UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Sikorski, Tiffany-RoseSubject: search.filters.subject.coherence

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    Developing an Alternative Perspective on Coherence Seeking in Science Classrooms
    (2012) Sikorski, Tiffany-Rose; Hammer, David; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Education research continues to struggle with how to characterize students' engagement in the doing of science. Too often, educators and researchers reduce doing science to learning particular facts and explanations, or participating in narrowly-defined, de-contextualized ways of reasoning and arguing. In this dissertation, I review prominent work that attempts to characterize students' engagement in one aspect of doing science--seeking coherence. By seeking coherence, I mean trying to make information "hang together" in meaningful, mutually consistent ways. Using examples from a variety of science classrooms, I show that these prominent approaches fail to provide substantive accounts of students' work to form connections between information. To address those weaknesses, I develop, refine and illustrate an alternative perspective on coherence seeking in science education, one that emphasizes what information students are trying to fit together, how they are trying to fit it together, and toward what ends.