Week 5

           The Ginsburg (1997) article introduced methods for conducting a successful clinical interview, including being prepared for the interview, recording the interview, establishing and monitoring motivation, assessing the knowledge of the child, and determining learning potential. An important theme in this reading that was continually stressed was that the child was leading the interview proceedings. Of course, the researcher is the one asking questions with a framework in mind, but the child needs to feel autonomous in order to feel comfortable enough to allow barriers to come down and thus have a transparent interview.

            The Greeno & Hall (1997) article talks about using representations as useful tools for developing understanding of the subject matter being taught. The article emphasizes that using a variety of different models and model types can significantly help promote understanding of the material. This is due in part to the collaborative aspect that students can benefit from when sharing material and explaining their models to a class.

            The Russ & Sherin (2013) article offers student-thinking interviews as an option to assess whether the student has learned and comprehended the material prior to its being taught, and to what extent. Teachers can facilitate interviews with students by asking open-ended questions, prompting follow up answers, and giving students new information to get them unstuck from the problem. This method is beneficial for teachers seeking to pre-test students’ background knowledge and thus cater the lesson to what the class does not yet know.

            The Russ & Sherin article suggests that students may have learned more before taking the class, and therefore conducting an interview serves two purposes: a) to allow the teacher to know what not to repeat in class, and b) to allow the student to review the material as they have to explain the concepts to the clinical interviewer (the practicum TA). This explanation of concepts is at the core of the Greeno & Hall article, which stresses that students who do model-based projects and then have to present them to their peers understand the concepts better because they had to know them in-depth to be able to explain them. This understanding can be explored in a clinical interview by a skilled researcher who knows how to ask the right questions; these types of questions are discussed in the Ginsburg reading. That is essentially how these readings tie together.

Week 5 Readings

Greeno & Hall

I felt like this article was the odd one out of the three.  The others are talking about clinical interviews and this one is discussing representation.  Anyways, the major point of this article is that in order for students to truly understand methods of representation, they should be the ones to come up with a way to represent the data as opposed to teaching students about the different types of representations.  Other points:

• Having students choose how they want to represent their models helps them understand their models better and may help or spur them to refine or even rework their model
• Using models dealing with real-world situations that they might find in a job helps students pay more attention and motivates them to understand.
• Students often require multiple forms of representation to truly understand a problem or model

Ginsburg

This chapter felt like it was written by researchers for researchers conducting clinical interviews, likely in the process of psychology studies.  Even so, it still has useful information to offer teachers who choose to conduct clinical interviews with their students.  One of the underlying themes was the importance of establishing trust between yourself and the student.  Other thoughts:

• Some parts of the article seemed to assume that we would have close to 30 minutes with the child.  If we do clinical interviews in class, I would expect to have no more than 7 minutes with an individual student or 16 minutes with a group.
• The sections on how to draw information out through the interview looked to be very useful, and not just for interviews.  The “Assessing Thinking: What does the Child Know?” section  in particular appears to be very useful for general teaching.

Russ & Sherin

This article seeks to answer the question that I started having as soon as I learned what a clinical interview was, “Why?”  The authors present clinical interviews as an alternative to a pretest to discern what the class knows about a particular upcoming topic. 

• Timing for the interviews: during lunch, free period, before/after school, while rest of class works on an activity
• Can use the interview to “seed new ways of thinking”.  Not teach, but get them thinking on a topic they’ve never given much consideration to before.

I’m honestly still not sure why the Greeno & Hall article is in this week’s readings.  It has some good points, but it seems like it belongs with last week’s readings on modeling.  Clinical interviews seem like a potentially useful method of measuring student prior knowledge, but I do have some questions/concerns about it.  First of all, if we’re teaching middle/high school students who have never done this before, how do we get them interested in the interview?  Offering extra credit is the only thing I can think of, and that will not work for everyone I’d like to interview.  Second, how effective is it for teaching the material we talked about in the interview?  Even if we just interview 5 students from each class for 7 minutes, that’s a lot of time we are devoting to interviews.  I’d like to know that it is going to be worth that time before I commit to doing them.

Week 5
This week’s readings deal with clinical interviews. Not a Cookbook details many techniques and rationale in how to conduct clinical interviews. The subjects within seem to be exclusively little children, but it is still very helpful. One of the most important aspects of conducting a successful interview that I learned is that we’re not trying to correct or evaluate the subject of his thinking, but to extract useful information in order to understand why and how he approaches tasks at hand. In essence you’re treating the subject as the expert, and you’re trying to glean as much from him as possible. This ties in with the reading Using interviews to explore student ideas in science, where the same interview techniques are used to gauge what students know about a scientific topic before formal discussion, so we as educators could identify and clear possible points of confusion beforehand before going down deeper down the rabbit hole. It also helps in probing students and guiding toward the path where they find ways to understand a concept by themselves, rather than we feeding the information to them. I believe that the further we conduct such interviews, the more introspective students become, and this helps them think and put things in logical perspectives. This leads us to the third article, Practicing Representation, where the main message is that students should learn to treat representations (graphs, charts) only as a means for communication and reasoning. Representations serve a purpose, but are not end goals in themselves. One thing I find very interesting is that students often have their own way of approaching tasks, such as the train distance problem in the article. When I was in school I was taught a certain algebra way to solve this sort of distance/speed problem. Reading this, I immediately thought to myself “shit, I haven’t done this kind of math for so long” and was stumped for a second. But then I started drawings arrows and ended up with something like the left side of figure 1 and got the right answer. This really makes me think that we all have some sort of innate understanding that helps us solve problems. It might not be the easiest or the most efficient way, but I think it’s important to have an inkling first. If we as educators treat only one formula or representation as stated in a textbook as the only right way to do it, without first trying to discover and tapping that innate potential, we run the risk of making students doubt themselves and confusing them even more. Clinical interview seems to be very useful, and my question now is how much clinical interview should we do on a day-to-day basis? Is a bellringer for the whole class in the beginning good enough? Is it more focused on lower performing students? Most likely situation-dependent?

Ray's Week 5 Readings Memo

          As we prepare to conduct clinical interviews, our readings this week discuss effective methods of conducting these interactions with students and what is important when gathering information about a student’s thoughts and rationalities.

            Russ and Sherin (2013) give us a short and visually pleasing article about clinicals, and briefly discuss the difficulty of ‘seeding new ideas’. Greeno and Hall (1997) detail ‘representation’ and the importance of the interpretation of a representation, insofar as the student’s ability to retrieve information from a representation. Ginsburg (1997) gives much more advice in a long, but comprehensive, dissection of clinical interview methods.

            I am the oldest of four brothers, and starting there, my whole life I think I have been pretty good at relating to people younger than me. Some of the skills involved in that are understanding their perspective, using their language and connecting similarities or interests. When reading Ginsburg and Russ & Sherin, the significance of ‘getting on the sutdent’s’ level, so to speak, is evident. In a clinical interview, we want to ‘get inside the head’ of the student and observe their thought process for themselves. If we stay within ourselves completely without making every effort to see the world through the student’s eyes then this task is impossible. Ginsburg outlines specific steps to do this: garnering the respect and trust of the student, using his/her language, and exploring the student’s answers far in depth. Russ & Sherin remind us not to change the mind of the student, but rather, learn about them. No matter how wrong his/her explanation may be, our duty is to explore every thought and theory they have.

            The representations discussed in Greeno & Hall are usless if they cannot transfer the correct information! These representations are only successsful if our students interpret them to express the same set of data/information that we intend them to. This is a challenge for us because we must understand the thoughts and mental processes of our students to accurately express this information through whatever representation that we choose. This, of course, makes the interview important, and in turn, makes our ability to ‘get on the level of the student’ just as important as well.

            I think this is an extremely important skill to have, not only in understanding the thoughts of our students but also teaching and relating to them in general. In addition, sharpening these skills take much more than just looking to a list of good interviewing strategies. This starts at the very beginning of our relationships with students. It starts with getting to know them personally, understanding what excites or frustrates them, who they get along with, what they value and look for. This is a very daunting tasks for teachers and one that I am sure many teachers vehemently avoid. But it is one (challenging) part of teaching that I honestly cannot wait to immerse myself in.

Post #4 Week 5

In “Practicing Representation” the authors contend that students need to be taught multiple forms of representation in the sciences, not as a “means in themselves” but rather, as “useful tools for constructing understanding and for communicating information and understanding.” Individuals often come up with unique representations to solve problems. Although representations can vary, certain conventions allow people to communicate and interpret others’ representations. In real life situations (such as engineering), representations are variable and often specific to a certain situation; they allow individuals to experience a “hypothetical reality”. According to the authors, it is these real, "situational" aspects of representations that should be brought into the classroom. For example, linking representations to real-life problems combined with the discussion/presentation of representations was shown to have a positive effect on students’ ability to interpret representations and communicate understanding.

In “Interviews to explore student ideas in science”, the authors contend that interviews can be useful in developing an understanding of students’ attitudes, conceptions, and prior knowledge of science topics. Interviews are especially useful because one can access student thinking regardless of how much time one has spent in the classroom. Interviews reveal student knowledge in a way that cannot be assessed with more standard types of assessments. According to Ginsburg (“Guidelines for Conducting Clinical Interviews”) it is imperative to use interviews as a way to “uncover student thinking, not change it”. The child should be seen as an “autonomous constructor of knowledge” that “takes an active stance toward theory and assessment”. The interviewer should recognize that the child’s ideas are the result of an honest attempt to make sense of the world.

These readings reinforce the idea that students are individuals and all have unique ways in which they represent or think about scientific concepts. Teachers and students would benefit if students’ preconceptions were not interpreted as “wrong” but rather as a form of learning potential. Indeed, encouraging students to come up with their own representations as a way to solve real life problems (such as maintaining caribou populations) and communicating those representations with others not only helps students develop an understanding of the process of problem solving but also allows them to practice communicating knowledge as they explain their representations to others. The latter is frequently used in various aspects of everyday life.

Memo 4 Week 5 Bottorff

·        Ginsburg’s Chapter 4: Not a Cookbook: Guidelines for Conducting a Clinical Interview

Ginsburg offers some helpful tips when preparing to conduct a clinical interview. Not surprisingly, most of his guidance also makes sense in the context of the classroom, albeit with a one to one interaction focus. Some of the most salient aspects of this article, to me, were that an active stance is necessary. This active stance refers to multiple tidbits of advice including varying tasks to both prevent student boredom as well as improve student performance given sufficient enthusiasm. It’s also very important to expect something reasonable given a student’s age and background. For example, it’s imperative to avoid using scientific jargon and instead use the student’s own language. Beginning with easy tasks also helps “warm” students up to the challenge of explaining their notions of scientific concepts.

Thinking ahead to the classroom, I’ve never heard of using clinical interviews as a method of pre-assessment until reading this article, but I see the merits immediately. It’s a much more personal method than most written pre-assessments, and despite not being practical in use for many students, the knowledge gained from just a few clinical interviews can be instrumentally essential.

·        Russ and Sherin’s Using Interviews to Explore Student Ideas in Science

Russ and Sherin emphasize some essential strategies for uncovering student ideas: contextualizing concepts, probing student responses, and seeding new ways of thinking. Contextualizing concepts includes asking questions in a context that is accessible to students’ initial and basic knowledge. Probing student responses corresponds to following up to students’ responses with either countersuggestions or questions that ask for further elaboration. Seeding new ways of thinking means asking students to apply their knowledge in a new context.

When I’m teaching students, Russ and Sherin’s knowledge will be applicable, for I already enjoy using countersuggestions and probing questions to informally assess student learning. In the future, I plan to make use of these interviews rather, or at least in conjunction with, written pre-assessments. Interviews give so much valuable information that can be missed when solely using written pre-assessments.

·        Greeno and Hall’s Practicing Representation: Learning with and about Representational Forms

 Greeno and Hall investigate the importance of education focusing on including a variety of representational forms in the learning process. I understood all too well one of the points that they were making with respect to technical representations often being taught as ends rather than as tools that students can use to understand and examine. The focus in present day society of success on assessments, from standardized tests to grades, belittles the purpose of education: to learn. Greeno and Hall mentioned that, as an example, it is imperative that students understand how to create and interpret graphs, not simply to receive passing grades but to understand the concepts behind graphing! As a future educator, I am committed to emphasizing concepts but I understand that, practically, standards are a necessary roadblock to conceptual based learning. Greeno and Hall also emphasized that a variety of representational forms is key. This variety allows students to understand that every representational form has strengths and weaknesses depending on the context. For example, sometimes one type of graph is more efficient at making a point, or a table might be easier to understand in some cases.

Memo #4, Week 5 Readings

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?