Toward Ontological Alignment: Coordinating Student Ideas with the Representational System of a Computational Modeling Unit for Science Learning
Computational modeling tools present unique opportunities and challenges for student learning. Each tool has a representational system that impacts the kinds of explorations students engage in. Inquiry aligned with a tool’s representational system can support more productive engagement toward target learning goals. However, little research has examined how teachers can make visible the ways students’ ideas about a phenomenon can be expressed and explored within a tool’s representational system.
Computational modeling tools present unique opportunities and challenges for student learning. Each tool has a representational system that impacts the kinds of explorations students engage in. Inquiry aligned with a tool’s representational system can support more productive engagement toward target learning goals. However, little research has examined how teachers can make visible the ways students’ ideas about a phenomenon can be expressed and explored within a tool’s representational system. In this paper, we elaborate on the construct of ontological alignment—that is, identifying and leveraging points of resonance between students’ existing ideas and the representational system of a tool.