Using Epistemic Considerations in Teaching: Fostering Students’ Meaningful Engagement in Scientific Modeling

Engaging students in modeling in a disciplinarily productive way is both important and challenging for teachers. While our prior research as well as that of others indicates that successfully engaging students in scientific modeling depends on aspects such as curriculum sequencing, empirical investigations, computer simulations, social interactions, and teacher scaffolding, these aspects do not capture students’ meaningful, as opposed to procedural, engagement in modeling. We argue that students’ meaningful engagement in scientific modeling requires students to be cognizant of the purposes of models, an important aspect of modeling competence, as they are engaged in the practice. In this chapter, we use our earlier work developing a learning progression for scientific modeling and an Epistemologies in Practices framework to characterize the range of student ideas about the purposes of models as they engaged in modeling. We illustrate meaningful engagement in scientific modeling through an example of a 5th grade elementary science teacher in the United States who implemented a 6-week modeling-based unit on evaporation and condensation. In particular, we demonstrate that it is important for teachers to address epistemic considerations when engaging students in modeling and provide scaffolds that contextualize them in concrete and approachable ways. We also compare the epistemologies in practice framework with the framework for modeling comptence in terms of the intended use for research as well as their implications for practical instruction.