Using Digital Interrupted Case Studies for Whole Class Inquiry in Life Sciences.

This short paper describes BioScann, a high school STEM inquiry curriculum that uses a CSCL environment to support an interrupted case studies (ICS) method. This technologyenhanced curriculum supports autonomous, sustained student engagement, scientific argumentation, conceptual understanding, and the development of student self-efficacy and career awareness. The BioScann technology platform scaffolds student activities, collects student artifacts, and helps the teacher advance the curriculum through various stages. We discuss how our designs were improved across multiple pilot studies, including two major versions of the curriculum and technology. Each new pilot allowed us to improve the materials and technology environment, as well as student engagement, career awareness, and collaborative data-based decision-making. Major issues addressed Scholars, visionaries, and policymakers have called for education that prepares students to face the complex challenges of an increasingly technology-driven “knowledge society” (OECD, 2016; Pellegrino, & Hilton, 2013). In response to such calls for change, STEM education has generally shifted away from the memorization of facts toward engaging students in authentic science inquiry and scientific argumentation. Researchers have advanced problem-based learning (PBL) as a pedagogical framework to develop 21 century competencies and to increase student understanding of science (Slotta, 2010; Bell, 2010). Our work is concerned with one such approach, called case-based learning (e.g. Riesbeck, & Shank, 1989; Foran, 2001) first developed for students in medical education. In case-based learning, students are engaged within peer groups to deliberate on carefully constructed “cases” (e.g., cases of medical scenarios) that provide opportunities for analytical thinking and application of concepts to real-world scenarios. Case-based learning can also integrate the evaluation of evidence and data-based arguments – skills that are critical for 21st-century health literacy. Our team (Jacque et al., 2015) has advanced a more structured model of case-based learning called interrupted case studies (ICS). By structuring cases into a clear progression, ICS provides “interruption points” that (1) allow teams of students to stay in sync and (2) give teachers an opportunity for planned or spontaneous whole-class discussions. ICS can be challenging for teachers who must keep track of student progress, monitor their ideas, and ensure that the case itself remains at the center of attention. To support teachers and students, we combined ICS and CSCL methods to build on the advantages of technology-enhanced learning environments (Slotta, 2010) to help track student ideas, scaffold their learning activities, and prompt them for reflection. The ICS method also advances CSCL methods by opening the door for the design of CSCL “scripts” (Dillenbourg & Jermain, 2010) that provide teachers with strategic opportunities to pose questions, review student responses, and to use those responses to address student misconceptions and model answering questions appropriately (Herreid, 2005). In this way, the combination of ICS and CSCL methods has a synergistic effect, allowing for more control over the technology environment and more support for both students and teachers. To support the use of ICS in high school settings, we have developed a technology environment called BioScann that engages students in collaborative STEM inquiry explorations. Students document their thinking and work in BioScann’s collective knowledge base/shared workspace and teachers use the digital records to lead discussions and help students debate issues. With CSCL environments – even those enhanced by ICS like BioScann – there is a substantial risk that the teacher will spend inordinate time ensuring the technology is functioning smoothly and keeping students “on task”. We are finding that teachers are challenged to coordinate such complex forms of interaction and that the technology environment, while critical (e.g., in providing materials and collecting student responses), is an additional source of complexity and strain on the teacher’s capacity to guide meaningful student inquiry. This paper reports on our efforts to improve the BioScann environment based on early classroom pilots and teacher interviews. At the time of paper submissions, we have completed multiple rounds of pilots and revisions, with a major iteration of the technology to be completed by the time of the conference in June 2019. Sections below CSCL 2019 Proceedings 636 © ISLS describe the theoretical perspective and specific approach and materials supported by BioScann, as well as our iterative designs of the technology environment, together with findings about teacher orchestration and student experience. Potential significance of the work We recognize the fit of our work to this year’s conference theme: A wide lens: Combining Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Embedded Learning in Collaborative Settings. Preparing students with vital 21 century competencies (Scardmalia et al., 2015) will necessitate a wide range of interactions for learning, including collaborative forms of inquiry. To accomplish this, CSCL environments and materials must be able to support complex forms of inquiry that transform the nature of learning and teaching. To achieve this goal, we produced a suite of innovative technology-enhanced curricula and tools that can be integrated into existing science courses offered in high schools. The robust and flexible web-based platform and ICS authoring toolkit, BioScann.org, enables classrooms to scaffold scientific inquiry in the form of ICS pedagogy. Our objective was to develop a learning environment and curricula capable of engaging underserved high school students’ in scientific inquiry, addressing the challenges of a learning community approach, as well as increasing STEM career interest and awareness and retention in science. Such an environment will work best when it supports the teacher in orchestrating the curriculum. Finally, we have developed and tested innovative professional development approaches for high school teachers to support implementation. At present, we are engaged in a substantive trial with 25 classrooms with over 600 students, with whom we hope to develop knowledge of and interest in bioscience careers. Theoretical and methodological approaches pursued From a theoretical perspective, BioScann employs a multi-role ICS approach set within a web-based, interactive environment to integrate conceptual learning with competency building and the development of awareness about STEM careers. The BioScann curriculum was guided by design principles from problem-based learning (PBL) and CSCL. PBL offers a pedagogical perspective that is well suited to students’ development of critical 21 century competencies, long-term retention of content and improved critical thinking skills (Bell, 2010; Kolodner et al., 2003; Strobel & Van Barneveld, 2009). CSCL complements this view, allowing the design of environments and activities that foster critical scientific inquiry and work-life skills, such as collaborative problem-solving with shared decision-making (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Means et al., 2015). By combining these perspectives with the ICS approach, BioScann cases reveal new information (data) that is critical for solving the problem facing the class at defined interruption points. In this way, BioScann models the processes of scientific discovery while simulating participation in STEM careers, as students become a workforce team collaborating to solve authentic inquiry-based problems. BioScann was created using a design-based research (DBR) approach, in which the designed innovation is itself one of the outcomes to be analyzed as a source of findings relating to the research questions (The DesignBased Research Collective, 2003). A co-design model was applied, involving education researchers, biomedical scientist and teachers (e.g., Roschelle & Penuel, 2006). This ensured that teachers have been deeply involved in the design process, that their values of pedagogy and practice are incorporated within the design, and that they emerge from the process with a full sense of ownership and familiarity with all aspects of the innovation. This method has been shown to improve the viability of designs in diverse school settings and ultimately leads to increased adoptability and adaptability (Voogt et al. 2016; Jacque et al., 2013, 2015). The Bioscann curriculum and technology were designed and developed in parallel by a team that included six high school biology teachers, researchers, content experts, and technologists over a period of two years (Roschelle & Penuel, 2006). They went through multiple cycles of ‘design, enactment, analysis, and redesign’ (Collins et al., 2004) to assess the quality as well as the effectiveness of both the design and its theoretical underpinnings. This included: (1) initial testing by co-designers in laboratory and classroom settings; (2) refinement of any features, functions or interfaces; (3) testing in settings with a second cohort of classrooms by teachers who are not members of the co-design team; (4) further refinements. In this way, we tried to rigorously address any emerging problems with implementation. From a research perspective, the design-based process also uncovered new areas of research. Materials, findings, and discussion The original goal of BioScann was to create a technology platform that could be used independently by students to work through interrupted case studies allowing the teacher to lead extemporaneous interactions. Version One (v1.0) of BioScann.org contained all the content needed to participate, guiding each student team through the activity. BioScann v1.0 was a four-day curriculum that placed students into teams of 3-4 students and each team CSCL 2019 Proceedings 637 © ISLS in the class wo