Science Education Reading List


Kathy Perkins and Sam McKaga will be trying to create a reading list for students of PER that either include new PER papers or ones from the broader literature that may be missed in Physics-department-based PER training of graduate students.  They are extending the PER-community-insider golden oldies list in The "Core Reading" list from the 2005 FFPER conference.

 

I've included some that I think PER students should have read by the time they graduate.  Some of these are so they will have a chance to discuss the limitations of the approaches and to understand what they might hear from the community.  Others are fundamental papers in psychology or sociology that I think are relevant.  I have also added some from David Hammer's reading course in Science Education a few years ago.  Add your own to the bottom of the list and feel free to add comments after any of the papers.

 

Joe Redish

 

J. D. Bransford and M. K. Johnson, “Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall”, J. of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, 717-726 (1972);

 

J. S. Brown, A. Collins, P. Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”, Educational Researcher 18:1 (Jan-Feb, 1989) 32-42.

 

S. Carey, "Cognitive science and science education", American Psychologist, 41:10 (1986) 1123-1130.

 

John Clement, Jack Lockhead, and George S. Monk, “Translation difficulties in learning mathematics,” Am. Mathematical Monthly 88 (1981) 286-290

 

A. Collins and W. Ferguson, “Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and strategies to guide inquiry,” Educational Psychologist, 28:1 (1993) 25-42.

 

A. A. diSessa, “Toward an Epistemology of Physics,” Cognition and Instruction, 10 (1993) 105-225.

 

A. A. diSessa, “Knowledge in Pieces,” in Constructivism in the Computer Age, G. Foreman and P. B. Putall, eds. (Lawrence Earlbaum, 1988) 49-70.

 

E. Hutchins, "How a cockpit remembers its speeds", Cognitive Science 19 (1995) 265-288.

 

D. Kuhn, "Children and adults as intuitive scientists," Psych. Rev. 96:4, 674-689(1989).

 

G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (U. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980).

 

J. L. Lemke, “Articulating communities: Sociocultural perspectives on science education,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching38:3, 296-316 (2001).

 

K. Metz, "Reassessment of developmental constraints on children's science instruction", Rev. of Educational Research 65:2 (1995) 93-127.

 

George A. Miller, “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information,” Psychological Review 63 (1956) 81-97.

 

S. B. Most, B. J. Scholl, E. R. Clifford, and D. J. Simons,  “What you see is what you set: Sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness,” Psychological Review 112:1 (2005) 217-242.

 

A. S. Palincsar and A. L. Brown, "Reciprocal teaching of comprehension -- fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities", Cognition and Instruction 1:2 (1984) 117-175.

 

D. Rumelhart & A. Ortony, “The representation of knowledge in memory,” in R. Anderson & R. Spiro (Eds.), Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge, 99-135 (Erlbaum, 1977).

 

A. H. Schoenfeld, “When good teaching leads to bad results: The disasters of “well-taught” mathematics courses,” Educational Psychologist 23(2) 145-166 (1988).

 

A. H. Schoenfeld, "What's the fuss about metacognition?" in Cognitive Science and Mathematics Education, A. Schoenfeld, editor, (Erlbaum, 1987), chapter 8, 189-215.

 

D. J. Simons and C. F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our midst:  Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events,” Perception, 28 (9), 1059-1074 (1999).

 

C. Steele, “A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape the intellectual identities of women and African Americans”, Am. Psych. 52, 613-629 (1997).

 

J. R. Stroop, “Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 18, 643–662 (1935).

 

D. Tannen, “What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations,” in D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in Discourse, 14-56 (Oxford University Press, 1993).

 

D. Tannen & C. Wallat, “Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: Examples from a medical examination/interview,” in D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in Discourse, 57-76 (Oxford University Press, 1993).

 

P. C. Wason, “Reasoning,” in New horizons in psychology, B. M. Foss, Ed. (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966).

 

Submitted by Ayush Gupta

Bransford, J. D., & Schwartz, D. L. (1999). Rethinking Transfer: A Simple Proposal with Multiple Implications. Review of Research in Education, 24, 61-100.(Comment: Preparation for Future Learning paper)
Hammer, D., & Elby, A. (2003). Tapping Epistemological Resources for Learning Physics. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(1), 53-90.  (This does a great job of blending epistemological resources with classroom instruction)
Saxe, G. B., & Esmonde, I. (2005). ARTICLES: Studying Cognition in Flux: A Historical Treatment of Fu in the Shifting Structure of Oksapmin Mathematics. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 12(3), 171–225.  (A really nice paper ... on the role of culture, context, individuals on cognition)
McDermott, R., Varenne, H., & Becker, A. L. (1998). Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam: The cultural construction of a learning disability. Successful failure: The schools America builds, 25–44.  (This is one of the most awesome papers I have encountered. Really challenges the notion of performance evaluation as it is usually done and though this one is on learning disability it is quite applicable to all classrooms)
O’Connor, M. C., & Michaels, S. (1993). Aligning academic task and participation status through revoicing: Analysis of a classroom discourse strategy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 24, 318–318.
Lising, L., & Elby, A. (2005). The impact of epistemology on learning: A case study from introductory physics. American Journal of Physics, 73, 372.
Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(1), 39-103.
Brown, D. E., & Hammer, D. (2008). Conceptual Change in Physics. International handbook of research on conceptual change (p. 127).
Stevens, R., O’Connor, K., Garrison, L., Jocuns, A., & Amos, D. M. (2008). Becoming an engineer: Toward a three dimensional view of engineering learning. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(3), 355–368.
Button, G. (1987). Answers as Interactional Products: Two Sequential Practices Used in Interviews. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2), 160. doi:10.2307/2786749
Barab, S. A., & Plucker, J. A. (2002). Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability, and Talent Development in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning. Educational Psychologist, 37(3), 165.
Hall, R. (1996). Representation as shared activity: Situated cognition and Dewey’s cartography of experience. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 5(3), 209–238.
Stevens, R., & Hall, R. (1998). Disciplined perception: Learning to see in technoscience. Talking mathematics in school: Studies of teaching and learning, 107–149.
diSessa, A. A., & Sherin, B. L. (1998). What changes in conceptual change? International Journal of Science Education, 20(10), 1155. doi:10.1080/0950069980201002  (Coordination Class theory: very relevant to PER)
Sherin, B. L. (2001). How Students Understand Physics Equations. Cognition and Instruction, 19(4), 479-541.  (Symbolic Forms ... highly relevant to PER)
Yackel, E., & Cobb, P. (1996). Sociomathematical Norms, Argumentation, and Autonomy in Mathematics. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(4), 458-477.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617-645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (1993). Beyond Cold Conceptual Change: The Role of Motivational Beliefs and Classroom Contextual Factors in the Process of Conceptual Change. Review of Educational Research, 63(2), 167-199.
Parnafes, O., Hammer, D., Louca, L., Sherin, B., Lee, V., Krakowski, M., diSessa, A., et al. (2008). How to study learning processes? reflection on methods for fine-grain data analysis. Proceedings of the 8th international conference on International conference for the learning sciences - Volume 3, ICLS’08, 306–313.
Rosebery, A. S., Warren, B., & Conant, F. R. (1992). Appropriating Scientific Discourse: Findings from Language Minority Classrooms. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(1), 61-94.
Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. (1981). Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices*. Cognitive science, 5(2), 121–152.
Chi, M. T. H., De Leeuw, N., Chiu, M. H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive science, 18(3), 439–477.
Chi, M. T. H. (1997). Quantifying qualitative analyses of verbal data: A practical guide. Journal of the Learning sciences, 6(3), 271–315.