Popular

Sugat Dabholkar
School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

Abstract:

Students of science should not only know important disciplinary ideas but also learn scientific inquiry practices that scientists use to figure these ideas out. In the digital age, the scientific inquiry practices themselves have changed because of the availability and use of computational tools and methods. Therefore, it is important that the students of science learn computational thinking in the context of scientific inquiry as well. To facilitate such learning, educators need to design Computational Thinking (CT) and Scientific Inquiry (SI) integrated curricular units. My work involves co-designing such units with high school science and mathematics teachers. For this research work in Learning Sciences, I use a design-based research method. In design-based research, the design of the learning environment and the design process take the center stage. In this talk, I will focus on the design aspects of the project. I will discuss a design framework and a pedagogical framework for supporting student learning of CT and SI in disciplinary contexts. Over the past few weeks, a dedicated group of educators and teachers at IISER Pune formed six co-design teams to develop such CT-SI units for high-school science and mathematics topics. The topics ranged from Mendelian inheritance, excretory system, free fall of an object to coordinate geometry. In this talk, I will discuss the co-design process as well as present each unit briefly in the talk.