a Metacognitive Approach to the Next Generation Science and Engineering Practices

摘要

Despite implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in my middle school classroom for the past five years, completing biannual professional development, and fully embracing all that three-dimensional learning has to offer, I still wasn't seeing my students fully grasp and embrace the science and engineering practices. Their understanding and growth didn't continue to build between conceptual units. For example, I felt as though each time I asked students to create a graph with data they had collected, it was like they were doing it for the first time, despite doing just that multiple times during previous units. They would ask about independent and dependent axes and if they should connect their plotted dots for every single investigation. I was at a loss as to how to ingrain the practices and form them into tools students could use to tackle new problems. It was about this time that I read an article in Journal of College Science Teaching titled "A Geometric Model to Teach Nature of Science, Science Practices, and Metacognition" (Nyman and St. Clair 2016). I was inspired to modify and execute this practice tracker in my classroom using metacognitive exercises.