Date of Award

1-1-2015

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Education Theory and Practice

Content Description

1 online resource (ii, 195 pages) : color illustrations

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Alandeom Oliveira

Committee Members

Roberta Johnson, Reza Feyzi Behnagh

Keywords

Artifact-driven Interviewing, Cognition, Ecological Experience, Epistemic Framing, Personal Epistemology, Tacit Knowledge, Tacit knowledge, Science, Environmental education, High school students, Science teachers

Subject Categories

Education | Environmental Education | Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the presence of students’ tacit understandings as they apply to environmental science content, and to discover how these understandings emerge and are viewed and interpreted by teachers. Towards that end over ten hours of classroom video was recorded and analyzed, from both large urban and smaller urban classrooms. Additionally, interviews were conducted with 15 students and two teachers to gain insight into their thinking on an array of topics related to the environment and environmental reasoning. It was hypothesized that students’ understandings and teachers’ interpretations of them may be influenced by their personal experiences with the natural world. For that reason, demographic information and self-reports of experiences were used to determine the extent to which tacit understandings are influenced by environmental experiences, and whether tacit understandings differed significantly by gender. The results indicate that there are significant differences between students from larger and smaller urban school districts, and males and females, in their interpretation of various environmental scenes. The data suggests that at least some of these differences are directly related to the students’ experiences. The data also suggests that teachers are well aware of the importance of these less formal understandings though they are not always able to integrate them into their instruction in a timely manner. It is argued here that science education must change its focus if it is going to meet the needs of a 21st Century citizenship, making it necessary to find ways to embrace the understandings that students bring with them to school; including those, perhaps even especially those, that are mainly tacit.

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