Brown Bag - Dr. Eric Wiebe
Please join us for the third Brown Bag seminar of the Fall semester. The seminar will be held Campus on Wednesday, September 30 in the Collaboratory Commons at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus. Refreshments will be served at 8:30am and them seminar will begin at 9:00am. Please feel free to bring colleagues and students along with you. The speaker will be Dr. Eric Wiebe, Associate Professor in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in the College of Education at NCSU. His presentation is entitled Elementary Science: Current Practice and the Potential of Enhanced Graphic-based Representational Reasoning.
Notebooks are often used in conjunction with science kit activities as part of an effort to infuse inquiry-based science into the elementary curriculum. Past notebook analysis has revealed a rich variety of graphic inscriptions, demonstrating a range of student meaning-making around science content and the nature of scientific inquiry. Given the potential for science notebooks to be used both as a vehicle for “drawing to learn” and as a formative and summative assessment tool, more rigorous frameworks are needed to analyze student-produced graphic inscriptions in science notebooks.
This presentation will introduce current research on a new approach to analyzing student science notebook work. We use semiotics and a social constructivist frame of science meaning-making to understand how students use the cultural resources of graphics to integrate abstract notions of science concepts with the concrete observations made during science investigations, shaping representations of the “invisible” world of science. Based on our findings, a new set of strategies for supporting graphic-based representational reasoning in elementary science instruction was developed and will be outlined in this talk.
Dr. Eric Wiebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education at NC State University. Dr. Wiebe has focused much of his research on issues related to the use of technology in the instructional environment, with a particular emphasis on multimedia tools and techniques. Application in this research area includes: exploring the cognitive basis of 2-D and 3-D visual perception, evaluating technology used as a vehicle for communication and learning technical, engineering and scientific information; and promoting graphics literacy and the application of scientific visualization in secondary and post-secondary education. Past projects include a grant from the NC GlaxoSmithKline Foundation to help develop cutting edge research techniques in K-12 STEM education and a 3-year NSF project developing curricula using scientific and technical visualization in middle and high school. Current work includes an NSF project focused on the use of graphics in elementary science education and a state funded project evaluating the impact of cloud computing technologies in high school and community college STEM courses.