Promoting Preservice Teachers’ Understanding and Use of Scientific Modeling in Teaching and Learning

0227557 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 for the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NSF. We thank the entire MoDeLS research group, at eight institutions, for their help in thinking about these ideas. We also thank the preservice teachers with whom we work. Abstract We describe a series of instructional activities aligned for use in science teacher education for preservice teachers at the elementary levels aimed at increasing teacher understanding and use of scientific models in their own teaching and learning. We believe that by including such instructional activities aligned with key modeling learning performances in a methods classroom, we can help teachers be positioned to both engage their students in scientific modeling and to learn about associated modeling practices and metamodeling knowledge. We present findings that suggest that preservice teachers' knowledge about modeling practices and metamodeling are impacted by these instructional activities. In this paper, we focus on the modeling practices of evaluation and revision of models. We discuss how teacher educators and curriculum developers can overcome challenges to design supports for promoting teacher learning related to scientific modeling. 3 Introduction How do preservice elementary teachers engage in scientific modeling? As discussed in more length elsewhere (Schwarz, Reiser, Fortus, et al,, 2008), a scientific model represents an abstraction and simplification of a system that make its central features explicit and visible, allowing someone to generate explanations and predictions of natural phenomena (Harrison & Treagust, 2000). The term model in science learning is typically used to refer to two related aspects of modeling practice (Gobert & Buckley, 2000). First, a conceptual or mental model refers to the individual's internal representation, or their understanding of a phenomenon. With our preservice teachers, we refer to this as the "idea model." Second, expressed models are external representations of an individual's idea model, and may be simply verbal descriptions, or more typically are inscriptions such diagrams, material depictions, or computer simulations. Scientific modeling involves a set of modeling practices, including constructing, using, evaluating, and revising models. Constructing a model—through identifying the salient features of the system or phenomenon under consideration and determining how those, and the relationships among them, can be depicted or represented—is accompanied by using the model to illustrate a system, explain a system or phenomenon, or to make predictions about …