hare that had gone on the snowmobile trail.

I thought it was interesting that an animal might make use of human elements. We

talked a lot in the field about leave no trace, backcountry ethics and why if you

leave your scraps from dinner out on a rock and an animal eats it, it reduces the

animals' ability to survive on its own. It was interesting to think of how a

snowshoe hare might use a snowmobile trail and how because we have given it

this trail to work with, it's not having to jump through deep snow and it's saving

itself energy. For me, that clicked back to the leave no trace thing. How we're

impacting the ecological community, just by having a Nordic trail or having a

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snowmobile trail, because these animals will use it. (Student 201, 11th grade,

Case 2)

When I asked during the interview Nick did not realize that his thought process was

paralleling those of experts in the field, it was simply an interesting observation to him,

and one that he continued to inform with later observations. His interest and observations

combined with the facilitated learning opportunities of the class allowed him to extend

his knowledge to a higher level. It seems unlikely that this same scenario would have

played out without either the peripheral or the facilitated learning opportunities that were

available.

In the previously discussed example of learning about the tides in Case 4, the

students used a variety of peripheral and facilitated means to come to a complete

understanding. One student sought to go further after independently observing how

drastic the tidal change was where we were staying and where perhaps 400 meters of

ocean floor were bare at low tide:

After Paul’s demonstration in the evening...or he gave his demonstration in the

morning, but in the evening I realized that I'd only seen the...like the tide went in

and out pretty drastically, where we were staying. And the only other ocean or

beach I'd really been at was at a sea, and so I was wondering if maybe I just hadn't

spent that much time there. I kind of thought maybe a smaller body of water has

less of a visible tide than a big body of water. I asked Paul about that and he kind

of confirmed that. (Austin, Student 405, 11th grade, Case 4)

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Again, Austin’s learning sequence began with a facilitated lesson, was pursued

further based on a peripheral observation and moved further still with a student-initiated

facilitated conversation with the teacher. In this case it also seems unlikely that Austin’s

realization would have happened without both the facilitated and peripheral

opportunities.

When students were given choice in the assignments they were given or the

research they needed to conduct, they often described how their choices were driven by

peripheral events that had piqued their interest. In this way, they informed a facilitated

aspect of the class based on their peripheral experiences and extended their understanding

of a concept beyond the level facilitated by the teacher. In the following exchange

Ashley from Case 1 explains her choice in such a project:

Ashley: we saw a bobcat while we were in class the other day. It was really cool.

Mike: You were sitting in the building and you saw it?

Ashley: Yeah, you know where the (classroom building) is? Well we were sitting

in the door that's facing west and the windows and we saw the bobcat like walk

by. And it wasn't even scared of us. It was cool… Everybody was all excited.

They were like “oh my god, it's a bobcat!” Only half of us saw it so it was cool. I

was like "yeah, I saw a bobcat." Then I decided to do bobcats (for an assignment)

because we had to pick from like an elk, a bobcat and a bunch of different animals

and I was like oh we saw a bobcat so I'll pick that. (Ashley, Student 105, no

grade levels, Case 1)

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In the previous sections evidence of student learning was presented as framed by

the roles of facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities. The contributions of the

environmental components outlined in the DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B)

were evident in much of the data presented, though it was not highlighted. One could

rescan those passages and note the influences of social interactions, the physical

environment, tools, and individual/affective factors in each pattern of learning

opportunities. For example, there is a strong relationship between the facilitated

opportunities and social interactions, between peripheral opportunities and the affective

component, and between the combination of peripheral and facilitated opportunities with

the physical environment. However these are not exclusive relationships.

In the following sections evidence is presented that illustrates the role of each of

the environmental components from the DIAL framework on student learning. The

patterns that are presented in this section are the themes that emerged in multiple student

interviews across all of the cases through the process of pattern-matching logic (Yin,

2009)during cross-case analysis. The emergent patterns were considered against the

theory presented in the conceptual framework (Appendix B). Because the data did not fit

the conceptual framework perfectly, they are presented here with some small changes to

the organization to reflect the evidence that supports the conceptual framework as well as

the evidence that does not. Evidence describing the roles of (E1) social interactions, and

the (E2) physical environment are first presented. Very little evidence suggested a role

for non-academic tools in these four cases and therefore the role of (E3) tools is presented

as one category. The role of culture was also very difficult to detect or disentangle from

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the social component with the methods used. As such, the few detected cultural elements

are presented in conjunction with the social elements. Similarly, the emotional surround

was difficult to detect. However, there were strong individual emotional connections that

came up and these were associated with a much more complex set of (E4) individual

learning factors and processes than what was proposed in the conceptual framework.

Supporting data are presented in sections on the general (E5) emotional component

following the discussion on individual learning factors.

E1 Social interactions

Based on both the frequency that students mentioned the social component of the

learning environment in conjunction with their learning and the directness with which

they made connections between learning and social aspects, the social component of the

environment was the most prominently represented contributor to student learning for

most of the students in these DIAL cases. For the purposes of this study there was no

distinction made between formal and informal social interactions, though all of the

interactions that were coded and that are described here contributed in some way to the

learning of the TSCs. Even when other factors were involved, students often referred to a

social interaction that added to their learning process. Figure 5.1 shows code frequencies

of the most common social code references applied to the collected data. These were

descriptive codes that were applied to the transcripts prior to the delineation of the

“concept unit” unit of analysis and thus reflect all references that students made within

each of the social component categories across all four cases. The distribution of code

frequencies in this case accurately reflects the relative importance of each of the codes.

These codes were later aggregated into broader pattern groups that are discussed below:

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(E1.1) teacher-student interactions, (E1.2) group interactions, (E1.3) peer-to-peer

interactions, and (E1.4) cultural interactions.

E1.1Teacher-Student Interactions

The codes “teacher said…” and “we talked about…” were prevalent across the

cases and usually indicated a direct, top-down transmission of information from teacher

to student. Even though students’ sentences would literally begin with the phrase “we

talked about…” they would then indicate that the situation was actually more teacher-

centered than it was balanced discussion. As many of the quotes within the facilitated

Figure 5.1. Frequency of descriptive code references within the social interactions code group before transcripts were divided into units of analysis for inferential coding. Includes all 4 cases.

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learning opportunities section show, the students relied very heavily on these traditional

teacher-student interactions as they learned the TSCs. This was true regardless of where

the learning took place. There does seem to be the sense from students that these types of

interactions with their teachers were an agreed upon exchange of information rather than

a mandate to receive information. They spoke of receiving information from their

teachers as a natural course of action and none of the students described lectures as a

burden . Vern described the interplay that he perceived between the teachers’ and

students’ roles in these interactions: “there's a lot of effort put in by Jacob to introduce

that kind of stuff, but to me it felt like, if you weren't interested in it, like with anything

else, you wouldn't be able to pay attention” (Student 107, no grade levels, Case 1). That

is, he seemed to see the teacher as having the specific role of delivering information but

that students were only capable of learning that information if they had some interest in

it. This was a uniquely expressed viewpoint amongst the cases though almost all of the

students spoke of receiving information verbally from the teacher and ascribed some of

their learning to this pathway.

As was also previously described (section F1), the teachers played an important

role in helping the students to notice and interpret their environments through guided

observation. In the two cases in this study where local experts were brought in, the roles

those experts took on, as described by students and teachers, were more aligned with

teaching as an expert rather than working as an expert and so these codes can be added to

an understanding of how teacher-student relationships informed the learning process.

In some cases described by the students these teacher-student interactions were

used to facilitate formative assessment, such as when teachers would quiz students in the

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field on identifying organisms or processes and then fill in the gaps in the students’

understanding. Students reported these interactions to be good learning experiences as

well. A student from Case 3 described his experience with them during his DIAL

experience:

I think that it was just like implanted in our heads in the classroom and then when

we actually got into the field, we would talk about them (the TSCs) and then we

would know what we were talking about. We were just put in that situation of

“what is this tree and tell me how you know”, you know. “Look at the bark, look

at the needles, how many packets- I mean how many needles are in each packet?”,

you know. “Tell me about the berries, tell me about the cones”, all that kind of

stuff, you know. And once we figured out what kind of tree it was, I mean of

course there was just a bunch of questions running through your mind like, “oh I

wonder what the adaptations are for?” (Jason, Student 103, no grade levels, Case

1).

Not all social interactions described by the students involved the direct

transmission of information, nor verbal exchanges at all. Students also described the

teachers modeling learning and actions for the students. Although this passage is focused

on paddling technique rather than learning science, Teddy describes an alternative way

that he learned from the teacher and guide: “I learned by listening to them and watching

them probably. By watching Kevin and Paul paddle, made my paddling better” (Student

407, 9th grade, Case 4). As described above (section F6) students noticed how teachers

modeled the practice of inquiring into the environment they were exploring together and

how they conversed with other experts when they were available.

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The roles of the teachers during these DIAL experiences was described by

students as being quite different than one might experience with a classroom teacher,

even these same teachers when they were in the capacity of classroom teachers. Teachers

were often described as either “parental” or “more human” than normal. In an

impromptu conversation during the Everglades trip Mei (12th grade) and Anna (11th

grade) described to me how they liked that during these DIAL experiences the teachers

still acted like teachers at times but other times they joked around and were less intense.

Teachers in all of the cases were described by students as being very approachable and

easy to relate to though students other than Mei and Anna did not specify whether these

traits were qualities that they always noticed in these teachers or if the qualities were

somehow enhanced during DIAL experiences.

E1.2 Group Interactions

Based on the frequency and quality of student descriptions of their learning

processes, group level interactions were much less important than the teacher-student

interactions but they did register as contributing to learning. It was difficult to compare

small group and large group interactions because three of the four classes were small

groups already. Some students described valuing the perspectives and insights of other

students, though when asked directly, very few of the students could cite any cases of

learning from other students. It is possible that students may not have recognized the

degree to which group learning was happening. One student described her perspective of

the interactions in a typical classroom session from her course: “in class when we're

discussing, people ask a lot of really good questions. So it's not so much learning new

stuff that they bring in, but just learning from the questions they ask and then Ryan

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answering the questions or even other students attempting to answer the questions”

(Kelsey, Student 230, 11th grade, Case 2).

Perhaps the greatest disconnect between the interview data and the data that I

collected in the field with Case 4 involved the role of the group in influencing the

learning of individual students. As in the other cases, students in the Everglades class did

not attribute much of their learning to group or peer-related interactions but in my field

notes I recorded many instances of this type of social learning. Teddy (Student 407, 9th

grade), for example, became enamored with roseate spoonbills, a rare and charismatic

bird with a pinkish hue and a large spoon-shaped bill that they use to filter food out of the

mud. Teddy is an avid hunter and though the spoonbills are not a game species, he was

able to notice them and most other wildlife before anyone else. The few times we did see

them he would point them out, ask questions about them, and get the other students

involved. At one point the canoes were lashed together to form two catamarans. When

Teddy’s group passed some feeding spoonbills they excitedly pointed out and discussed

how the birds were using their bills and other behavioral characteristics. The other group

noticed the birds but then quickly returned to a social conversation. Later, in the

interviews, all of Teddy’s group indicated being interested in the birds while none in the

other group did. It seemed as though Teddy served as a catalyst for their interest but they

did not recognize his role in it. There were a few other cases where I noted significant

peer-influenced, group learning during my field observations that were not described as

such during student interviews either during or following the DIAL experience. It is

unclear if this disconnect was isolated to Case 4 or if students across the cases did not

recognize peer/group influence on their learning.

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There were a few other situations in which students described group problem

solving or interpretation as being beneficial to their learning, particularly when they were

working in small groups without an instructor present. Kelly described an exchange

resulting from an animal tracking activity they did: “we'd be outside and we'd see

footprints and I'd say ‘oh it's a cougar’ and then we'd get into this heated discussion about

it and then it turned out it was the snowshoe hare we saw minutes ago. It was the same

prints because a snowshoe hare has really big feet” (Student 106, no grade levels,

Case 1). It was the group exchange that helped her detect and correct her originally

erroneous interpretation of the tracks she was seeing.

In a very similar encounter in Case 2, Mitch also described being corrected on

identification of a track but through another student using a field guide as evidence. In

each of the Cases 1,2, and 4, students described this type of group problem solving to

interpret their surroundings, usually as a facilitated activity but at times it happened in

passing. It did not come up in Case 3 but students in that case also did not discuss any

individual problem-solving. During my field observations I noticed many examples of

brief exchanges between small groups of students as they worked together to identify

what they were seeing. Dante (Student 406, 9th grade) was particularly adept at learning

to identify an organism from a single interaction with the local expert and then sharing

the information later in a small group. In one notable instance he demonstrated to a small

group how the large snail he was holding was a channeled apple snail (invasive) rather

than the native apple snail. This was a peripheral event. I do not have any data indicating

that students ever took that to a higher conceptual level beyond identification of

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organisms or behaviors though all of the students in Case 4 accurately discussed invasive

species as they talked about their PFnets in the interviews.

E1.3 Peer-to-Peer Interactions

As with Teddy’s roseate spoonbills, individual students would take an interest in a

particular idea or individualized assignments would lead them there. All of the students

on the Everglades trip, for example, were assigned a research topic that they were

expected to present at some point in the trip. They each spent an hour or less before the

trip preparing for it and so most were lackluster. A few were higher quality and other

students cited these talks as being informative. In particular, Thomas (Student 403, 11th

grade) presented on the natural history of epiphytes (air plants) and a few students cited

that presentation or follow-up conversations with Thomas as the chief way in which they

learned about those plants, despite the topic being heavily discussed throughout the trip.

It is unclear and difficult to detect if or to what degree students were motivated by

their peers. It is probably difficult to detect even within oneself. It is worth reporting one

interview segment in which Daniel candidly explains the role of his peers in his own

motivation:

Daniel: I felt like in the tree part we went really quick and I wasn't able to learn a

lot of it. When we did our first assessment, some of the other guys knew

everything, and I was like “how the hell do they know this”. And I just found they

just became really interested in it and I started asking them, I was like “what do

you like about the tree adaptions (sic)?” and they would start telling me all this

cool stuff and I was like “that does sound pretty cool” and that's when I started

getting more interested. Just following the crowd I guess.

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Mike: And were those interactions happening in class, or in the field or outside of

class?

Daniel: In class, out of class, talking while we're hiking, just everywhere. Always

trying to talk to people about why they think the class is fun. (Student 102, no


Again, there were a few cited instances of students seeking out help from other

students, particularly for skills such as skiing and clarification on assignments, but it was

not commonly discussed in the interviews. As with the group interactions, it seems likely

that there were more peer-to-peer supports than the students realized.

E 1.4 Cultural Interactions

As discussed in Chapter One, the cultural component of the conceptual

framework does not try to capture culture writ large. The component is intended to

account for cultural elements of the environment that are novel for the students and

related to the target concepts, as might be experienced while students worked on a project

with practicing scientists or while immersed in another culture. This component rarely

came up directly in the student interviews or it was not made clear through the analyses I

conducted. It could be argued, and situative learning theories would suggest that cultural

elements were operating in the background, determining such things as the student-

teacher relations and the relationship between students and the origins of knowledge but

these background levels of influence were beyond the scope of the study.

There may have been some manifestations of learning that could be considered

cultural in the field observations I made but their influence seemed minimal based on my

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observations and their absence from the interviews. Kevin, the guide/local expert,

seemed to approach the Everglades from a natural history perspective in which there

were human and non-human members who all had identities and life stories. The

instruction that I observed him providing was typically providing oral mini-lessons and

stories to the students when some environmental cue such as a particular place or species

presented itself. During a mid-trip interview with Kevin he presented his viewpoint of

the environment as containing stories that could influence the student’s trip through it.

He did not seem to see the environment as providing examples of broader ecological

concepts as Paul, the teacher, did. For example, when teaching about tides, Kevin

focused heavily on what that meant for paddling, travel, and camping while Paul focused

on using those observations to understand the big picture of tidal fluctuations. Students

associated both perspectives with important learning of relationship between tides and

other TSCs.

E2 Physical Environment

Second to social contributions, the physical environment seemed to be the most

heavily cited and valued source of learning for the students. Figure 5.2 shows the

frequency of descriptive code references assigned to the data in this study. These codes

were used in the preliminary coding process and were later organized into three thematic

categories describing how these elements contributed to student learning: (E2.1)

providing evidence of concepts, (E2.2) embodied experiences, and (E2.3) geographic

cues.

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E2.1 Visual Evidence of Concepts

Across all of the cases the physical environment was described by students as an

important contributor to their learning. In the majority of described instances, the

environment provided evidence of concepts that students learned in lectures, readings or

through otherwise formal means as was described above in the “completing the picture”

(B1) section. Whether facilitated or peripheral, there were a number of ways that the

physical environment was seen by students to provide evidence of the TSCs. First,

students discussed seeing direct examples of the TSCs, giving them a personalized visual

image to attach to the concept, as in this example:

Figure 5.2. Frequency of descriptive code references within the Physical Environment code group before transcripts were divided into units of analysis for inferential coding. Includes all 4 cases.

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What gave me that connection was seeing it (an air plant) attached to those plants

in person and seeing its connection to the environment, like seeing the strap fern

or the vanilla orchid, those that were attached to the actual trees themselves rather

than just having this concept. I can actually relate them by seeing them together”

(Thomas, Student 403, 11th grade, Case 4)

In Case 4 students described having difficulty with visualizing the role of human

impact on the Everglades but when Jake did find some evidence, it stuck with him: “The

logging that we saw when we did the swamp hike, like we saw the stumps where there

had been logging like a long time ago” (probably 70 years, Student 401, 11th grade).

When I asked Jake in his interview about human impact, one of the TSCs for his course,

that was the image that first came to mind for him. Other students in Case 4 recounted

different images that reminded them of the human impact TSC and allowed them to begin

their discussions of how human impact was related to other TSCs. Related to the same

TSC of human impact Jake also made connections to niche and invasive species, but not

immediately. It took a series of observations throughout the ecosystem:

Jake: We are introducing invasive species and making some species go extinct so

it's really connected. Niche and invasive species I connected because invasive

species are kind of taking over niches and driving other organisms out of their

specific niche.

Mike: Was there any one moment where either you or something you learned

connected all of those things to niche?

Jake: I think it happened or it happens throughout the trip. Really like before, I

never really had known all of how these things have their own niche and how they

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kind of affected everything and have their own place in it. I think it happened a

little by little during the trip… I think I just understood it more and more because

I think when I did niche in school it was kind of a basic understanding of it.


Not only did Jake find evidence to build a deeper understanding of a concept from

this course but the visual evidence he accumulated allowed him to extend his learning

from a previous class. He held what sounds like a declarative understanding of the

concept that became a much more nuanced, schematic understanding of niche. As he

describes it, this change was largely due to the accumulation of visual evidence across the

duration of the course.

The process of looking for visual evidence also seemed to foster the development

of procedural knowledge of how to make detailed observations, a requisite skill in

science (N. R. C. NRC, 2012). When students were guided through observations they

began to do so on their own as well. This was a common theme in my field notes of Case

4 and is described by Joseph here:

(I learned) how to pay more attention to my surroundings I guess. Like the colors,

texture, the leaves, the pines, the cones, the animals, the season, everything. And

just realize what they go through. What the animals and plants go through because

they are all living organisms. Just learning that was amazing. Just being more

aware of your surroundings. (Student 108, no grade levels, Case 1)

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In Joseph’s case the procedural knowledge of observation also supported his

understanding of adaptations, one of the TSCs for the course, as he begins to describe in

the above passage. In all of the classes observation was an instructed and assessed skill

according to the teacher interviews. Even when information was first presented through

traditional means, students described relying more heavily on their own observations,

suggesting they were in some way more powerful or complete than transmitted

information. In the following dialog, the student describes his assumption of how what

was presented in the classroom was somehow wrong or incomplete and how he was

surprised to find that was not the case when he was able to make his own observations in

the actual context. His observations confirmed what was taught in the classroom:

Mitch: I guess the idea of when snow crystals facet they're actual small pyramids

and I thought it was more of an abstract idea where it's not really like that but

when we looked at the snow layers we had some really huge clear facets and it

was actually really amazing to see.

Mike: Why was that amazing or surprising to you?

Mitch: In class when we talked about it, it was drawn on the board. I guess I didn't

really.... I thought they were more solid and instead when we looked at them they

were hollow in the middle, which was kind of a cool thing... Like a little cup.

Mike: And you could see that with a magnifying glass?

Mitch: Yeah, the snow crystals we got were huge. (Student 207, 11th grade,

Case 2)

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Natural processes, which often need to be abstracted to be taught in the classroom

were instead observed directly by students during these DIAL experiences and they

reported that the observations supported their understanding of the related concepts. In

this way students could pick out complexities within those processes lost through

abstraction and also see realistic versions that are not overly dramatized as they might be

in a video, for example. Students could see the dramatic plunge of an osprey as it caught

a fish but also saw the more realistic events in which the bird missed a few times before

finally succeeding.

Prior to the Nebraska trip Jared had completed a research project on bird flight

and he described having a good sense of the science behind it but he also described how

seeing the actual process helped him understand the concpet much better:

When I originally read about Bernoulli's principle it made sense to me, like I got

the theory down, but I didn't really picture it in my head. I got how it worked, but

then seeing it, I was able to visualize how it would work. 'Cause their wings are

curved like this. You know, air has to move faster over the top to meet up with the

air on the bottom. So... it made...it brought it together. Like I had thoughts and

then I could put an image to those thoughts. A more defined image...refined

image. (Student 305, 9th grade, Case 3)

When snow science is taught, dramatic examples of avalanches are often used but

the reality is typically subtler. In the next quote a student from Case 2 describes a

process related to snow metamorphism, one of the TSCs, that he observed while in the

field. To describe the phenomenon to a class would not be very riveting but for this

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student, seeing this fairly subtle process and knowing what had caused it was an exciting

moment:

Mitch: We've talked about snow compacting, where all of a sudden the surface of

the snow will compact… We actually saw that happen when we were walking

five minutes that way, and it was really cool to see.

Mike: What did that look like?

Mitch: It's like, if this is the snow right, it's like a jagged line of snow, it just goes.

A certain section of it just goes down.

Mike: So like settles lower than the surrounding area?

Mitch: Yeah. Only like a half inch but it's still really cool to see. (Student 207,

11th grade, Case 3)

It seems unlikely that Mitch would have noticed the event if he had not had the

knowledge of snow compacting and as he describes it, he may not have had the

appreciation for the information without also seeing an example of it in context.

Students also described being in the field and interpreting evidence of former

processes to extrapolate back , again helping them to better understand the TSCs. In

Cases 1 and 3 many students talked about animal tracking activities helping them to

understand the lives and adaptations of the animals. This use of evidence was common in

both facilitated and peripheral opportunities to learn.

A final way that environmental evidence seemed to contribute to learning was

through the illustration of relationships. Some of these described relationships were

simple such as air plants growing on trees, or birds gathering around alligator wallows.

Students also described more complex relationships that they detected, suggesting the

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importance of being able to experience and see how an idea fit into a much bigger

scheme. In all of the cases students implied how that helped them to develop an

ecosystem-level understanding, though they also tended to struggle articulating this idea:

“I guess you could kind of just ...it was more... you kinda see the scale of everything, how

many birds there actually were and you could hear it a lot better” (Meghan, Student 304,

9th grade, Case 3) and “I guess the thing is when we were in the blind, there were literally

thousands of birds flying in all around us. It gave me actual, sort of, real world context

about what this was and why it's so important” (Nate, Student 309, 9th grade, Case 3).

E2.2 Embodied Experience

In three of these four DIAL experiences, students described learning some

concepts in an embodied way. Moving far beyond simple kinesthetic learning in which

some physical movement is incorporated into a lesson, students fully and physically

experienced tidal changes by paddling against them, experienced behaviors and materials

that allow organisms to resist the cold and desiccation of winter, and other topics. The

students in Case 3, the crane migration class, did not report any embodied experiences.

The most heavily cited example of a concept that students physically experienced,

reported in Cases 1and 2, was thermal conductivity and the resistance to cold. This

physical embodiment of the concept occurred in both facilitated and peripheral situations,

as in this report in which the student describes how different materials affect thermal

conductivuty:

So talking about thermal conductivity we... I've been sitting in snow with just

basically a base layer and then snow pants on and then also with fleece pants and

snow pants, and there's a huge difference. And then also the sit pads that we had,

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which are basically 1/2 inch thick foam pads, those help a ton with conserving

energy. (Mitch, Student 207, 11th grade, Case 2)

Kelly (Student 101) described the embodiment of the concept simply as “you are

one of the animals” to explain how she came to understand how animals have adapted to

the cold conditions. According to students, in a simple exercise, Ryan, the teacher of

Case 2, had them stand outside with one shoe on and one shoe off to illustrate the

difference in conductivity even a very thin sole can make. Tara explained how that

simple, embodied activity helped her to grasp the idea of applied thermal conductivity:

Tara: One time we took one shoe off and that was to talk about insulation… we

went out onto the porch with one shoe on. Ryan doesn't mind the cold, which is

weird, but everyone else does. And so then you're like, “so now your foot is

freezing and the other one's not, why?” So it's different than “IF you went outside

your foot WOULD be cold”.

Mike: Is that a big difference for you?

Tara: Sometimes.

Mike: Why is that?

Tara: 'Cause things can make more sense if you're experiencing them and you can

talk about them more accurately without hypothesizing about what it would be

like. You know exactly what it's actually like. (Student 224, 11th grade, Case 2)

In another lesson Ryan was teaching about seasonality and how the angle of

incidence of the sun’s rays on the atmosphere is what determines the amount of thermal

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energy available (as described by Ryan in his post-DIAL interview). Rachel reflected on

that lesson:

Rachel: I think because we were outside it was… we're in winter it registered

more than it would have inside the classroom.

Mike: Why do you think that is?

Rachel: Because we could feel the sun and it's sunny but it's also really cold and

you’re sitting in the snow. It just registers on a lot of levels that it probably

wouldn't if you were just sitting inside. (Student 204, 11th grade, Case 2)

The discrepancy between what her eyes were telling her and what her body was feeling

helped her understand the target concept.

Experiencing the tidal changes (Case 4) was described earlier in the chapter. Also

in the canoes, the students of Case 4 experienced the density of the mangroves and what

it would be like to live in that ecosystem, including the difficulties caused by heat,

dampness, mosquitoes, and the diversity of other life. Anna describes making her way

through the mangrove tunnels:

I think it was the first day we started canoeing through the mangrove tunnels, not

in the beginning because they were really cut down and stuff, but then afterwards

when we canoed through it and we had to push the sticks away and get stuck, and

there were spiders and I kind of liked that (the whole experience). (Student 402,

11th grade, case 4)

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Through directly experiencing the difficulties of trying to paddle through that

ecosystem, Anna and other students described developing a better sense of its structural

complexity and both the difficulty of living in that ecosystem and the many niches within

it. Students in Cases 1 and 2 also described their difficulties with traveling through the

snow and how that led to an appreciation for animal adaptations for doing so. On the

much-anticipated, or much-feared swamp hike at the end of Everglades trip students

described going in with expectations that the ecosystem would be an endless body of

water with malevolent elements trying to do them harm at every turn. By leaving the trail

and hiking through the swamp, students seemed to discover that it was not a bottomless

pit and that they could make their way through the water and patches of dry land to

successfully traverse the ecosystem. In my field notes and videos for that day I

chronicled that gradual change in students as they became more accustomed to the

environment and their discussions and actions became less hyperbolic in reaction to the

environment. At the beginning of the hike students were jumpy and spoke almost

exclusively of pythons, alligators, and spiders. By the end of the hike they were walking

more assertively and discussing the plants and more benign features of the ecosystem.

The embodied experiences seemed to allow the learners to use all of their senses

to interpret their surroundings. Students recalled using all of their senses within the

DIAL experiences, including smell from time to time. Joseph described a multi-sensory

experience in trying to identify a tree during an assigned task: “we looked around the

tree, we didn't know. We went ok, so how does the bark feel? How does the color look?

How does the pines look? What's the elevation of this area?”

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E2.3 Geographic Cues

Another consistent theme that emerged across the four cases as students discussed

their learning was the connections they made between their understanding of concepts

and specific geographic places where they learned it. Particularly for Case 4, in which

the students visited many places, but also for the other cases, students quite often

described their learning as situated in a specific place. Their descriptions implied a

narrative and contextualized understanding of the concepts they spoke about but they did

not seem to then only associate a concept with a given place. Rather, the place seemed to

provide a memory stamp that helped them access and communicate the idea and to recall

a specific event or visual sequence. It seemed to be a tool they used to help index their

knowledge, if inadvertently. I asked some of the students to try to articulate this process

when they mentioned it. The following is an example of a resulting dialog:

Robert: I guess I would have understood it if we hadn't been outside, but

definitely not as well, and it definitely helped me remember and fully understand

it.

Mike: So when you think about that concept now, do you think about.... do you

put yourself back in that place? Or do you think of it more abstractly?

Robert: I guess I don't go back to where we were in the woods but it just sort of

helped me understand it really well. I guess it just sort of cemented the ideas

rather than drew me back to a place where I could…”Oh this is where I was, it

must be that”. It sort of is hidden back in my mind somewhere that it's just like

this. I don't know how to put it in words. (Student 215, 11th grade, Case 2)

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The students tended to use to these geographic memory stamps with novel

settings and seemed to use them in such a way that one place was associated with one

concept. While these associations were individualized, there were some places that

multiple students associated with a given topic. There was one particular camp in Case 4

that students connected to understanding pneumatophores and another camp that students

associated with tides. One of the blinds that Case 3 students visited was more associated

with understanding flight while another one was associated with understanding crane

behavior.

Moving through a landscape or moving from one landscape to another also

seemed to support student learning by providing contrast between places that emphasized

different aspects of a concept, as in this instance:

I think I was skiing on-one day-I don't know what happened but I was skiing and I

was just thinking to myself and I was looking at the trees because we were trying

to figure out which tree was which and I was thinking “well it can't be this tree

because this tree wouldn't survive in this environment” because I mean we were

high in the park (elevation) and there is- I don't remember what tree it was but

that tree is at Bald Mountain Academy so it's on campus there but I was thinking

it's not going to be able to survive that high in the park because it's branches won't

be able to hold up the snow. (Kate, Student 101, no grade levels, Case 1)

Based on their descriptions of their learning experiences students often seemed to

be wrapping their understanding up within a geographic context that made the concept

real for them. They tended to explain the TSC(s) at a schematic level when they could

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fill in the full narrative of a concept’s application with specific examples. When asked to

recall the information, the geographic place was often recalled with it. To search back

through the previous quotes, one can find many examples in which students refer to

specific geographic places as they explain their understanding of various TSCs.

E3 Tools

Students indicated using tools and resources to help in their learning of the TSCs.

Figure 5.3 shows the relative use of the most commonly referenced tools. Again, these

data reflect frequencies of descriptive codes assigned prior to the inferential coding stage

and represent the four aggregated cases. There were no patterns of tool use that clearly

emerged in the cross-case analysis other than the broad idea that students did report using

various academic tools in their learning processes. The pattern-matching analysis within

the cross-case analysis did not support the prediction within the conceptual framework

(Appendix B) that non-academic tools would play a significant role in science concept

learning. Rather, students made few references to non-academic tools in relation to the

learning of TSCs. Even the 11 references reported in Table 5.3 represent very loose

connections between the tools and the TSCs.

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Student descriptions of tool use were overwhelmingly facilitated rather than

peripheral though there were a few instances of students finding and using tools on their

own, such as park signage. Most of the references to the tools that students used cited

assigned readings, videos, and notes that were written on the board. As such, students

described these as more often used in the more formal settings of classrooms or as

homework. Even in Case 3, in which the group traveled to the natural habitat of the

cranes, students described learning much of their declarative knowledge within a

classroom at the Audubon Center where the local expert showed videos and wrote notes.

One student from Case 2 described a PowerPoint slide that she connects to her

understanding of thermal conductivity:

Figure 5.3. Frequency of descriptive code references within the academic tools and non-‐academic tools code groups before transcripts were divided into units of analysis for inferential coding. Includes all 4 cases.

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The image that comes to mind most is the Power Point image of an elk standing in

the snow and there are arrows going in and out, for insulation, metabolism, and

then there's also the heat loss through the feet, through the contact with the air,

and that sort of thing. (Student 224, 11th grade, Case 2)

When tools were used in the field, they seemed to take on a supporting rather than

a central role. Students described using thermometers to measure temperature within the

snowpack and shovels to access the layers of snow. Field guides and dichotomous keys

were used to identify trees. Skis and canoes were used to move through the environments

and students and teachers described those vehicles being used to illustrate concepts such

as tidal changes and snow crystallization. All of these tools seemed to remain in the

background and none were identified by teachers as important learning tools. A couple

of the teachers described bringing small whiteboards or printed pictures into the field to

illustrate concepts or write important notes when needed and some students refered to

these during their interviews. In the following passage, Vern describes a learning process

that was dependent on the tools at the various stages but they are not heavily

acknowledged and become an important part of the learning environment background:

It was near the end of class and we were kind of reading. We went out into the

park with shovels and we shoveled out snow. What we were trying to get to

exactly was the bottom of the ground. It was about 5 1/2 feet and 2 big around.

Jacob was explaining there were different layers. So we were taking, we were

testing the rigidity of it so the top layer was kind of soft. The middle was kind of

hard. It was just more packed. We were taking temperatures of the different

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levels. For the surface it was pretty cold. Near the middle it was warmer. And

then when you get lower into the ground it's still pretty cold, 'cause the earth is

kind of a conductor. So we were learning about that and we came back to class

the day afterwards and he gave us a sheet and it was like, “nivean means snow not

lotion”. And it was explaining how they're different layers of snow and they all

have different terms. And so there's the supernivean which is the top layer.

Subnivean and then the 3rd one I seem to have forgot. (Vern, Student 107, no


In this sequence the group needed skis and related equipment, shovels,

thermometers, notebooks, pencils, and the worksheets to make it happen. We can assume

the tools fundamentally changed the experience by considering what the experience

would have looked like without them but in the student’s description the tools were part

of the background rather than critical elements of the lesson. This illustrates the

possibility that tools played a more important role than I was able to discern from the

interview process.

As described in a previous section of this chapter (F5), teachers readily co-opted

available materials to use as demonstration tools when needed: balls and students to

represent celestial bodies, water bottles to simulate thermal conductivity in organisms and

tidal changes. Associated with the theme of geographic links to learning (see section

E2.3), students and teachers described the regular use of maps in the four cases, both for

planning travel and for helping students to understand landscape-level concepts such as

water flow through the Everglades or trans-national migration of the cranes. In one

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sequence captured in a video from the Case 4 field study, the guide gathered the students

around a nautical chart of the area they were traveling through and the group

spontaneously created a TSC referenced narrative of the events that unfolded as they

retraced their route. They then used the map along with a tide chart to predict and plan

the best route and timing for the next day.

E4 Individual Factors

Within the DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B) the individual learner

contributes to a situated learning process through representation, indexing, and higher-

order processing. In this section some evidence is presented on how indexing and

processing seemed to contribute to students’ learning in this study. However, in the

cross-case analysis, it became clear that the patterns as they are presented in the

framework were not well supported by the data across these four cases. Rather, there

seemed to be a collection of learning processes that could be described as being attached

to the individual learner instead of to the whole learning environment as are the other

identified contributors to learning. To use Perkins’(1993) terms, there were

manifestations of the learning process that were associated with the person-solo rather

than the person-plus. These have been included into the heading of Individual Factors

that influenced learning in this chapter. Figure 5.4 shows the frequencies of the

descriptive codes that were used to define the themes of individual learning processes

that emerged from the data. Some of these code references, including application and

personal discovery were discussed in previous sections (sections B3 and P1, respectively)

when they were closely tied to learning opportunities. The development of deeper

understanding is related to many of the other codes and has been referenced throughout

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this chapter. The pattern themes (E4.1) of individual reasoning and internal reflection,

(E4.2) writing and verbal articulation, (E4.3) linking across events, and (E4.4) making

connections to past learning were informed by these descriptive codes (figure 5.4) and

emerged as consistent trends through cross-case analysis. These themes are described

below.

Figure 5.4. Frequency of descriptive code references within the individual processes code group before transcripts were divided into units of analysis for inferential coding. Includes all 4 cases.

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E4.1 Individual Reasoning and Internal Reflection

It is well beyond the scope of the study to understand student thinking processes

in much depth. Rather, the goal for this aspect of the learning environment was to

develop some sense of how these processes of the individual learner interacted with the

other components of the learning environment. It is clear from the data that these person-

solo-centered processes were informed by and, in turn, informed the other environmental

contributors to learning in these four cases. For this study, the individual reasoning code

indicated a student-described process or event in which they indicated needing to reason

through a conceptual connection or in some way add an extra layer of thinking or

processing to make sense of incoming information. This was a fairly common code

across the four cases. The following passage came at the end of a dialog with Heather

about a realization she came to regarding migration:

Mike: And how did you learn about that?

Heather: More of my own mind figuring it out.

Mike: Do you have any sense of when that came to you?

Heather: Well yeah. Jennifer was drawing out a chart of when and where they (the

cranes) are. At what times of the year, and I just kind of noticed...I started

thinking about why they migrate and it's obviously because they can't survive in

the cold in the winter up in Canada, and they can't...it's too hot for them down in

the south in the summers. So kind of tied in with habitat. (Student 301, 10th grade)

Another student captured the role of individual processing in his learning:

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He (teacher) teaches it to you but then I guess you sort of have to come to a

certain point of realization to fully understand the concept. He brings you 99% of

the way but then that last 1%, to really have a full understanding of the concept,

that sort of has to come from within, I guess. (Robert, Student 215, 11th grade,

Case 2)

These two examples reflect an interaction between directly facilitated learning

opportunities and the individual students’ role in processing the garnered information

through a unique thought process. Peripheral and synthetic learning opportunities were

also involved in cited instances of individual reasoning interacting with information from

other elements of the learning environment. In contrast, a number of students also

described the purely abstract development of understanding about a given concept by

learning how other concepts related to it, and without ever being taught about the original

concept. Ashley describes one such sequence in which she is referring to a conclusion

she correctly came to as a logical certainty born of learning the related concepts:

If the trees didn't stop growing in the winter, then it would die because it would be

cold and it wouldn't have enough nutrients because the sun doesn't shine a lot.

And I don't know-yeah I guess I got to that by learning everything around it.

(Ashley, Student 105, no grade levels, Case 1)

By learning about photosynthesis, seasonality, and snow load, Ashley pieced

together the reason why trees stopped growing in the winter. Though this information

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was generally available as declarative information, Ashley reasoned it out into a

schematic understanding through her own logic processes.

The Internal reflection code was used somewhat differently, to indicate instances

where students recalled thinking about or reflecting on an idea in the moment, when they

learned an idea rather than a more general sense of having processed the information.

The previously used example of Austin (Student 405) reflecting on past places where he

had seen tidal changes and thinking about the relationship to the size of the body of water

is a good example of this. As in that case, reflection was often associated with a

peripheral learning opportunity, though the teachers in all of the classes also assigned

reflective journal prompts and thus encouraged this type of processing. Like instances of

individual reasoning, internal reflection could be considered a person-solo phenomenon

that occurs within and is influenced by the person-plus. Student descriptions in this study

usually described the internal processing and the external influence as asynchronous.

Internal reflection was also described by students as being helpful for keeping the

momentum of their learning progress. One learning event would lead to reflection which

would then lead to new hypotheses or questions and so on, as in this instance:

Once we figured out what kind of tree it was, I mean of course there was just a

bunch of questions running through your mind like “oh I wonder what the

adaptations are for it?” you know. And just like that kind of stuff. (Jason,

Student 103, no grade levels, Case 1)

There can be no doubt that the role of the individual learner and her thought

processes add a layer of complexity well beyond what was captured here. For the

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purposes of the study the data suggest that there was a close link between internal

reasoning and bringing together the other elements of the learning environment as

students often described them in conjunction. This seemed to be particularly true in cases

where both facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities contributed to learning.

When both were discussed as contributing within a concept unit, some level of reflection

or internal reasoning was often described as bringing those pieces together.

E4.2 Writing and Verbal Articulation

Neither the process of writing nor the process of verbal articulation were

described by students as playing a significant role in their learning of the science

concepts. Journals/notebooks were collected and coded for Cases 1 and 3, as described in

Chapter Three. Most of the descriptive codes assigned to the notebooks within those two

cases were references to the TSCs though there were few other codes to indicate that the

journals were used by students for much beyond the recording of declarative knowledge

and events. Although a few students used the notebooks more openly, the majority of

entries were in response to facilitated prompts from the teachers to record information

(based on teacher interviews and similarity in entries across each of the two classes.

Similarly, during the interviews students rarely described the processes of writing or

verbally expressing their ideas to others as contributing to their learning or in conjunction

with their understanding of the TSCs. In one previously described case, that of Mei

(Student 408, Case 4) coming to a deeper understanding of the relationship between tides

and mangroves as she observed the tide coming in, the student was in the process of

journaling when she came to that realization. A few other students reported that written

assignments or thinking about the assignments helped them pull their thoughts together

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but this was not common. This is not to say that these processes did not contribute to

learning, only that the data collected for this study do not lead to that conclusion.

E4.3 Linking Across Events

The Pathfinder assessments offer one view into how students are indexing their

knowledge by showing the structure of their knowledge organization. Another indicator

is how students conceptually link different learning events, recognizing that one has a

conceptual similarity to another. Within a given concept unit in which students described

their current understanding of a TSC, relationship between TSCs, and changes in their

understanding of them over the course of the DIAL experience, I looked for patterns in

how students recognized different events as representing or illustrating the same concept.

Because these patterns were often associated with the longer and more elaborated concept

units it is difficult to present concise examples here but the following excerpt is a more

contained example in which Jake responds to the question of how he learned about

invasive species, illustrating the trend of linking disparate events through a TSC:

Jake: Probably, the thing, just everything where Kevin stopped and showed us an

invasive species, like when he was talking about the Burmese python,

Mike: where was that?

Jake: let me think about that. I'm not really sure but I remember him talking about

it, and the competition between alligators and pythons for like food and territory

and stuff. And like when we stopped along the road before the swamp hike and

looked at the Australian pine or something I think it was. And on the swamp hike

there was that, it was a tree from Brazil that had all the little red berries on it, that

he was talking about how the trees are hard to get rid of it. And that they’d

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probably never get rid of it completely. That's all I can remember. (Student 401,

11th grade, Case 4)

Linking across events was often associated with the combination of peripheral

and facilitated events as students not only recognized a link but created or applied one in

an informal setting as Rachel describes:

I definitely started thinking about the concepts that we learned in class a lot

outside of class. Just living here I guess, I'm not used to this climate and this

environment. I think it's really cool, but we learned a lot about taking care of

yourself here properly and so I think it really registered learning about thermal

conductivity and then thinking about the layers that I had on. We had ski week

and I had to think a lot about if I was going to wear cotton then I would get wet

and if it was a cloudy day how I should protect myself that way. I think what I

learned in class a lot, applied to what I was doing every single day here. (Rachel,

Student 204, 11th grade, Case 2)

As students experienced learning situations that linked conceptually to past

events, either form their personal experience or the course events, they often described

developing a deeper understanding with each new event. Their conceptual understanding

and organization was seemingly becoming more elaborated with new experiences and

new types of experiences in a manner suggesting an important role for a constructivist

person-solo aspect of learning as well as the environmentally-centered person-plus

aspects of learning. Jake also described this progression in his understanding of tides:

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When we first started I kind of knew about the tides but I didn't really pay that

much attention to it and then when we were on the island I understood it and then

when we were on the last day, when we were paddling to Chockoloskee it was

really applied to the situation. (Student 401, 11th grade, Case 4)

E4.4 Connection to Past Learning

Similar to the previous section, student references to past learning indicate some

indexing within the structures of their conceptual knowledge, though in relation to pre-

DIAL experience learning. Some of these connections were simple associations, some

were described as present continuations of past learning, and others were connections to

big picture ideas. As an example of the associations students made, Robert described

how a word he originally associated with another topic took on an entirely new meaning

for him within this new domain of ecology and thus changed the structure of his domain

knowledge to include a new way to understand the term, a change that was confirmed by

his pre to post PFnets:

Robert: Before I thought metamorphism was changes in the rock and I don't

know. I didn't really know it. I'd heard the word a couple times....

Mike: And it is by the way.

Robert: Yeah. I guess it still is, but now I more think of metamorphism as change

in the snow pack, like constructive and destructive and how that changes the snow

into facets and rounds and how that really impacts the stability of the snow pack

and how through metamorphism that can really increase or decrease the danger of

avalanches and things like that. (Student 215, 11th grade, Case 2)

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At this point in his learning, the association he made is only through the word,

apparently not seeing any conceptual connection.. As reported in Chapter 4 and reflected

in the PFnets there were times when students who performed well on the pretest

performed much worse on the posttest and this seemed to be a result of these students

reorganizing their structural knowledge around their recent learning rather than a broader

view of the domain knowledge. This example is one such case in that Robert almost

abandoned a previous and correct understanding of metamorphism within a different

domain in favor of a new concept he had learned through DIAL. He did not seem to

make the connection that they were essentially the same idea applied to different

contexts. Of course the potential exists that he will see the word again in the future in an

entirely different context and begin to see how metamorphism is a common theme across

the natural sciences

In other instances students did describe building on their past learning. One

student described learning about photosynthesis in fifth grade and how that made it easier

for her to understand the topic when they learned about it in this course. Interestingly,

she still referred to the process in naive phrases such as the plant “eating the sunlight”.

Another student also described still being in the process of trying to connect past learning

with her DIAL experience:

Tara: I didn't know what thermal conductivity was before but I assumed it had to

do with energy because heat has to go in with energy and thermal has to do with

heat and then we learned about thermal conductivity which still kind of confuses

me, and I still don't understand what the difference is between it and specific heat

capacity, but apparently there is one.

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Mike: Is specific heat capacity something you talked about in class?

Tara: No, but I took chemistry last year. (Student 224, 11th grade, Case 2)

For many of the students who discussed these past connections, they seemed to

sense that there was a connection, as in the cases above, but could not make a complete

conceptual connection in a manner consistent with canonical domain knowledge. This

suggests that closer formative assessment and facilitated support may have helped the

students make more conceptually sound connections between past and recent learning.

Finally, a few students indexed their learning within big picture ideas that they

had developed or picked up previous to the DIAL experience and found a role for the

new knowledge within that big idea. Although the theme that Thomas describes here was

not an overt lesson of the course, he found that there was ample evidence to support his

developing idea:

I guess “aha moments” came when I connected humans' motivations for further

conquest of natural areas for simply monetary reasons for the most part. I've

noticed that in the past but seeing it also in the Everglades solidified that and

made it more concrete. (Student 403, 11th grade, Case 4)

Austin expressed a very similar idea, and while human impact, in general was a

TSC, the broader themes were not:

I think over the past couple years I've been interested more and more in like

human impact and environmental studies, and global warming and stuff. And so

that was kind of something I was experiencing first hand and it was cool to be

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able to be there and also know what was going on. (Student 405, 11th grade,

Case 4)

For these two students, the conceptual science knowledge they developed

over the course of the DIAL experience informed personally relevant schemata

that they had already been developing previously and that had applicability within

but also external to the learning goals of the course.

E5 Emotional Contributors to Learning

The DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B) includes the contributions of the

emotional environment to student learning. Figure 5.5 shows the frequencies at which

emotional environment descriptive codes were assigned to the data. Good emotion and

bad emotion each encompass infrequently used codes that fit those general

characteristics. At an early stage of the coding process it became clear that most of these

codes referred to students’ descriptions of how they were feeling at different times

throughout their DIAL experiences rather than capturing the originally intended

emotional atmosphere of the whole group. There was little evidence to support the

notion that students retained an explicit memory of the emotional environment except in

a few cases. Based on field observations of Case 4, the emotional environment was a

contributor but it may not have been obvious to participants and, more importantly, times

of heightened emotional intensity seem to have been disassociated from learning events.

The data concerning both personal and group emotional factors are described below.

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Students in Cases 1, 2, and 3 cited personal emotional ups and downs but there

were not many events that multiple students cited and that would suggest an overall

emotional environment. This is not to say that this was not the case but that students did

not explicitly detect it or articulate it. That being said, there were emotional highs and

challenges for students. Almost every student mentioned times when they were

particularly excited by the learning or events, engaged in the learning process, or

generally enjoying the course. A few students in Case 1 also cited the skiing as being a

challenge that they were nervous about or struggled with. With one exception, they saw

Figure 5.5. Frequency of descriptive code references within the emotional environment code group. before transcripts were divided into units of analysis for inferential coding. Includes all 4 cases.

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that as a challenge that they were proud to have overcome and enjoyed in the end. The

student who never really came to enjoy the skiing describes her experience in this way:

I kind of feel like when I was out there (skiing) I was in such a bad mood that I

wasn't really paying attention and I just liked being in the class working on my

own. I just prefer that you know. But I did feel like it did connect because

everything we were talking about we saw out there. And sometimes even if we

didn't talk about it when we were out there, there were some days we would talk

about like what we were learning in class out there, but some days we didn't. I

feel like people were just kind of noticing, you know. I know that sometimes I

was noticing. (Student 106, no grade levels, Case 1)

Rebecca goes on to describe a series of highly relevant observations she made

while out skiing. Although she felt she was not paying attention to direct instruction, she

was still learning in that situation. In the same case, Kelly described the opposite

problem. She was so engaged in the non-academic element of the course that she had

trouble focusing on the academics: “It was really hard to balance my work and fun in that

class and I was challenged by just trying to stay on task and just getting my work done

when all I was thinking about was going skiing the next day (Kelly, Student 101, no

grade levels, Case 1).” She does describe overcoming that challenge with increased

focus and with a sense of accomplishment that she developed through the physical

challenge:

I’d be the fastest one out of everybody and it was just cool because I feel like

even though maybe I wasn't in the best shape, out-out of everyone, I still like- I

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pushed myself most out of everyone. And I got like a really-it was like really

gratifying for me because it felt good. (Student 101, no grade levels, Case 1)

In Case 3 a few students described being bored at times or uncomfortable

watching the cranes for extended periods in the blinds or in the hot sun:

They (cranes) are all doing the same things and we'd be out there for a couple

hours and it got really cold and we couldn't talk at all. We couldn't make any

sound. We were hiding behind these little squares of wood. I was pretty bored the

whole trip. (Meghan, Student 304, grade 9)

Despite these occasional reports of motivational struggles and disengagement

overall sentiment and indicators of motivation/engagement across the cases were

overwhelmingly positive. Most students described some degree of engagement or

interest generated by the experiential aspects of the course, as Daniel does here:

That's kind of what I thought was so cool about it. Like we would hear about, I

don't know, certain-like an example of an adaption (sic) of a tree, we would have

a reading on it and then like I said, we would go up to the park and actually see it

doing it. And it's like “whoa, I know what that is!” We learned about that. I just

think that's one of the coolest parts of the class is actually going to watch it

instead of just hearing about it which is boring. (Daniel, Student 102, no grade

levels, Case 1)

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As an outside observer of Case 4 I was in a better position to observe the overall

emotional environment of the group than were the members of it who were enmeshed

within it. At most times the emotional scene was pretty level as students moved through

the environment, listened to mini-lessons, observed, and socialized. There were a

number of emotional highs and lows that the group experienced together and these did

seem to have a direct impact on learning. As described with the jellyfish scene earlier,

there were times when the whole group was excited together. Teddy mentioned a few of

these:

We'd seen so much stuff that day, like the roseated (sic) spoonbills. What else did

we see? We saw the...oh yeah, like right before, I think the dolphins cheered

everybody up and then once we saw the roseated spoonbills that cheered people

up too. Once we got up to the ocean everybody was all happy and that was just a

good day. (Student 407, 9th grade, Case 4)

In this passage you can detect the ebb and flow of the emotional surround and this

was confirmed by my field notes and videos for the day. The dolphins that Teddy

mentions were not the first the group had seen. The group had been struggling mightily

against tides and headwinds for a number of hours. At the first chance to stop on dry

land, we were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. Once back out on the water,

everything had calmed down, the tide was with us, the sky was turning pink with the

sunset, and finally a large pod of dolphins began breaking the surface of the water all

around us. A few students mentioned this as a highlight of the trip but, as with the

jellyfish, none expressed any association with any TSC learning during the interviews.

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Some students did describe feeling a personal connection to the Everglades after the trip

and cited these types of experiences. It seems likely that these feelings led to greater

engagement overall but they did not seem to lead to peripheral learning. It is unclear if

facilitation could have influenced the making of connections at these hyper-emotional

events though it seems likely based on the abundant data showing the learning linked to

other events in which the teachers followed peripheral observations with facilitated

lessons.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were a few times during my Case 4

field observations in which there was an overall sense of nervousness or unease

surrounding the whole group. During interviews most students also described some of

these, though from a personal level rather than as an overall emotional environment. The

previously described swamp hike of Case 4 seemed to be one of the most anxiety-

provoking. It was an unfamiliar environment with real and perceived dangers including

snakes, spiders, and scenes that are classically associated with foreboding places. There

was a similar sense at the onset of the canoe trip. Students were paddling through tunnels

carved out of the mangrove forests with barely enough room overhead beneath the

branches and tight maneuvering amongst the roots. Alligators sat on the banks and the

air was filled with exotic bird sounds. Large orb-weaver spider webs were set at eye

level as students bumped through the thickets.

In both the hike and the paddle, students responded to the stimuli in a way that

reflected a sensationalized view of the places- they shouted and tried to scare each other,

pointed out the dangers, and over-reacted to minor events such as kicking an underwater

stump or seeing a spider web. Also in both cases the teacher and guide let them

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experience that but then reset the emotional tone. After the introductory period of

novelty during both the hike and the canoeing, the guide asked that students spend the

next 20 minutes in complete silence. There was an immediate shift in both instances

where students still pointed out the dangers to each other but they also began pointing out

orchids, birds, ferns and other less threatening but more interesting objects. Although my

recordings on the trip captured some very interesting and TSC-related topics pointed out

by the guide during those introductory periods of novelty, none of it was described by

students in the subsequent interviews as contributing to their learning. However, there

were many examples in the periods of silence that were discussed by students in the

interviews, some of which have been described already. Interestingly, none of the

students mentioned the imposed silence but almost all of them mentioned a personal shift

in their comfort level. Austin described that transition:

Austin: On our swamp hike I was nervous, especially after we saw the big orb

weaver or banana spider, ‘cause I'm pretty afraid of spiders. And then at first

getting in the water, I was a little uncomfortable, but I think after 10 minutes or

so, I felt comfortable and was able to just go along with it.

Mike: Any idea what that transition was... like why you made that transition or

how?

Austin: At first it was like, that I've never done something like this.

Mike: Walking through a swamp?

Austin: Knee deep in swamp water you can't really see. And we had already seen

alligators and all that stuff. So... but then Kevin seemed pretty confident and

everybody else was so I just went for it. (Student 405, 11th grade, Case 4)

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The codes describing emotional references (figure 5.5) were common

across the four cases but, again, the references that students made were related to

personal emotional responses rather than as factors of an emotional surround. For

Case 4 these codes often (but not always) closely matched my field observations

and what I recorded as a more collective emotional environment. As I did not

conduct full field studies of the other three cases it is not possible to determine if

this pattern existed across all of the cases. What is apparent is that students either

attributed emotional elements of their learning experience to personal emotions or

they did not recognize/describe them at all, good or bad. If the other three cases

did indeed have emotional elements that were manifest at the environmental level,

they were not recognized or described by students and were perhaps operating as

a subtle background element, much like the cultural environment may have been.

Contextualization

The final component of the DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B) is the

context vehicle, the construct that describes how the learner combines multiple cues from

the environment and associates them with a target concept, resulting in either a

contextualized understanding or a decontextualized understanding of the concept. The

level of contextualization was a concept unit-level assessment of the degree to which a

student discussed TSCs within a concept unit in relationship to the environment in which

they were learning. Therefore it allowed for analysis beyond how students learned a

given TSC and elucidated how described interactions with the environmental components

influenced students’ understanding of the concept at the time of the interview.

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The contextualization scores used (See table 3.3) reflect a spectrum of knowledge

that ranges from decontextualized to complete and contextualized. Figure 5.6 shows the

level of contextualization achieved across the four cases. Each pattern code reference,

assigned to a complete concept unit includes one student’s description of a TSC or

relationship between TSCs and the level to which that idea was associated with

experienced contexts at the time of the interview. The lowest level, 0, indicates no

contextualization. A score of 1 indicates that there is some misconception or incorrect

element in their description of the science. The remaining scores indicate an increasing

level of both understanding and association with real contexts. Based on these scores

68% of the knowledge that students described was contextualized to some degree. That

is, across the concept units coded in student interviews, 68% were scored as a 2 or above,

a high value compared to past research(Rivet & Krajcik, 2004a, 2004b, 2008) , as is

discussed in Chapter 6. Through the lens of the DIAL conceptual framework, this is

evidence that the conceptual knowledge structures that these students developed were

heavily but not entirely influenced by context vehicles constructed with the components

of their DIAL environments.

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Figure 5.7 shows the breakdown of mean contextualization scores by case,

presented with the mean changes in csim for each case, the measure of learning

determined through the Pathfinder procedure. This four-case study does not provide

sufficient power to conduct meaningful statistical analysis though the pattern in Figure 5

suggesting a relationship between contextualization and learning is borne out in the

qualitative data. Students in Case 4, the group that showed the greatest learning, all

relied heavily on real-world examples from their own experiences when describing their

concept knowledge. Case 3 students spoke more about decontextualized ideas that were

pulled from readings, lectures and videos, though not to the exclusion of contextualized

knowledge. Case 1 and 2 students were more balanced in the manner in which they

Figure 5.6. Contextualization level frequency judged for each concept unit within student interviews across all four cases. Higher score indicates greater contextualization.

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learned and discussed the TSCs. This suggests that there may be a relationship between

the degree to which these students contextualized their learning and the degree to which

their conceptual knowledge structures became more expert-like following their DIAL

experience. However, if that relationship were to prove true within a larger sample it is

not clear if contextualization leads to more advanced knowledge structures or if more

expert knowledge allows for a greater ability to contextualize.

Figure 5.7. The bars represent the learning as shown in Pathfinder ∆ csim values across the cases. The line graph represents the mean contextualization scores for case. Case 3 had a mean contextualization score of 0.

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Misconceptions

The contextualization score of 1 deserves some special attention. It refers to cases

in which the knowledge expressed may or may not have been contextualized but was

incorrect in some way when compared to accepted understandings among scientists.

There was only one of these misconceptions that came up within the study and it may be

directly related to contextualization. In three of the four cases (1, 2, 3) students used two

different definitions of adaptation interchangeably. They seemed to equate the behavioral

adaptations that people need to make when encountering new situations with the idea of

evolutionary adaptation driven by natural selection. This is a fundamental misconception

of evolution (Engel Clough & Wood-Robinson, 1985) and it seemed to be supported by

the metaphor students, and perhaps teachers, were making between the environments

they were trying to survive in on a daily basis and the adaptations that organisms had

made over millennia. The following is one example, ”when I first came to Bald

Mountain Academy, I had to adapt to how high it was because I'm from Seattle and that's

sea level. And then deciduous, that's a tree and then also connected to trees because trees

have to adapt” (Kelly, Student 101, no grade levels, Case 1). In this way

contextualization by making connections between TSCs and experience with the

environment probably moved some students’ understanding of this common TSC away

from the way that scientists in the domain understand it.

Chapter Five Summary

In this chapter I have presented analysis of qualitative data to answer the research

question “do students’ interactions with the components of a DIAL environment

contribute to change in their conceptual science knowledge structures??” Through

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pattern matching across cases and aligned with the DIAL conceptual framework, a

complex picture emerged to explain how the identified environmental components and

learning opportunities did contribute to learning for the students in the four cases of this

study, based largely on associations that students made during their post-DIAL interviews

and supported by my field study observations, teacher interviews, and student work

samples.

Both facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities contributed to learning in

these cases through largely different means. Facilitated opportunities were more directly

associated with the learning of the targeted science concepts, particularly through

elements of direct instruction. Teachers played an important role in this facilitation as

they guided student observations, provided learning resources, helped make conceptual

connections, and provided information directly to students. Peripheral opportunities,

however, added personal connections to student learning largely through individual

discoveries and affective connections that students made.

Student-described learning processes that included an interaction between

facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities tended to be associated with

understandings of the TSCs that could be described as more schematic and complete than

when the learning processes were either facilitated or peripheral alone. This

combination often resulted in students generating a “complete picture” of a concept as

facilitated information and personal experience informed each other. Keystone events

occurred when a peripherally learned idea or piece of evidence led to a much deeper

understanding of a concept that was otherwise learned through facilitation. Students’

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peripheral application or extension of previously facilitated learning also proved to be an

important interaction for changes in students’ conceptual knowledge.

The construct of a context vehicle, presented in the DIAL framework (Appendix

B), was supported in that students did associate many of the environmental components

with the learning and recall of concepts and this contextualization seemed to bolster

student learning. Of the environmental components, social interactions seemed to be

associated with the greatest contribution to the change in knowledge structures. Most of

the social interactions that students associated with learning were facilitated and involved

teacher-centered practices. The physical environment also played an important role in

learning, particularly in helping students to create visual, embodied, temporal, and spatial

associations to their knowledge. Individual learning processes, including the affective

elements, seemed to provide a bridge between the various environmental components as

students reasoned about the connections between disparate events and concepts, their

relevance, and gave personal meaning to the context vehicles formed from those parts.

Based on the data collected for this study the other components of the learning

environment from the conceptual framework (Appendix B), including the cultural and

emotional environments and the tools used played a less central role in learning for most

students in these four cases. It seems unlikely that they simply did not play a role but

they may be operating in the background at a level that the students do not readily

recognize, a finding suggested by the data collected in the field study portion of this

project. Details of how each of the environmental components contributed to learning

were summarized in the chapter.

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CHAPTER VI

DISCUSSION

Overview

This study was an investigation into the process of deep immersion academic

learning (DIAL) and was guided by two research questions:





The first goal was to determine if DIAL experiences can be an effective tool to

support the learning of targeted science content knowledge. If so, the second goal was to

determine how the contextualized environments of DIAL and opportunities to access

those environments contributed to any learning. A theoretical framework of situated

constructivism along with a review of the relevant literature on learning in authentic

contexts was used to conceptualize and design the study. From those foundations a

conceptual framework (Appendix B) was proposed to model the DIAL process. The

conceptual framework highlighted the role of facilitated and peripheral opportunities to

interact with various components of the learning environment in creating a context

vehicle to interact with and add to an individual learner’s knowledge structures.

That conceptual framework has also been used throughout this dissertation to

outline the various chapters; connect the work to previous research; provide the structure

for pattern-matching, cross-case analysis; and to present the results in discrete chunks. A

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discussion of those results is presented in this chapter, followed by the limitations and

contributions of the study, a revised conceptual framework developed based on the

results of this study, and a discussion of future, recommended research.

Discussion and Implications: Research Question 1

Aggregated student data in this study did show significant changes in structural

knowledge following the DIAL experiences. As a whole, the DIAL experiences were

effective in that regard as 70% of students showed changes in their conceptual knowledge

structures that made them more similar to expert knowledge structures, and almost 40%

showed high or exceptional levels of change. These results are in agreement with other

studies that have shown cognitive learning in contextualized environments (Eaton, 1998;

Knapp & Barrie, 2001; Milton & Cleveland, 1995; Prokop, et al., 2007) though this study

adds two important contributions. First, the use of the interview process in conjunction

with the structural knowledge assessment of Pathfinder allowed for a greater depth of

understanding of the state of the students’ knowledge. The knowledge structures

assessed through the Pathfinder process and then discussed in student interviews often

seemed to show the development of schematic knowledge as students discussed not only

declarative facts about the concepts, but also the complex relationships between those

ideas in applied contexts. Most of the students spoke of the relationships highlighted in

their PFnets at a schematic level, confirming DIAL practitioner anecdotes. Second, this

study followed students who were deeply immersed in context over longer durations of

time than the more typically studied daylong field trips (see Chapter Two for review). As

has been shown with affective changes in students (Bogner, 1998; Emmons, 1997), it is

possible that the longer duration of the experiences may have contributed to the students’

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cognitive learning, though this was not sufficiently measured in this study to definitively

say. Case 3, for example was the shortest experience (three days) and had essentially no

aggregated change while Case 4 students experienced the most concentrated immersion

and showed the greatest growth. This is not to say that there was a direct causal

relationship between immersion and learning but it is a relationship that deserves further

study.

It is important to note that the learning was not consistent across the cases. Cases

3 (zero growth) and Case 4 (highest growth) represent the starkest contrast while Cases 1

and 2 showed moderate changes in knowledge structures. Based on the analysis of

student descriptions of their learning, field study data, and the other supporting data, it

appeared that these differences were a function of many factors, including differences in

access to or utilization of the environmental components described in the next section.

Case 2, with the largest sample (n=41), was instructive in that it allowed for the

examination of how a larger distribution of students learned through the same DIAL

experience. One important pattern that emerged was that most of the growth was in the

middle of the distribution of students’ pretest values. That is, students with the highest

and lowest pretest values did not tend to show as much change in knowledge structures as

those students with pretest values closer to the mean. This suggests that students at the

bottom might need more support. It could be that these students have insufficient

background knowledge to begin to access the information in the course or it could be a

difference of ability levels. It is clear that these students could have benefitted from a

teacher-administered pretest, early formative assessments, and extra supports throughout

the class to help address any gaps.

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Those students who were at the top of the pretest distribution might also need

more supports with moving beyond the intended curriculum and with teasing out

subtleties of the content knowledge to develop more expert knowledge. In Case 2 as well

as Case 3, a number of students with high pretest scores actually changed their

knowledge structures to be much less similar to the expert referents following the DIAL

experience. Based on the PFnets and student interviews, these students appeared to be

coming in to the classes with strong background knowledge and then keying in on

particular aspects of the content that were interesting or new to them. As described in the

previous chapter, two of the students in this category reliably described accurate

conceptions of TSCs that they held before the experience and then described new

understandings of these ideas that were more highly focused on the specific content of the

class rather than the broader understandings reflected by the expert referents. Because of

this, they assigned greater importance to these new ideas and assigned higher levels of

relationship to other TSCs in the Pathfinder assessment. Perhaps this was a function of

the novelty, moving former learning to the periphery, even if that past learning was more

conceptually central to an expert’s way of organizing the knowledge. This was a

fascinating phenomenon within this case that deserves further attention from both

researchers and practitioners. It would be important to know if these over-highlighted

ideas remain so in students’ schemas or if they attenuate once the novelty is past, leaving

a more expert view of the content. It would also be important for practitioners to be able

to identify this process and to help students see their newfound knowledge within the

bigger picture. DIAL practitioners could use some guidance on this in the form of

longitudinal research.

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The Case 2 distribution also showed that in addition to those middle level learners

showing more growth than the high and low pretest scorers, they also tended to reach

about the same level of similarity to the expert referent by the end of the course. The

similarity (csim) scores could have theoretically gone much higher, suggesting that a

ceiling effect was not the explanation for this. It is possible that the Pathfinder

assessment tool or process has a limited sensitivity that made it difficult to distinguish

structural similarities beyond a certain point but this is not reflected in other research

using Pathfinder. It is also possible that the Pathfinder assessment process accurately

reflected the extent of the learning opportunities available to students such that the

apparent ceiling on the students’ csim scores did accurately show the extent of the

learning opportunity within the class. In either case, the largely consistent change in

structural knowledge that was detected in this study suggested that these students were

learning conceptual science knowledge to a degree that led to significant positive changes

in their knowledge structures though there were also important differences from case to

case. Further investigation into the limits of Pathfinder sensitivity are warranted for

future research.

Some of the difference in learning between cases might be explained by the

design of the study. To look at the contrast of Case 3 (zero growth) and Case 4 (highest

growth), the background knowledge of the students coming in to each experience was

quite different. In Case 3, the teacher had spent a significant amount of time preparing

the students and teaching content in class before the experience and before the pretest,

while in Case 4 the students had not had any pre-instruction, thus they had more room to

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grow. However, it has been shown that on day trips, pre-instruction improves learning

(Orion & Hofstein, 1994) so it is difficult to tease out the differences with these longer

experiences.

One conclusion to draw from the results of the first research question is that

although DIAL can lead to significant learning, the process and context do not

automatically do so. There are clearly variables that must be addressed well to increase

the chances of student learning. Some of these variables are addressed in the next section

but it is clear that more work needs to be done to better understand what makes one

DIAL experience a successful support of cognitive learning and another one less so. The

next section discusses both the findings from this study on how some of these variables

affected learning in these cases as well as a discussion of further work that needs to be

done.

Discussion and Implications: Research Question 2

Learning Opportunities

Because DIAL tends to provide ample opportunity for both independent and

directed learning, a central aspect of the DIAL framework (Appendix B) is the distinction

between facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities. How students used these

learning opportunities in DIAL was a key finding of this study. Facilitated learning

opportunities were more often cited as influences on the development of TSC knowledge

than were peripheral opportunities, though the most important learning processes in

which students developed personally relevant schematic knowledge of the TSCs tended

to involve interactions between both facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities.

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I found that the students with the greatest positive changes in structural

knowledge tended to rely more heavily on facilitated opportunities, though there were

important exceptions. It is not surprising that the facilitated opportunities were more

often associated with cognitive learning than were peripheral opportunities alone as

facilitated learning has been shown to be generally more productive than “minimally

guided instruction” (Kirschner, et al., 2006; Klahr & Nigam, 2004). What is surprising is

that peripheral learning accounted for as much of the learning as it did. It is difficult to

think of another formal education venue in which students pick up a substantial portion of

their information in a peripheral manner. They may do internet research or similar tasks

but these are generally assigned and therefore facilitated by a teacher. In these cases of

DIAL, students were picking up some important lessons directly from the peripheral

opportunities. For one student in each of the cases, they described the peripheral learning

opportunities more often and in ways that suggested they were more important to the

students’ learning than the facilitated opportunities. This suggests that for those

individuals the opportunity to interact directly with the contextualized environment was

critical to their learning.

Past studies of authentic learning environments have shown that peripheral events

are more highly anticipated by students than are facilitated events prior to a field trip

(Ballantyne & Packer, 2010) and that learning is more resilient over time when students

are more actively engaged in the environment on a field trip (MacKenzie and White

1982) but it was unclear if or how peripheral opportunities contributed to the learning

process. This study has shown that peripheral learning opportunities helped students to

make personal and affective connections to the target concepts. The immersion aspect of

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DIAL allowed students constant access to the context they were studying and through

peripheral learning opportunities, students extended their learning into events that did not

have educational intent.

Neither Mayer’s (2004) detailed review of discovery learning in which he

concluded that pure discovery learning pedagogies did not hold up to scrutiny, nor other

studies of open-ended learning environments (Dean & Kuhn, 2007; Klahr & Nigam,

2004; Novak & Musonda, 1991), considered the learning of individual students. This

study confirms Lai’s (1999) finding that access to peripheral learning opportunities may

be an important way to differentiate instruction for the minority of students for whom that

is important. Based on the positive affective connections to the TSCs that students

described in conjunction with aspects of the TSCs they had discovered on their own, they

seemed to be more invested and attached to what they had discovered on their own than

to the information learned through other means. If this is true across other DIAL

experiences, it would be important for teachers to recognize and honor this type of

learning, and to assess the accuracy of it.

There are two other important differences between those studies and this one.

First, in the cited studies that decry discovery learning (Dean & Kuhn, 2007; Klahr &

Nigam, 2004; Novak & Musonda, 1991) the learning takes place in contextually

impoverished learning environments- contrived experiences in classrooms. This study

suggests that the context and the environment are critical contributors to this type of

learning. How could discovery learning be effective when there is nothing to actually

discover? The second and more important difference between those studies and this one

is that the discovery aspect was considered in isolation and in contrast to directed

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learning while in this study, the interaction between facilitated and peripheral learning

opportunities emerged as the most important learning pattern for the students in these

DIAL cases. This study confirms that discovery learning or peripheral learning

opportunities alone were not highly effective for most students but to think of the issue in

such a dichotomous manner misses the point that peripheral learning was one effective

tool for some students and when facilitated and peripheral opportunities were available to

students in conjunction, the most powerful learning seemed to emerge. Although the

facilitated learning opportunities were more associated with cognitive learning across the

cases, it is important to consider the needs of the individuals who did not fit those

patterns. If these trends that were consistent across the cases are also consistent across

the wider population, DIAL practitioners would need to keep in mind the importance of

the teachers’ facilitation on student learning but also recognize that some students may

benefit from an alternative, peripheral path to knowledge development.

Deeper learning seemed to most often come from learning processes that included

both facilitated and peripheral opportunities, often in the pattern of peripheral

opportunities providing the keystone event that made sense of the facilitated learning.

This may be due to the types of learning and cognition that were associated with each.

Students reported cognitive understanding more often with facilitated opportunities and

affective understanding more often through peripheral means. It seems then, that the

combination of facilitated and peripheral opportunities tends to result in a more holistic

understanding that involves a personal connection as well as external information.

Students gained declarative or schematic knowledge but also contextualized the

information and gave it relevance. Students were able to combine the canonical

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knowledge gained through facilitation with their own observations and affective

connections. They could make connections that were personally relevant. Because

students were immersed in authentic contexts while receiving instruction along the way,

they could quickly move back and forth between the facilitated and peripheral allowing

for both inductive and deductive learning processes to build their knowledge.

This pattern of learning that includes both personal constructions of knowledge

and a heavy influence from the learning environment, particularly the social aspects of it,

is in agreement with the idea of situated constructivism presented in earlier chapters. The

learning for these students was neither a “person-solo” (Perkins, 1993) gathering and

processing of information nor an entirely social construction of knowledge, but an

interplay of both elements, situated within a physical, geographical space. It was a

“person-plus” (Perkins, 1993) system with a spectrum of learning from highly individual

sourcing of knowledge development to highly social constructions. Within that

spectrum, however, the deepest learning seemed to be associated with the construction of

knowledge that included both elements in conjunction, although not necessarily at the

same time. When students described their understanding of concept relationships and

described learning events across the person-solo/person-plus spectrum, they most often

described the events as temporally distinct but conceptually linked. The situated and

constructivist aspects of learning seemed to be integral rather than distinct processes.

The lesson in these findings is that both facilitated and peripheral learning were

critical for these DIAL experiences. It was important for teachers to lecture, guide

student observations in the field, create contextualized demonstrations, and facilitate

discussions, but it was also important for students to have opportunities to explore the

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environment and discover evidence on their own. Case 4, which had by far the greatest

learning gains, had a much higher proportion of undirected time within the DIAL

experience than did the other cases, but also provided students instruction, largely

through guided observations. Because each student was picking out their own peripheral

opportunities that were meaningful to them, it seemed advantageous that there were a

wide variety of opportunities available to them. In Case 3, with essentially zero gain in

learning, students had very little opportunity for peripheral learning due to the short

duration and a sequence of events that was described by the teacher as being highly

scripted. Of course, there were other factors identified in this study that may have

contributed to the difference in gains between Cases 3 and 4 but the difference in

peripheral learning opportunities may have contributed as well.

Although students involved in these DIAL experiences were using peripheral

context cues for their learning, just knowing how to make use of those opportunities may

have had its genesis in the facilitated. Guided observation, for example, may have

become internalized to the point where the practice was personally useful, a process

described by Vygotsky (1978). Seen in other terms, by working within a community of

practice, students seemed to be observing through legitimate peripheral participation until

they were competent enough to make meaningful observations on their own in more

expert ways (Lave & Wenger, 1988). The students who relied most heavily on the

peripheral learning opportunities were those students who had either high or particularly

low background knowledge (based on pretest). The former seemed like it led to

productive learning while the latter led to observations and experiences that students

could not easily connect to big picture science concepts. This study suggests that the

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balance between facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities in DIAL should not be a

fixed formula but may depend on the level of expertise of the class and individual

students. It may be helpful for students to be scaffolded/facilitated through the process of

how to effectively take advantage of peripheral learning opportunities though it seems

unproductive in most educational settings that the balance should ever move to entirely

peripheral learning opportunities, certainly not in DIAL if the data presented here are an

indication. It is also important to reiterate that facilitated instruction is not synonymous

with classroom instruction. As shown in these four cases there are ways to facilitate

learning that are not typically associated with classroom learning such as impromptu

observations of the environment, and it seems conceivable that a creative classroom

science teacher could foster opportunities for students to discover peripheral learning

within the classroom. The data presented here indicate that it is important in DIAL to

heavily rely on the context of the environment but to also use demonstration, and guided

observations along with the occasional lecture.

Experiential Learning Theory in general, and the cyclical models of learning in

particular (Chapman, et al., 1992; Kolb, et al., 2000) rely on students making sense of

their experience through reflection. This study suggests that individual reflection, while

important, may not be as effective as teachers more directly helping students to

understand the connections between abstract ideas and the students’ experiences, often in

what could be described as social reflection. Although a controlled study would be

helpful in comparing these avenues for making connections, students across these four

cases were more likely to report the role of teachers in facilitating the students’ making of

connections than they reported making connections on their own, particularly in writing.

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If this were to hold true across other DIAL experiences teachers would need to rely

heavily on formative assessment so they may be aware of where each student falls on this

spectrum and so they can give more exploratory freedom to those students who will

benefit from it and more supports to help students who are struggling with making those

connections. Although it was important for students to pick up personally meaningful

information peripherally, facilitation was almost always required to help students see how

that information fit into the big picture.

Teachers also need to be aware of the metaphors that students are picking up

directly from the environment. While these metaphors can be powerful learning devices

that the teachers in all of the cases used well, they can also lead to misconceptions, as

was the case for students in Cases 1 and 2 who confused behavioral and evolutionary

adaptations.

The role of novelty in field trip learning has been shown to be both beneficial and

problematic in that it heightens awareness and engagement but also compromises task-

oriented learning (Falk, et al., 1978; Martin, et al., 1981; Orion & Hofstein, 1994). In all

of the cases described novelty was interpreted as being important for developing student

interest, even for students who came into the experiences disinterested. Student curiosity

led them to explore further, even if those explorations were not directly associated with

the concepts they were intended to learn. In all but Case 3, there was some element of

risk and therefore distraction associated with the novelty. However, for every student

who mentioned the feelings of risk, they described a transition from threat to

understanding that occurred over time. Trying to connect content to context, facilitated

to peripheral, may be ineffective when the novelty space is too high but once students

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have adjusted to the novel situation, they may be poised for much deeper learning, armed

with the contextual inputs. This process seems to be important for DIAL as the time

exists for students to make this transition. Teachers who use DIAL can allow the novelty

to engage the students but then use that novelty to deliver the lessons, as all of the

teachers in this study did. Facilitating that transition was important as students in Case 4

did not tend to notice much beyond the sensational aspects of the environment until they

had moved past the novelty space. A better understanding of the process and the time

required to effectively use it deserves further study.


Through pattern-matching during cross-case analysis, the findings of this study

supported some aspects of the conceptual framework (Appendix B) and did not support

others when considering the contributions of the environment to the DIAL process.

These are discussed in the following sections.

Social Interactions and Cultural Elements

The environmental components did not contribute equally to learning across the

four cases of the study. The students in these cases associated their learning more heavily

with social interactions than with any of the other components. The heavy emphasis on

the social aspects of learning are in agreement with situative conceptions of learning (e.g.

Brown, et al., 1989; Cole & Engeström, 1993; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978) as well as

theories that could be called situated constructivism (e.g. Cobb & Yackel, 1996; Pea,

1993; Perkins, 1993). As in many educational settings, there was a very heavy reliance

on teacher-centered interactions where the teacher was the dispenser of knowledge.

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Students seemed to value that traditional relationship. However, students and teachers

described and I observed in Case 4, teachers adopting non-traditional roles as they acted

more as experts, interacted with other experts, modeled learning for the students, and

acted in non-instructional roles, as also observed by Lai (1999) and DeWitt & Hohenstein

(2010).

It is important to understand the role of social interactions in DIAL. When

thinking about examples of DIAL experiences, including those in this study, it is easy to

think of the exotic physical or geographical settings or the non-traditional academic

activities in which students are engaged. All of this is important to DIAL but the social

interactions, particularly the teacher-centered instruction, seem to be of critical

importance to the learning of the content knowledge. Context is important but the

teachers largely provided the primary conceptual connections between the environment

and the learners’ experiences.

The findings of this study suggest that social interactions were an important

mediating factor (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 2007) for the cultural and emotional

components. Based on student perceptions of their learning processes, the cultural and

emotional environments seemed to contribute very little directly to the learning of the

content but it was clear that there were emotional and cultural contributions to learning

associated with the other identified components: Social Interactions, Physical

Environment, and Tools. This suggests that environmental contributors to DIAL may be

operating at different levels and in different ways as they influence the context vehicle.

Though not specifically addressed in this study, cultural norms must have contributed

heavily to establishing the relationships with a given group. That is, all of the social

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interactions are based on cultural foundations and influenced by the emotional

environments.

Both Dewitt & Hohenstein (2010) and Lai (1999) found that power structures

between teachers and students as well as relationships between them changed on field

trips. This also seemed to be true for these DIAL experiences. In all of the cases

students had interacted with the teachers as both classroom teachers and during the DIAL

experiences of the study. A number of students reported that they appreciated the more

informal affect of their teachers and how they appreciated seeing their teachers learn

alongside them. The relationship between teachers and local experts in Cases 3 and 4 (as

described by teachers, students and observed in the field) also seemed to change the

learning environment by modeling expert dialog and a culture of professional interaction

as scientists. A more in-depth look at these relationships would add much to our

understanding of DIAL and science education and thus deserves attention in future

research.

One of the more surprising findings regarding the role of social interactions in

learning was the almost universal agreement amongst students that they had learned little

or nothing from their peers. Students did not report being distracted by social relations

and tensions, as reported by Smith et al. (2010) in a study of high school science camps

run as part of the public school curriculum in New Zealand. Based on a comparison

between student interview data and my field observations of Case 4 regarding peer

interactions, it seems that student learning may be influenced heavily by peers but they

do not seem to recognize that influence. In many cases students shared information with

each other, generated interest in a TSC, and discussed content knowledge together. This

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was an ongoing process in Case 4 and so it is unclear if those students did not recognize

these as learning processes, did not remember the encounters, or if there was some other

factor that led students to believe they were not learning from each other. Again, further

investigation is warranted.

There are three primary implications of these findings on social interactions for

DIAL learning, centered around the idea that teachers need to recognize the importance

of their role in the process. It is not enough to simply provide the context or the

experience for students. Teachers must (1) guide students through the process, (2)

directly provide information for the students to interpret in context, and (3) help students

make connections between their experience and targeted information. The use of local

science experts was a useful tool in many ways but it was also important for teachers to

help students make sense of the experts’ information and see how it fit into the big

picture. Although the majority of data in this study did not suggest a strong peer

influence on learning, the discrepancy between field and interview data suggest that it

should be considered as potentially important.


The physical environment was the second component that directly contributed

many contextual cues to the individual learners as they elaborated their understandings of

the TSCs. This is in contrast to existing research and one of the more important findings

of this study. To repeat a previous quote, “the physical environment does not so much

increase learning when it is excellent as inhibit it when it is poor” (Tessmer & Richey,

1997, p. 96). This was absolutely not the case in these DIAL experiences. Rather,

students picked up much important information directly from the physical environment as

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they developed their understandings of the TSCs. At times the teachers guided the

students’ observations and at times the students noted examples of TSCs and

relationships on their own. In many cases these context cues were described by students

helping to develop complete pictures of the concepts or understand the ideas in a broader

context. Often these context cues from the physical environment became keystone events

that allowed a given student to finally understand a concept they had been wrestling with

or understand it at a much deeper, even schematic level.

The physical environment provided context cues through all of the senses and

allowed students to embody some of the concepts in ways that could not be done in an

abstracted way. Seeing examples of TSCs was described as important, as was the

association of information with geographic places. For students there was something

categorically different about direct experience with the physical environment that allowed

them to understand the concepts in ways that they could not when the information was

entirely abstract. This “you had to be there” effect was described as important by most of

the students in the study as they listed the many ways in which they felt that direct

experience provided some level of information that was different than they could access

through other means. though they had trouble defining the mechanism behind it.

Students struggled with explaining why that was so categorically different but their

descriptions suggest that this effect might have something to do with trusting one’s own

senses more than secondary information (even if implicitly) and the ability to judge scale

and complexity which cannot be done through description or recorded media. This is

certainly another area that needs further study.

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The significant role of the physical environment in DIAL was an important

finding. DIAL hinges on the idea that students should be deeply immersed in authentic

contexts to enhance learning. If the physical setting of a place does not contribute to

learning then there is little sense in the logistical and financial difficulties associated with

providing many DIAL experiences. This study overwhelmingly showed that students

were using the physical environment to support the learning of conceptual knowledge and

in a number of ways that were not available through other means.

The implications of this finding are clear for the implementation of DIAL

experiences: the choice of the physical environment in which the experience takes place

is critically important. Although logistically challenging, bringing students into an

authentic context, conceptually linked to a relevant context, seems to be a powerful way

to add depth and relevance to science learning. Conversely, it may make more sense to

match the teaching to existing contexts, making use of schoolyards and even school

buildings as the context to teach ecology or engineering principles, for example, so that

the physical environment can be effectively utilized to support science learning and it is

no longer seen simply as a source of distraction.

Tools

Tools, including predominantly traditional academic tools, made up the third

category of environmental components that contributed cues directly to the formation of a

context vehicle. However, tools did not contribute to learning as heavily as social

interactions and the physical environment. The students in Case 4 had no required

reading, and very little access to other tools, and yet they showed the most learning. It

seems plausible that the role of tools could be more substantial in other cases of DIAL,

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such as an experience that is more heavily driven by text-based source material or an

experience in which the context is a working science lab. The distinction between

academic and non-academic tools in the original conceptual framework was not borne out

in the data. Tools either contributed to learning or they did not, regardless of the

intentionality behind them and students rarely saw non-academic tools as directly

contributing to their learning.

Ballantyne & Packer (2010) reported that students prior to field trips had very low

interest in using tools such as worksheets during the trip and reported them as among the

least useful for learning after the trip. Students in this study did not necessarily report

academic tools as being particularly exciting to them, but they did often discuss them as

important aspects of their learning. Perhaps one difference is that the students in this

study tended to use or access tools when they needed them (e.g. dichotomous keys,

thermometers) or saw the tools as helping them understand what they were observing in

the field (e.g. readings, videos). This may have added the relevance that was lacking for

the students in the Ballantyne & Packer (2010) study. In agreement with Orion &

Hofstein (1994), the use of readings and preparatory materials was valued by the students

who had them (Cases 1,2,3), allowing them to interpret the environment once there, but

this did not seem to be critical, as evidenced by large changes in knowledge structures for

Case 4 students despite the lack of such materials.

The implications for DIAL are that tools should be chosen and used very

carefully. Educators are used to relying very heavily on tools such as books and

computers to deliver information. Certainly this role still exists for tools in DIAL but a

more important role might be in helping students interpret the information that is already

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present in the environment. Tools should be used to preface an experience but not so

much that the information supersedes the students’ experience. Tools should be ready on

an on-demand basis so that students can bridge their own experience with established

scientific knowledge. Of course, this process needs to be modeled and facilitated by the

teacher, particularly at first.

Individual Role and Emotional Environment

Although I originally conceptualized the role of the individual and the emotional

environment as different elements in the DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B), the

findings of this study indicated that they were more blended. Largely, the role of the

individual seemed to be bringing all of the environmental components together. The

emotional environment, apparent during the field study but rarely reported by students,

seemed to be influencing learning as more of a background element than as a direct

contributor, much like the cultural environment. The emotional / affective elements of

learning were expressed by students as individual rather than environmental factors.

When there were instances that could be considered as influenced by the emotional

environment, that influence was mediated by the social interactions and physical

environment components. For example, the comb jellies or dolphins in Case 4 were

emotional highs that were mediated by the physical environment (Wertsch, 2007).

Perhaps the most significant role of the individual was indexing the knowledge

distributed throughout the environment and within the mental representations of that

individual, as described in situated constructivism (Brown, et al., 1989; Cobb & Yackel,

1996; Perkins, 1993). Although the teachers often helped students to make connections

between concepts, the environment, and student experiences (past, present, and future), it

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was up to each student to determine their relevance, accept those connections, or build on

them to incorporate past learning or their own unique perspectives. This indexing was

strengthened through the interactions of peripheral and facilitated learning opportunities

as students readily built contextual understanding around TSCs by associating them with

events, places, visual examples, embodied experiences, and communicated information.

Each student created these elaborate context vehicles by incorporating many elements of

the learning environment though teachers often facilitated the connection-making

process. This conception of the context vehicle is reflected in the conceptual framework

but the role of the individual learner is probably more active than originally proposed.

In the framework the learner adds context back into the learning environment

through reflection, a central theme in Experiential Learning Theory (Chapman, et al.,

1992; Kolb, 1984). The results of this study made it clear that the role of the individual is

more significant than simply reflecting. When one considers the emotional reactions,

reflection, reasoning, and indexing that students seemed to be doing consistently

throughout the learning process, it was clear that this role was what unified the

information into a rational, whole context vehicle.

The case of the novelty space (Falk, et al., 1978; Orion & Hofstein, 1994) is a

good example of how the individual has a pivotal and flexible role in DIAL. Novelty can

be seen as recognition that the context cues are unfamiliar to the learner and in need of

assimilation into her existing schemata or adjustment of her schemata (Rumelhart &

Ortony, 1977). Students often described this process as involving an emotional response

as well as a heightened sense of engagement for them, though perhaps this was

engagement in the event rather than in the TSC. Although the affective sphere includes

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more than engagement, this study’s results do agree with past work showing the ties

between engagement and cognitive learning (Ballantyne, et al., 2001; Bogner, 1999;

Chapman, et al., 1992; Jakubowski, 2003; Shellman & Ewert, 2010). The field study

data from Case 4 confirmed student descriptions showing that once the novelty wore off

and the experience became de-sensationalized, the relationship to the context changed

and both the learning and understanding also changed character. When the learner was

taking in information in reaction to a perceived threat (avalanche, pythons, cold) his

reaction seemed to be more emotional and though students still described context during

those heightened emotional events, there seemed to be a disassociation from the TSCs.

Once the sense of threat or excitement wore off, students were open to new types of

context cues which they did not seem to perceive during the heightened emotional period.

Some emotional connection helped engage the students in the TSCs but too much, either

positive or negative, seemed to temporarily hinder content learning. It is possible that

these heightened emotional events changed the course of future learning for students

when the situation was de-sensationalized but it was not clear from this study. Further

study is needed in this area.

The most important implication of these findings is that teachers who use DIAL

need to be cognizant of the individualization of the learning. When the environment is so

complex physically, emotionally, socially, and conceptually, students are working with

much more information than they are in a typical classroom learning environment.

What’s more, students are potentially associating all of this information with the target

knowledge. Science teachers using DIAL experiences need to recognize and capitalize

on this environmental diversity and use highly individualized formative assessments to

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make sure each individual student is developing their knowledge in ways that agree with

scientifically accepted understanding.

Contextualization

The results of this study confirmed that the students did associate many context

cues with the target knowledge and used them for indexing (Perkins, 1993) and recall.

The contextualization of the target knowledge happened in a number of key ways. First,

students acquired real world visual examples of the concepts they were tasked with

learning and could use these to recall and articulate their understanding of the concepts.

By seeing the concepts and processes illustrated in authentic contexts, students could pick

out subtleties based on a series of observations or note how the concept was not the clean

and precise concept it might have appeared to be when first hearing about it. In short,

they were able to develop more expert representations of the concept by understanding

the context that was now bound to the target concepts.

In addition to visual representations students also seemed to be adding

geographical references to the contextualization process- an idea that was not found

through the literature review and not accounted for in the conceptual framework. When

asked about a given topic, students often referred to the geographical place where that

concept was most clearly illustrated for them. However, this was truer for the cases in

which there was much geographical variety such as Case 4 in which students were

constantly on the move and each place was substantially different than the others. Thus,

geographical association was important for those students in contextualizing their

knowledge. In Case 2, the students experienced much less variety and, in turn, they

spoke more generally about place and did not seem to associate specific concepts with

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specific places. This is an important finding in that the role of geographical

contextualization has not come up in the science education literature but it may be a

useful tool in helping students to understand and contrast concepts. By highlighting the

connections between specific places and concepts, teachers could help students recall

ideas and develop common understanding.

Through all sources of contextualization there was an observed relationship

between the level of contextualization and the level of learning across the cases, as shown

by the Pathfinder results and the student interviews. As in Rivet and Krajcik (2008),

contextualization was tied to learning. Contextualization did much more than help

students see how a concept could be applied in the real world, it actually helped the

students understand the concepts and helped them to develop knowledge structures that

were closer to the way experts organized their knowledge. The contextualization led to

more expert concept knowledge structures, in part by helping the students to see how the

various concepts were interrelated in the real world and giving the students a basis for

deciding how related two topics were. This was particularly evident in the described

cases of student PFnets in which a concept was entirely unconnected in the pretest and

then connected in a manner that agreed with the expert referent in the post-test. In all of

those cases interviewed students accurately described their new understanding of the

concepts and did so by framing them in the authentic contexts in which they were learned

and could be applied. Students were able to learn about a discrete concept but then

observe the concept within the entire ecosystem.

This is perhaps the most important and broadly applicable finding from the study.

Authentic contextualization is a powerful pedagogical tool that can significantly enhance

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science learning. The levels of contextualization found in this study through DIAL,

though not directly comparable, seemed to far exceed those found in classroom-centered,

problem-based learning activities (Rivet & Krajcik, 2004a, 2004b, 2008). During the

DIAL experiences it seems that there were vastly more opportunities to access contextual

information from the authentic environment than can be done through more abstract

means in the classroom. Providing opportunities for students to generate contextualized

understanding of science concepts may have many applications beyond DIAL

experiences though it is unclear if this level of contextualization is possible without

DIAL and this too deserves further study.

Revised Conceptual Framework

The process of pattern matching analysis in case study research tests a theoretical

conceptualization against relevant data collected from multiple sources (Yin, 2009). In

the current study the DIAL conceptual framework (Appendix B) was built based on

relevant learning theory and past findings in contextualized learning. Based on the

discussion above, some elements of that framework were supported by the data and some

were not. In order to illustrate those differences a revised conceptual framework is

shown in Figure 6.1 and is shown side-by-side with the original framework in Appendix

B, to reflect the results of this study. The purpose of this revised framework is not to

definitively say that DIAL writ large is more accurately reflected by the new framework

but that it more accurately reflects the findings of this study. It is my hope that these two

versions of the framework will form the foundation of future study and that future work

will continue to test the patterns illustrated in both as we better develop our

understanding of contextualized learning and DIAL. In this section I highlight the

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changes in the framework and discuss how the results of this study led to those changes

or to maintaining original elements.

Figure 6.1. In DIAL, target knowledge is inevitably bound to environmental and individual inputs that form a context vehicle to elaborate and associate the information. The learner stores representations that are modified through experience with the environment and thought processes. Learner access to context cues can be facilitated by a teacher or peripheral. Each learner contributes to and is influenced by the cultural and affective background through the learning process.

Learning Target

Context Vehicle

Learner

Social Interactions


Peripheral

Facilitated

Context Cues

Cultural & Affective Background Environment

Memory

Indexing Reflecting Connecting Emoting

The Deep Immersion Academic Learning Process

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One of the changes to the framework is the reduction in the number of

components directly contributing to the context vehicle. A situative learning perspective

(e.g. Brown, et al., 1989; Greeno, et al., 1996) suggests that all elements within any given

context are contributing to learning, as was reflected in the original framework.

The results of this study suggest that those components may be contributing in different

ways. Social interactions, tools, and cues from the physical environment all seemed to

directly contribute to context cues that students associated directly with the TSCs they

learned.

In contrast, students made only vague references to the cultural and emotional

environments as they described their understanding of concepts or the ways in which they

felt they had learned new content though the field study data suggested these elements

were operating in the background of the learning process. For this reason, the new

framework shows the cultural and emotional environment components as background

elements that have the potential to indirectly impact the other aspects. These background

elements probably influence the entire process and become elaborated into a learner’s

representations (memory) through mediation by social interactions and tools as

previously discussed. This idea agrees closely with Vygotsky’s (1978) description of the

learning process along with other situative learning theorists (Brown, et al., 1989; Brown

& Duguid, 1996; Cole & Engeström, 1993; Greeno, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Pea,

1993; Perkins, 1993; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 2007). Although the student interview data

did not support this, the revised conceptual framework (figure 6.1) maintains these

elements because they are so consistently represented in learning theory, the field study

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data did support their inclusion, and one of the goals of this new framework is to

encourage future research and these are elements that clearly deserve further study.

Based on student descriptions of their learning, three components of the

environment were regularly and directly associated with the learning of the TSCs: social

interactions, the physical environment, and tools. A fourth component, the individual

learner’s contribution was also important but seemed to be of a different nature, one of

processing rather than contributing new information. The three external components

were reconfigured on the revised framework to reflect a number of findings from this

study. First, the (now) three contextualizing environmental components are represented

as three different sizes to indicate the degree that each seems to contribute to DIAL.

Social interactions contribute most heavily, followed by the physical environment, and

then tools. The proportional sizes of the environmental components in the conceptual

framework should be seen as somewhat flexible and the contributions each one makes to

DIAL should be tested across a wider range of DIAL experiences.

Another distinction in the revised framework as compared to the original is the

connectivity of the environmental components. The original framework acknowledged

that the various components all became mingled as overall context but the results of the

study indicated that the components were interrelated at a process level as well. Social

interactions, for example, changed based on the physical setting while the interpretation

of the physical setting was dependent on social interactions, particularly guidance from

the teachers. Tool use was almost entirely driven by social interactions, again

predominantly based on guidance from the teachers. To account for this connectivity, all

of the components are now grouped together as a body of sources that together create

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multi-faceted context cues for the learner. This higher degree of connectivity is also

more in keeping with a situated perspective of learning.

In the original conceptual framework, each environmental component was

represented as having equal contributions from facilitated and peripheral learning

opportunities. The revised framework indicates both the dominance of facilitated

opportunities as well as the interaction of both facilitated and peripheral opportunities in

forming context cues for learning. A final and important change to the framework

reflects the greater and multi-faceted role of the individual learner in the DIAL process,

showing the role as not simply reflection but indexing, emoting, and making connections

between all of the other elements of the learning environment.

Limitations

This study provides a view into how students use the components of a learning

environment to develop conceptual science knowledge. By looking at multiple cases, one

can get a better sense of how trends hold up in diverse settings. However, there are

infinite variables that go into any DIAL experience and each experience is therefore

unique. The ability to generalize is limited by this fact and thus this study should be seen

as a testing of the conceptual framework, a first step into exploring DIAL, rather than a

definitive account of the DIAL process.

A fundamental limitation of the study is that it relied largely on self-report of

student learning experiences. Although the assessment-driven interviews helped students

to recall learning events, it is still unrealistic to assume that their meta-cognitive

processes would recognize all aspects of learning. I can be more confident in reporting

what did contribute to DIAL in these cases than in ruling out elements that did not. This

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study should be seen as a report on some contributors to DIAL rather than all

contributors. Similarly, the relative importance of each environmental contributor to

learning reflects students’ perceptions to a large degree as was shown by the disconnect

between field study data and interview data regarding the role of peer contributions to

learning. The reliance on sticking close to students’ own accounts of their experiences

was used to increase the trustworthiness of the account (Creswell, 2007) but it also adds

these inherent limitations.

The sampling design also limited this study, particularly for the quantitative

aspects. Larger samples within each case would have allowed a more robust comparison

between them. The intensity sample likely introduced a level of bias into the results. All

of the schools were independent schools and all but Case 1 served white, middle to upper

SES students. Although Case 1 represented a diverse and generally low SES subsample,

there are a number of selection mechanisms within the school that alter the make-up of

the student body. Further, almost all of the students had specifically chosen to participate

in the DIAL experiences. If the DIAL experiences had been implemented in a school

where not all of the students were excited about the experience, the results might have

been quite different. There was some suggestion of that in Case 3 with one or two

students who were not as engaged. Though case selection was limited in this study to

outdoor learning of ecology, DIAL is conceptualized more broadly and it is likely that

DIAL manifests differently when the context changes substantially. Caution should be

used in how the results are generalized to other populations.

Analysis of the data could have been strengthened with multiple coders and the

creation of a coding system that was cooperatively created and tuned. A measure of

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inter-rater reliability would have strengthened the trustworthiness of the study. Similarly,

the use of member checking was more limited than what would have been ideal.

Students were able to review the PFnets to confirm that they truly reflected how they

organized their knowledge but due to the timing of the analysis coinciding with the

schools’ summer breaks and the lack of a database to track students when they left these

programs, it was not practical to conduct further member checking.

The Pathfinder process also has a number of limitations. First, it is a fluid

assessment that could be expected to fluctuate to a small degree even in repeated

measures with the same subject. The referents used are based on expert knowledge that

is also somewhat fluid. Acton et al. (1994) showed that the average of expert responses

was the best metric to determine student learning but that within the experts there could

be significant differences. As such, the expert referents should not be seen as an absolute

benchmark of correct answers but as a guide with which to judge general changes. As

the sample size increases the csim scores are more telling but qualitative examinations of

the PFnets are probably more valuable at the individual student level. It also seems that

there may have been a ceiling effect with the assessments. In two of the cases, there

seemed to be a ∆ csim value that may have reached a maximum. Within this study the

use of the Pathfinder assessments would have been strengthened with a more formal

instrument validation process.

The role of facilitation in this study was important but it was treated as either

contributing or not. Clearly there is wide variety in what facilitation looks like, along

with associated efficacies, and this was not taken into account in this study. Class size

was also an issue not only from the perspective of small sample sizes but also because it

299

most likely affected the interactions between students and teacher-student interactions,

both of which were shown to contribute to learning in this study. It seems likely that

some of these dynamics would change as class size increased.

Contributions

This work represents a number of contributions to the fields of science education,

learning theory, and experiential education. First, the DIAL construct and the two

associated conceptual frameworks define a heretofore undefined but practiced

pedagogical approach to contextualized science (and other disciplines) education. In

providing a way to conceptualize DIAL, practitioners and researchers have a more

defined starting point from which to manipulate and test the various aspects of it. The

data presented in this study suggest some trends within the framework that can also

provide some guidance in how teachers might approach DIAL to enhance student

learning and guidance to researchers for areas that need further study.

As outlined in Chapter Two, the fields of experiential learning and contextualized

science education suffer from a lack of empirical evidence on if and how the learning of

content knowledge occurs as a result of these pedagogical approaches. This study does

provide both quantitative and qualitative evidence to show that science concept learning

did take place for most of the participating students and outlines how those students

interacted with their learning environments to lead to that learning.

This study was based on a theoretical foundation that encompasses both cognitive

and situative conceptions of learning in a manner that is gaining traction in learning

theory literature and discussions (Cobb & Bowers, 1999; Greeno, et al., 1996; Pea, 1993;

Perkins, 1993; Salomon, 1993a, 1993b) but also needs further empirical testing. The

300

cases studied here provided strong support for this idea of “situated constructivism”

showing that there was an ever-present interaction between the individual and

environmental learning processes as students built their concept knowledge within the

given domains.

This study illustrated an evaluation tool that could be used by both practitioners

and researchers to measure the efficacy of DIAL experiences or other similarly open

learning environments. The Pathfinder algorithm proved to be an effective tool to

measure conceptual knowledge within the content domain of each class that allowed

content-specific feedback but also seemed to be responsive to multiple ways of knowing

or contextualizing the given concepts. Pathfinder has much potential for future use as an

assessment or evaluation tool in many aspects of experiential and contextualized

education and addresses the dearth of rigorous assessment tools typically available for

these pedagogical approaches.

The Pathfinder algorithm and the resulting graphics of structural knowledge

(PFnets) were shown to have much potential for mixed methods research. The

quantitative nature of the process allowed for meaningful statistical analysis of the

sample while the highly individualized graphic results shown in this study provided for

an efficient interview process that allowed the questions to immediately focus on each

students’ individualized knowledge structures.

Overall this study introduced a new line of research into DIAL, a newly defined

approach to learning contextualized academic content through immersion in a relevant

learning environment. The implications of this line of research extend beyond the

practice of DIAL and have the potential to inform science and other disciplinary

301

education from the field to the classroom as we come to better understand the learning

process in contextualized, authentic learning environments.

Recommendations for Future Research

Because this study was largely exploratory, it generated more questions than

answers, providing much fodder for future research. Probably the most needed study in

this line of inquiry would be a large-scale, comparative study of DIAL and a more

traditional approach with matched curricula and students. The most direct offshoot of

this study should be the further testing and adjusting of the original and revised

conceptual frameworks (Appendix B). It was developed based on theoretical constructs

and adjusted based on the results of this multiple case study but there are a number of

related questions that still need to be answered:

1. Facilitated and peripheral learning opportunities:

a. Do students interpret or value information differently when it comes from

facilitated versus peripheral sources?

b. Can a learning environment with more peripheral than facilitated learning

opportunities be as effective under the right conditions or with more

advanced learners?

c. How do variable approaches to facilitation affect DIAL?

d. How can facilitation be used to enhance peripheral learning?

e. Do the relative benefits of peripheral and facilitated learning opportunities

shift with the expertise of the students? Does expertise allow for greater

learning potential from peripheral learning opportunities?

302

f. Are there identifiable characteristics of individual students that would

allow practitioners to predict whether facilitated or peripheral learning

opportunities are more likely to be effective for them?

2. Contributions of the environmental components:

a. Are all of the environmental components needed to lead to effective

contextualization or can it be achieved with just one ore two?

b. How consistent are the proportional contributions of the environmental

components across DIAL experiences?

c. Why do students not readily recognize peer-to-peer learning in DIAL? Is

this common across DIAL experiences?

d. How do teacher-expert interactions affect learning in DIAL settings?

e. When students index their learning in association with geographical

places, what are the implications for long-term recall?

f. Do heightened emotional events occurring in context prime students for

later learning?

3. Contextualization:

a. Can the levels of contextualization found in relation to the DIAL

experiences be transferred to or fostered in classroom settings through

creative facilitation by teachers and curricula?

b. Why or how does one’s physical presence in an authentic context change

the way information is learned? What explains the “you had to be there

effect”?

303

4. DIAL:

a. Does the conceptual framework accurately model learning in other and

different DIAL environments?

b. When students focus their attention on new learning to the detriment of

past learning, does that effect attenuate over time or are students left with

a skewed sense of importance?

c. Are learning gains achieved through DIAL resilient over time and new

learning?

d. Is there a relationship between the duration of a DIAL event and the level

or type of learning that students achieve?

e. How does novelty space attenuate over the course of a DIAL experience

and how does this impact learning?

5. Methodology: Are there predictable limits to the sensitivity of the Pathfinder

algorithm and process?

Chapter Six Summary

In the final chapter of this dissertation I discussed the findings of the study,

following the two research questions. First I discussed the science concept learning that

occurred in the four cases and concluded that although DIAL can lead to significant

learning, the process and context do not automatically do so. There are variables that

must be addressed well to increase the chances of student learning, as was shown in

comparing Case 3 (zero growth) to the other cases . Those variables were discussed and

a revision of the study’s conceptual framework was presented as a result. Although

facilitated learning opportunities were more often associated with science concept

304

learning, both peripheral and facilitated learning opportunities were important for DIAL,

each contributing different qualities to the learning process, and a synergistic effect

seemed to lead to greater or deeper learning when they were used together. In agreement

with past work, the social aspect of the learning environment proved to be the most

important source of contextualizing cues. In contrast to the literature, the physical

environment also proved to be an important direct contributor to learning. Tools were

less so. Contextualization led to more expert knowledge structures, and occurred as a

result of the individual learner indexing and making connections amongst all of the

environmental components. The implications for DIAL teaching and further research

were discussed.

305

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: Important Terms and Abbreviations

Concept Unit: The primary unit of analysis for this study. Defines a block of transcribed

interview in which a student describes a complete thread of the understanding of a

given science concept

DIAL: deep immersion academic learning, an approach to learning in which students are

immersed within an real-life, authentic context directly related to the subject

being learned, usually for an extended period of time.

ELT: Experiential Learning Theory

Facilitated: Used in this dissertation to describe learning opportunities in which the

teacher has a direct role in supporting the learning.

Keystone Event: an event that allows a student to complete a conceptual picture of a

concept and thereby develop a deeper understanding.

Peripheral: Used in this dissertation to describe learning opportunities in which the

teacher does not have a direct role in facilitation, in which the student discovers

relevant knowledge on their own.

PFnet: The graphical network output resulting from the Pathfinder algorithm and

representing an individual’s structural knowledge in a given domain.

TSC: targeted science concept, the concepts associated with the learning goals of each

class involved in the study. They are contrasted with science concepts that may

be important but were not specific learning goals of the course.

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APPENDIX B: Original and Revised Conceptual Frameworks

Learner/environment network components

Facilitated social interactions

Peripheral social interactions

Facilitated physical environment

Peripheral physical environment

Figure B1. Learning environments provide a contextual surround that lead to elaborations and greater integration of learning targets with schemata. Deeper and more connected learning occur when the environmental components add contexts that are related to a learning target. .

Context

Vehicle

Learner

Learning Target

Learner elaborates the learning target with a unique set of environmental context cues

Facilitated non-‐academic tools

Peripheral non-‐academic tools

Facilitated emotional environment

Peripheral emotional environment

Facilitated academic tools

Peripheral academic tools

Facilitated cultural environment

Peripheral cultural environment

Fac. internal dialog & expression

Per. internal dialog & expression

Learning targets without contextual elaborations are less likely to interface with the learner’s schemata and less likely to be learned.

DIAL Framework: Contextualization of Learning Targets Through Environmental Interactions

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Figure B2. In DIAL, target knowledge is inevitably bound to environmental and individual inputs that form a context vehicle to elaborate and associate the information. The learner stores representations that are modified through experience with the environment and thought processes. Learner access to context cues can be facilitated by a teacher or peripheral. Each learner contributes to and is influenced by the cultural and affective background through the learning process.

Learning Target

Context Vehicle

Learner

Social Interactions


Peripheral

Facilitated

Context Cues

Cultural & Affective Background Environment

Memory

Indexing Reflecting Connecting Emoting

The Deep Immersion Academic Learning Process

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APPENDIX C: Student Interview Protocol

Student # (teacher initials and #): Date: Class: C (pre/post/change): Part I Procedure: 1. Remind student about project, ability to opt out, non-assessment. 2. Show student the second concept map and ask if it seems like an accurate

representation. 3. Show student original map and point out major differences, one at a time (table below

to be filled out before interview) Differences in pair scores or clusters (list in order of decreasing significance)

Notes

i.e. ecosystem-keystone +4 i.e. ecosystem highly linked i.e. in first map ecosystem was only connected to

symbiosis (space expanded for actual use) 4. “Your relatedness score for concept X and Y changed quite a bit from the pre to

the post (adjust to fit) , does that seem accurate?” (space expanded for actual use) 5. Can you tell me about your present understanding of the concept(s)? (space expanded for actual use) 6. Why do you think that relationship/understanding changed for you? (space expanded for actual use) 7. Move on to next concept. Part Two: clarify answers from part one and/or key experiences listed by teacher (focus on: physical, emotional, cultural env; social interactions academic/non-academic tools, & facilitated vs. peripheral) Notes from part 1 to follow up with: (space expanded for actual use) Notes from Part two: (space expanded for actual use)

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APPENDIX D: Coded Interview Sample

The following graphics are screen shots of a student interview coded for this study using

HyperRESEARCH qualitative analysis software. The graphics represent a series of

concept units (the inferential unit of analysis) and the associated descriptive and pattern

codes assigned. In practice all of these codes would not typically have been shown

together. Rather, the codes of interest at any given point in the analysis would have been

highlighted or compiled.

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APPENDIX E: Consent and Assent Forms

Student Assent Form

Date: Valid for Use Through: Study Title: Investigating Learner Networks in Contextualized Science Learning Environments Principal Investigator: Michael Giamellaro, PhD Candidate Advisor: Dr. Deanna Sands HSRC No: 11-1708 Version Date: 3/28/12 Version No: Jeffco_3 – Student Assent

You are being asked to be in a research study. This form provides you with information about the study.

Why is this study being done?

The goal of this study is to better understand how high school students learn during experiential trips. About 90 students will participate in the study. Your class, led by teacher XXXXXX, has been asked to participate in the study because it is a good example of learning science during a long field trip.

What will I need to do/ what can I expect if I agree to join this study? If you agree to participate in Level One of this study, you will be asked to fill out a form. The form allows a computer to create a diagram of how you organize your ideas about the class topics. You will be asked to do this before and after the trip. Some students in the class will be randomly selected to be interviewed after the trip. Samples of your work from the class may be collected. If you agree to participate in Level Two of this study, a researcher will briefly interview you during the trip. The researcher will use video, audio, photo and written recordings of trip events. You can ask that we erase any report about your learning that you do not agree with. You can ask us to erase any recording you do not wish us to keep or use.

What are the possible discomforts or risks? There are no physical, mental, legal or emotional risks in this study.

What are the possible benefits of the study? Results of this study will help teachers and researchers understand how learning happens during field trips. You will receive copies of your before and after computer diagrams that you can use to see how your knowledge changed over the course of the trip.

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Who is paying for this study? This study does not have any external funding.

Will I be paid for being in the study? Will I have to pay for anything? You will not be paid for participating in this study and it will not cost you anything to be in the study.

Is my participation voluntary? Taking part in this study is voluntary. You have the right to choose not to take part in this study. If you choose to take part, you have the right to stop at any time. Participating or not participating will not affect in any way your grades or your relationship with your teacher, school or school district.

Who do I call if I have questions? If you have questions, you may call Michael Giamellaro at 720-352-4796 or email him at [email protected]. Your teacher can also provide you with more information.

Who will see the research information? We will do everything we can to keep the records from this study a secret. The results from the research may be shared at meetings and in published articles. Your name will be kept private and a pseudonym will be used to identify your words or work.

Agreement to be in this study I have read this paper about the study or it was read to me. I understand the possible risks and benefits of this study. I know that participation in this study is voluntary.

I agree to participate in Level One of the Study (pre/post test & possible interview)_____ initial here

I agree to participate in Level Two of the Study (on-trip interviews and observations)______ initial here

I agree to be audio recorded during the study______ initial here

I agree to be video recorded during the study______ initial here

I agree to allowing my recorded voice or image to be used in presentations______ initial here

Student Signature: Date: ___

Print Name:

330

Parental Consent Form

Date: 1 /25/12 Valid for Use Through: 1/25/13 Study Title: Investigating Learner Networks in Contextualized Science Learning Environments

Principal Investigator: Michael Giamellaro, PhD candidate Advisor: Dr. Deanna Sands HSRC No: 11-1708 Version Date: Version No:

Your son or daughter is being asked to be part of a research study and information will be collected about your child as part of this study. This form provides you with information about the study.


The goal of this study is to better understand how high school students use their learning environment to learn science during extended field trips. Five teachers from different schools and 90 students will participate in the study. Your daughter’s/son’s class, led by teacher XXXXXX, has been asked to participate in the study as it is a good example of this type of approach to learning science.

What happens if I consent to my son or daughter joining this study?

If you consent to allow your child to be included in this study, the following will occur: • Your daughter/son will be asked to complete a survey before and after the trip. Changes in their responses

between the before and after surveys will help show how much they have learned about the science in the class.

• Samples of your daughter’s/son’s class work may also be looked at. • Your son/daughter may be briefly interviewed during or after the trip and observations of them may be

audio or video recorded during the trip. • The class and the experience will not be different from normal, however some class events may be

recorded. These recordings will make it easier to describe how students are learning in their environment. Names of students will be ‘bleeped-out’ in any recordings and changed when a written report is made.

• Students will have an opportunity to ask that any recording or observation is erased and not used. • Any document for this study will be scanned into a computer, password-protected and the hard copies will

be destroyed.

What are the possible discomforts or risks? There are no physical, mental, legal, social or economical risks with this study. Professional standards of protecting confidentiality will be followed; pseudonyms (fake names) will be used; consent forms will be kept separately from the information we collect; information will be stored in a password-protected electronic file or stored in a locked file cabinet.

What are the possible benefits of the study?

Results of this study will be available to all educators to help them better understand how students’ learn science during extended field trips. This should help educators to improve how they teach and support student learning. The teacher of this class may be able to use the results to enhance his/her teaching of this class for the rest of the semester and in future years. Your daughter/son will be given a report showing the change in their knowledge from before to after the trip.

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Who is paying for this study?

This study does not have any external funding.

Will I be paid for being in the study? Will I have to pay for anything?

Neither you nor your son/daughter will be paid to be in the study. It will not cost you anything to be in the study.

Is my participation voluntary?

Taking part in this study is voluntary. You have the right to choose not to let your daughter/son take part in this study. If you choose to take part, you have the right to stop at any time. Your son’s/daughter’s grades will not be changed based on your decision to be in the study.

Who do I call if I have questions?

The researcher carrying out this study is Michael Giamellaro. If you have questions, you may call Michael at 720-352-4796 or email him at [email protected]. You can also call the Human Subject Research Committee (HSRC) at the University of Colorado Denver at 303-315-2732.

Who will see the research information?

We will do everything we can to keep the records from this study a secret. It cannot be guaranteed. The consent form signed by you may be looked at by others. They are: • Federal agencies that monitor human subject research • Human Subject Research Committee at UCD • The group doing the study • Regulatory officials from the institution where the research is being conducted who want to make sure the

research is safe The results from the research may be shared at meetings and educator professional development opportunities. The results from the research may be in published articles. The name of your daughter/son will be kept private.

Agreement to allow my son/daughter to be in this study

I have read this paper about the study or it was read to me. I understand the possible risks and benefits of this study. I know that allowing my son/daughter to be filmed as part of this study is voluntary.

I agree that my daughter/son may be audio recorded during the study______ initial here

I agree that my daughter/son may be video recorded during the study______ initial here

I agree that the recorded voice or image of my daughter/son may be used in academic presentations. _____ initial here

Parent/Legal Guardian Signature: Date: ___

Print Name:

Print Student Name: _________________________________________

332

Teacher Consent Form

Date: 1/25/12 Valid for Use Through: 1/25/13 Study Title: Investigating Learner Networks in Contextualized Science Learning Environments Principal Investigator: Michael Giamellaro, PhD Candidate Advisor: Dr. Deanna Sands HSRC No: 11-1708 Version Date: 1/12/12 Version No: 2 – Teacher Consent

You are being asked to be in a research study. This form provides you with information about the study.


The goal of this study is to better understand how high school students use different aspects of their learning environment to support their development of science concepts during immersive, experiential trips. Five teachers and 90 students will participate in the study.

What happens if I consent to joining this study? If you consent to allow yourself to be included in Level One of this study, students in your class will be given a concept map assessment before and after the trip experience and some of your students will be interviewed following the trip. If you consent to allow yourself to be included in Level Two of this study, a researcher will accompany and observe your class during the trip. You will be interviewed briefly before and after the trip.

What are the possible discomforts or risks? There are no anticipated physical, psychological, legal or emotional risks in this study.

What are the possible benefits of the study? Results of this study will be made available to all educators to help them better understand how components of experiential learning environments can contribute to students’ concept development. This should allow educators to highlight key contributors or shift the focus to better achieve learning targets when appropriate. This study holds promise for improving experiential education practice and increasing student achievement. Your participation may also give you specific feedback into how elements of your class/program contributed to students’ conceptual development. You will be given the assessment results from your class within one month of test administration, which may be used in a formative manner. A full presentation of the results and implications of the study can be scheduled for your school/faculty

333

Who is paying for this study? This study does not have any external funding.

Will I be paid for being in the study? Will I have to pay for anything? You will not be paid for participating in this study and it will not cost you anything to be in the study.

Is my participation voluntary? Taking part in this study is voluntary. You have the right to choose not to take part in this study. If you choose to take part, you have the right to stop at any time. Participating or not participating will no affect in any way your relationship with your school or with the school district.

Who do I call if I have questions? The researcher carrying out this study is Michael Giamellaro. If you have questions, you may call Michael at 720-352-4796 or email him at [email protected]. You can also call the Human Subject Research Committee (HSRC) at the University of Colorado Denver at 303-315-2732.

Who will see the research information? We will do everything we can to keep the records from this study a secret. It cannot be guaranteed. The consent form signed by you may be looked at by others. They are:

• Federal agencies that monitor human subject research • Human Subject Research Committee at UCD • The group doing the study • Regulatory officials from the institution where the research is being conducted

who want to make sure the research is safe The results from the research may be shared at meetings and educator professional development opportunities. The results from the research may be in published articles. Your name and the names of your students will be kept private.

Agreement to be in this study I have read this paper about the study or it was read to me. I understand the possible risks and benefits of this study. I know that participation in this study is voluntary. I agree to participate in Level One of the Study (pre/post assessment & student interviews)_____ initial here

I agree to participate in Level Two of the Study (class observed by a researcher)_N/A____ initial here Teacher Signature: Date: ___

Print Name:

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APPENDIX F: IRB Approval

DEEP IMMERSION ACADEMIC LEARNING (DIAL): AN ANALYSIS...

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