Michelene Chi

This research team will develop and pilot test a set of classroom activities for use in middle school science classrooms that will support both constructive and interactive modes of student engagement The value of learning actively is widely recognized, yet teachers are often unsure exactly how to select optimal "active learning" activities. Prior work by this team has led to the development of the Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive (ICAP) Framework which defines active learning...

To address students' persistent misconceptions about the cause-effect relations of scientific phenomena, the research team will develop and pilot test an intervention to teach the common structure that appears to underlie many science concepts and phenomena, and in particular, those in which students have misconceptions (i.e., the "emergence" schema). The Principal Investigator's prior work suggests that misconceptions occur when a student incorrectly uses a more familiar schema to explain t...

Self-explanation has been shown repeatedly to be a key, contributing factor in deep learning of curriculum material. Research on tutoring benefits suggests that modeling good question asking and reasoning skills encourages deeper student comprehension, yet much of classroom instruction continues to use a teacher-led, didactic approach. This project will develop and pilot test a computer-based system and instructional method for simultaneously engaging all classroom students in self-explanati...

"Active learning" is often defined as engaging students in more meaningful learning. A variety of concrete activities are offered in the literature for ways that students can be more cognitively engaged while learning in a variety of instructional contexts, such as asking questions and taking notes. However, there are no criteria for determining what constitutes a cognitively engaging activity. Also, there are no recommendations for which student activities are more engaging than others no...