Ginsburg: Not a
Cookbook: Guidelines for Conducting a Clinical Interview
In this reading, Ginsburg outlines basic procedures and
thought processes that one should consider when conducting a clinical
interview. Interviewers must act “clinically” by creatively use a general
structure of guidelines and applying them adaptively to a child’s unique
personality and thought processes. The interviewer must further acknowledge that
the children that they interview are autonomous thinkers—the students are
making genuine attempts to explain their knowledge of a concept based on their
experience. Interviewers must also have a goal of what to look for, which can
be based on age-appropriate norms, the interviewer’s pre-established protocol, and
specific tasks that target a student’s thought-process. Furthermore,
establishing a positive rapport with the student can help the student feel more
comfortable and open to expressing their opinions.
- Child as Expert: By treating the child as the expert thinker in the situation, one can help them feel confident enough to express their though process.
- Interview as Dialogue: Interviews should be conversation-based in order to seek justifications of students’ problem-solving strategies and tap into student’s procedural knowledge.
- Openness: An interviewer should avoid leading questions and expect “diff-understandings;” this can allow the student to respond more honestly and openly to an interviewer’s questions.
Greeno and Hall: Practicing
Representation: Learning with and About Representational Forms
Greeno and Hall posit that each student should be exposed to
a variety of representations (or required exercises) in the science classroom. They
stress the importance of situative practice, in which students learn through
participation. With this situative technique, students will work with a wide
range of representations to learn firsthand what types of representations work
the best in different problem-based scenarios. These representations allow
students to organize information, participate in the epistemic culture of
science, and interpret data to make sense of how various representations can
model the concepts that lie at the heart of problem-based learning. Ultimately,
students will be able to make their own representations, which provides the
students with the opportunity to participate in the decoding of information and
gain a deeper understanding of problem-solving techniques.
Russ and Sherin: Using
Interviews to Explore Student Ideas in Science
The authors here suggest that by being aware of what the
students already know about a topic, teachers can guide future instruction and
activity in the classroom. One way to obtain this information is through a “student-thinking
interview,” which teachers can carry out with their students. The general
strategy for conducting these interviews follows the structure of
contextualizing the concept, probing a student’s answers to your questions, and
seeding a different way of understanding a concept. Russ and Sherin also stress
that these interviews should be treated as formative assessments, which are
designed to help the teacher determine how to teach off of the students’ prior
knowledge rather than looking for “correct” answers.
- Objectivity: By keeping a non-biased attitude towards student responses, a teacher can learn more about a student’s previous knowledge and thought processes.
Overall, these articles emphasize the various ways in which
teachers can learn more about their students’ thought processes, prior
knowledge, and conceptual understanding. Ginsburg and Russ & Sherin
emphasize the role of interviewing to access a student’s naïve conceptual and
procedural knowledge, while Greeno & Hall help illustrate how the use of
various modes of representation and model building can help teachers observe
how their students are work through and interpret scientific problems. While
the authors definitely have me convinced about the benefits and efficacy of
these methods, I wonder how a teacher can routinely use interviews in a
classroom. Is there a way to interview students on an individual or group basis
while still maintaining effective classroom management for the students that
are not being interviewed?
I really enjoyed your discussion, and I particularly liked the comment about group interviews. I've only learned about clinical interviews in the past few weeks, but I've only heard of them as individual, one-on-one interviews, so it's interesting to think of a group interview with the same focus. I definitely think that a group clinical interview is feasible and might actually have some benefits over individual ones, such as perhaps allowing students to bounce ideas off of each other.
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