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

Ravit Golan Duncan is an assistant professor of science education with a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University. Her research interests focus on theoretical and applied issues in science learning. In particular, she is in interested student cognition in complex scientific domains, like genetics, and the ways in which our understanding of student reasoning can inform the design of more effective learning environments. Duncan’s dissertation work, funded by the NSF Center for Curriculum Materials in Science, involved the development of a cognitive model of student reasoning in genetics. The cognitive analysis informed the design and implementation of novel and reform-oriented curriculum materials for high school students. As a doctoral student at Northwestern University she participated in efforts to develop design guidelines for software scaffolds as part of an NSF-funded project. Under the auspices of this project Duncan studied student learning and teacher use of learning technologies, particularly the role and efficacy of scaffolding strategies used in the software. In this context she also assisted in the planning and facilitation of professional development workshops for teachers using technology-infused and inquiry-based middle school science curricula.