Learning science through the design of passive solar dwellings: Can specialization contribute to improved learning outcomes

The project, called Desert Houses, was the capstone activity for a semester on heat and temperature. The pedagogical goal of the project was to encourage students to integrate their ideas by differentiating between alternatives, developing criteria for making design decisions, and justifying those decisions using scientific principles. The hypothesis was that Specialists would develop more principled design criteria by comparing and contrasting design alternatives and would therefore be more likely to refine their own designs using scientific principles and develop a more elaborated understanding of the relevant scientific ideas.; To research the strengths and limitations of different approaches to specialization, I conducted a pilot study to explore effective ways of guiding students' initial research with the goal of helping them integrate their ideas about thermodynamics in relation to the house design task. In my main experiment, I compared learning outcomes of students who had an initial research focus (the Specialists) with those of students who had no initial focus (the Generalists).; The pilot study compared three foci for research selected because they represented instructional methods typically used to teach design. The three initial research foci were: (a) comparing and contrasting building components, (b) understanding scientific concepts, and (c) critiquing annotated house design solutions. I studied the implementation of the project in a suburban public school for two semesters, each with approximately 150 middle school students working in pairs fifty minutes per day for two weeks. The Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE) guided students through the steps of the project. WISE asked students to: elaborate on the initial definition of the problem, create initial design sketches, search for evidence on the web, discuss alternatives with their peers in online discussions, refine their initial designs, complete a heat flow analysis of the dwelling, and support their decisions with evidence in the form of scientific principles, personal experiences, and laboratory work.; In the main experiment, students using this refined approach to specialization (the Specialists) were contrasted with students who did not have an initial research focus, but had access to the same resources (the Generalists). In the project, students develop alternatives for solving the problem, construct criteria for selecting between alternatives, as well as analyze and justify design decisions. These processes helped students differentiate between ideas and iteratively refine their design solutions by integrating, comparing, and contrasting alternatives. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...