Learning Progressions as a Guide for Developing Meaningful Science Learning: A New Framework for Old Ideas

The development of learning progressions is one approach for creating the types of coher ent curriculum frameworks that have been identified as predictors for high-performing scores on international stem assessments. We have developed a learning progression that describes how secondary students may build more sophisticated understanding of the struc ture, properties, and behavior of matter, and that also outlines the connections and relation ships among ideas needed to develop more expert understanding. We used data collected from 82 individual interviews with secondary students and from assessments administered to 4000 Us middle school students to characterize how learners select and apply ideas to explain a range of transformation of matter phenomena. We found that most students relied on a limited set of ideas in their explanations, but that with the proper support, even middle school students were able to appropriately integrate ideas involving the structure of matter, conservation, interactions, and energy to provide mechanistic explanations of transforma tion phenomena.

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