A Learning Progression for Developing Understandings of Genetics

Ravit Golan Duncan

Learning progressions are a new way of conceptualizing learning as it occurs across multiple grades and as a consequence of targeted instruction and assessment around a small set of core ideas. These progressions describe the pathways that learners might take in developing successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about key ideas and practices in a discipline. The proposed research seeks to develop and empirically validate a learning progression for deepening students’ understandings of few foundational ideas in genetics. The proposed progression spans the elementary, middle, and high school grade bands (5th -10th grade). I will study this progression by following students across two target grades -the 8th and 9th grades. To instantiate this progression through classroom instruction I will develop 4-6 weeks long instructional units that will be taught in the target grades. Using microgenetic methods I will construct fine-grained analyses of student’s understandings as they develop throughout the instructional units across both grades. This work will provide insights about the ways in which learning develops over time and how we can foster such learning through coordinated instruction and assessments that are based on a cognitive model of learning in the domain.

About Ravit Golan Duncan

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