=46riday a week ago my colleague and friend Hugo Wikstr=F6m successfully
defended his Phd thesis in the public ceremony that this is in Sweden. The
title of his dissertation is (in official English translation, the book
itself is in Swedish): *Understanding change. Model building, simulation
and high school students' learning.*
The following summary is mine, and thus possibly more speculative than Hugo
would have made it:
The observation of an urgent need for improved understandings of change has
been a driving force in Hugo's work for as long as I have known him (we
were in the same batch of new doctoral students in the late eighties). With
his background experience as a mathematics teacher in secondary school this
observation made him turn to system dynamics as an alternative to the
traditional curriculum where science students in secondary school are
introduced to differential equations, mostly learning the procedures
without gaining an understanding that could link productively to
understandings of the world we live in. The modelling tool in Hugo's case
has been Stella simulations.
The centerpiece of the dissertation is a full-scale teaching experiment
that Hugo had the opportunity to carry out with a group of 13 science
students (17 yrs). For ten weeks this group devoted three math lesson
periods a week to dynamic modelling of a number of problems (from economy
and ecology), and the writing of reports on these problems. (As an aside:
did anybody ever get the idea to have students write long reflective
reports on their problem solving with differential equations?) There were
before-and-after interviews carried out, and also a post-test involving a
reference group with no Stella experience.
To make a long story short: The students learned a lot about the
time-dependent behaviour of systems under different initial conditions
(etc.) At least some of them were also able to link this productively to
the features of differential equations, while for students with no Stella
experience differential equations seemed rather to form an obstacle to
their understanding of processes of change. (This is a point where I may be
misrepresenting. (EE))
One of Hugo's final questions for further research is how teaching methods
using dynamic simulation could be taken down in the age groups -- he has
done some developmental work with Stella in the last grades of primary
school. With tools like those David mentions in his message I'm convinced
that something sensible could be done with simulation in the early grades
of primary schooling, too.
Developing sensible artifacts (aka microworlds and simulation templates)
and good tasks//problems for younger ages seems to me the minor problem.
More important is the setting: I'm sure we could run very successful
projects on modeling in early childhood education, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that modeling becomes an integrated part of the practices
once the project is over and the researchers leave.
Eva
P.S. to the CCs: Hugo, you must have heard me talking about the XMCA
discussion list? and Bill, thanks for the copy of your paper, haven't had
time to look at it yet.