Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education Research Articles

Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program: Accelerating students’ cognitive development

As an intervention program developed to accelerate participant cognitive development, the effect of Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) implementation in certain conditions needs to be clarified. This paper describes the effect of CASE program to the cognitive development of elementary students in Indonesia. The study used a mixed method sequential explanatory design with the quantitative data collection in the first phase by Scientific Reasoning Skill Tasks administered to all of participants both before and after intervention followed by collection of qualitative data in the second phase included interviews with the participants from both CASE and control groups. Participants of the study were 70 elementary school students (aged 10-12). After three months of intervention, students of CASE group showed higher mean gain (RGS mean= 4.4) compared to those of control group (mean RGS = 0.1). The qualitative data indicated that the CASE program also enhanced students’ motivation. Moreover, teachers who involved in the Teachers’ Professional Development (PD) Training Program developed more specific strategy to enhance student’ cognitive ability. In other words, the CASE program was a worthwhile intervention for elementary level students in Indonesian school.

THE EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE CONFLICT MANAGEMENT ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND SCIENCE ACHIEVEMENT

Three teaching methods were compared in this study, namely a Cognitive Conflict Management Module (CCM) that is infused into Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE), (Module A) CASE without CCM (Module B) and a conventional teaching method. This study employed a pre- and post-test quasi-experimental design using non-equivalent control groups. The design involved 130 participants from Form 2 (Grade 7) in a Malaysian secondary school. The cognitive level of all participants was classified as non-formal operational on the pre-test and were allocated to one of the four intact groups: experimental group 1, EP1 experienced Module A, experimental group, and EP2 experienced Module B, while the others were divided between two control groups. The impact of the three teaching methods on the level of cognitive development and science achievement were observed after a 20-week intervention. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis of variance/multivariate analysis of covariance, analysis of covariance and a paired-samples t test. It is hoped that this study can contribute to knowledge in the field of cognitive intervention and cognitive conflict strategy. The findings show that a high dose of cognitive intervention in CASE activities within a short period has an effect on the levels of students’ cognitive development, standard science achievement and constructive cognitive conflict.

Conceptual Questions and Lack of Formal Reasoning: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

Using specially designed conceptual question pairs, 9th grade students were tested on tasks (presented as experimental situations in pictorial form) that involved controlling the variables’ scheme of formal reasoning. The question topics focused on these three chemical contexts: chemistry in everyday life, chemistry without formal concepts, and chemistry with formal concepts. The second task of each question pair contained three additional questions, designed according to the pillars of the cognitive acceleration through science education (CASE) intervention, which represents a set of activities using the schemata of formal operations aimed at improving children’s thinking by accelerating progress towards formal operations in Piaget’s terms. The first task did not have these questions. Results showed that some students could solve conceptual problems with specially designed additional questions even when the students could not solve the conceptual problems without such help. Statistical analysis revealed a correlation between the construction–metacognition additional question and the main cognitive conflict question in the second context of chemistry without formal concepts. The results indicate that conceptual questions designed using the CASE pillars have the potential of accelerating students’ formal reasoning abilities.

Changing Science Outcomes: Cognitive Acceleration in a US Setting

Inquiry is seen as an integral part of science education in the USA; however, few American science programs explicitly focus on the higher order thinking skills that are the precursors to inquiry. In this paper, Australian researchers report the result of using a version of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program in a school district in Oregon (USA) to address teacher-identified concerns about student competence in scientific inquiry. The substantial effect of CASE on British children’s cognitive development and scholastic achievement has been demonstrated convincingly since its inception in the United Kingdom in 1981. The Oregon CASE project was not a mere replication of the original British CASE research: different instruments were employed, and both the measures of cognitive level and student achievement were Rasch-calibrated. The Oregon CASE teachers received comparatively less professional development than did their British counterparts. Neither did they deliver the entire intervention. The results of the study suggest that many of the benefits of CASE still apply when the intervention is conducted in a sub-optimal setting. Cognitive growth was apparent in participating students and high correlations were found between cognitive level and results in some state-mandated tests.

The Impact of Motivational “World‐view” on Engagement in a Cognitive Acceleration Programme

Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) is an intervention programme conducted during Years 7 and 8 in the United Kingdom (aged 11–13 years), which has reported remarkable success in enhancing cognitive development and in raising academic achievement. Critics, however, have questioned whether a purely cognitive mechanism can explain the differential cognitive gains made by participants. One suggestion is that differences in motivational style might provide an explanation. This paper will present findings from a longitudinal study that addresses this matter. Utilising a goal theory approach to motivation, the motivational orientation, related beliefs, and self‐concepts of approximately 1600 secondary students attending nine schools, five of whom were delivering the CASE intervention, were assessed before and at the end of the programme. Analyses of these data suggested that students exhibit six different motivational styles or world‐views. These will be characterised. Change in motivation can be gauged by examining changes in world‐view over the time‐span of the research (the first 2 years of secondary schooling). Differences in the change of motivation of students for students attending CASE and control schools will be inspected. Finally, the relationship between motivation and cognitive gain, which turns out to be complex, will be presented. The implications of these findings, including whether world‐view can explain differential cognitive acceleration effects, will be discussed.

과학 맥락에서 학생간 논의과정의 발달

The purpose of this research was to investigate the change of argumentation of middle school students when they participated in argument tasks with CASE(Cognitive acceleration through science education) programs. Students argumentations were divided into two categories; 'explanatory argumentation' and 'dialogic argumentation'. Several argumentation components were used in their argumentation. Among argumentation components, claim and ground took place more than half of argumentation components. The percentage of 'dialogic argumentation' was lower than the percentage of 'explanatory argumentation'. The percentage of 'dialogic argumentation' was getting higher during CASE intervention. CASE programs had more effect on symmetric group than asymmetric group, however it was unstable. In general, participation ratio in argumentation of the formal operational student was high and the ratio in argumentation of the transitional student was getting higher.

Pupils' thinking whilst designing an investigation

Reflection on one's thinking, metacognition, is seen to be important in learning and development of reasoning ability. The Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education (CASE) intervention programme, which claims to improve pupils' reasoning ability, includes the fostering of metacognition. This study was done to find out if pupils who had been taught through the CASE intervention were more metacognitive than others when designing scientific investigations. In the study pupils were asked to design an investigation on solubility, explain how they arrived at the answer and react to a presented design. The results showed that pupils find it easier to correct a faulty design than create one. Pupils who had done CASE were better able to design an investigation and better able to explain their thought process than those who had not done CASE. Non-CASE pupils tended to rely on recall of conceptual knowledge and had poorly developed encoding and monitoring skills. The paper discusses the significance of these finding to the teaching of scientific investigations.

The Influence of CASE on Scientific Creativity.

This paper describes a study of the influence of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) programme on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. 1087 pupils from six suburban mixed comprehensive schools in England took part in the investigation. Three of the schools had participated in the CASE programme and three had not. Samples of students in years 7–11 from each school were given the Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students, an instrument designed to tap various aspects of scientific creativity. The results indicated that the CASE programme did promote the overall development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, although the effects on different aspects of scientific creativity varied. As expected from previous work on delayed effects of CASE on academic achievement, the results indicated that the effects on creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long-lasting. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed.

Verbal interactions in CASE lessons in Malawi

The paper discusses a study of verbal interactions in “Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE)” lessons. CASE is an intervention which aims at accelerating the cognitive development of secondary pupils in the context of science lessons. A lesson observation schedule was developed in such a way that it would be used to estimate the frequency of the type of verbal interactions advocated by the CASE method. The categories in the schedule thus reflect the main phases in a CASE lesson, namely; concrete preparation, cognitive conflict and construction, meta-cognition and bridging. The schedule was used to compare CASE lessons with regular science lessons in Malawi. In general CASE lessons were observed to have higher frequencies of the type of verbal interactions sampled by the lesson observation schedule than regular science lessons. However there were lower frequencies of verbal interactions pertaining to meta-cognition and bridging in CASE lessons than would be expected from the method. Reasons for this observation are briefly explored.

Teachers as leaders: a case study

Current popular and officially mandated models of leadership position teachers as followers. Transformational leadership is based on the integration of the self into organisational goals, and so the teacher must either feel, or be seduced by, the charismatic vision of the leader if schools to are to deliver outcomes that will meet the needs of the predicted future economy. While the rhetoric is of participative problem solving, the reality is of control and compliance. Creative pedagogy, through which teachers have the capacity to exercise professional courage over learning processes and needs, is being reworked into target setting and auditing and so by its very nature can only pay lip service to educational values. Being 'led' and being prepared to be led is marginalising alternative ways in which teachers can and do understand and experience their work. Teachers as leaders is not a new approach, but is being silenced through the current policy discourse (Gunter 2001). This article makes a contribution to making teacher leadership visible through an analysis of the CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) project within the Department of Education at Keele University.

Cognitive development in a secondary science setting

Observations were made of the progressive change in the cognitive development of 141 students over the course of their secondary education in an Australian private school. Cognitive development was measured in years 8, 10 and 12 usingBond's Logical Orerations Test. Rasch analysis of each of the data sets provided ability estimates for students in the year groups of 1993 (year 8), 1995 (year 10) and 1997 (year 12). Twenty-nine students from the year group of 1993 were tested on all three occasions. We analysed data from these 29 students in order to investigate the children's cognitive development across years 8, 10 and 12. We also examined the influence of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE)Thinking Science program on the cognitive development and scholastic achievement of these students. We found increased mental growth between years 8 and 10 for most students in theThinking Science cohort, which could not be predicted from their starting levels. There was a significant correlation between cognitive development and the scholastic achievement of these students. Although boys as a group were more advanced in cognitive development than girls in years 8 and 10, no difference was found in the rate of cognitive change based on sex up to year 10. However girls showed cognitive gains across years 10–12 which were not found in boys. The students who were new to the school also showed increased cognitive development in years 11 and 12. Students who had experienced theThinking Science course were more cognitively developed than students who joined the school after the intervention had taken place. This study supports the claim of Adey and Shayer that there is a relationship between cognitive development and scholastic achievement, even though we used different measures of cognitive development and scholastic achievement.

Cognitive acceleration through science education: alternative perspectives

Since the publication in 1991 of Thinking Science, a commercially available scheme resulting from the CASE (cognitive acceleration through science education) (Adey et al. 1989) research carried out by Shayer and Adey, it has been adopted in many schools in the hope of raising standards in science. This paper will review the evidence, add a little more to the debate and consider the educational background to the programme. We will suggest that its adoption can be argued on empirical or philosophical grounds but that each argument carries with it certain consequences which must be borne in mind by any school intending to embark on such a programme.

Conceptual links between Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and Motivational Style: a critique of Adey and Shayer

Results published from the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) project suggest enhanced cognitive development and science achievement for between 25% and 50% of children involved; other children showed less or no improvement when compared with control groups (Adey and Shayer 1990, Shayer and Adey 1992a, b). In explicating their findings, these researchers appear to have focused upon children for whom successful intervention is reported. For children failing to respond to CASE techniques, no adequate theoretical explanation is provided. Further understanding of the underlying psychological processes involved in children's learning might help teachers to utilize CASE techniques for the benefit of a greater population of children. The theoretical model of motivational style illuminates CASE findings and provides a missing theoretical framework which helps to explain them.