Instructional Metaphors Research Articles

Making progress: Engaging maker education in science classrooms to develop a novel instructional metaphor for teaching electric potential

Physics educators often struggle with how to tackle complex content such as electric potential. As a result, high school students are typically not engaged in developing a deep understanding of this concept. Historically, such engagement has been perceived as too challenging and abstract. To date no process exists for engaging students in a meaningful way around such content. However, Making provides a new way to engage students in learning about electric potential that has not yet been done. Drawing upon observations and interviews, this article shares the instructional opportunities afforded one high school physics teacher in teaching electric potential through the construction and coding of electronic textiles (e-textiles) maker projects. The study furthers current research in physics education by examining both the instructional methods and outcomes of instruction for high school physics students when e-textiles is used as a model for teaching electric potential.

Conceptualizing Language Learning Metaphors in the Saudi EFL Context: Practicality, Applicability & Appropriacy

This paper tries to investigate the trends about the use of metaphors in the Saudi EFL classrooms. The proper implementation of metaphors (i.e. instruction, acquisition, and socialization metaphors) by teachers can be a reason for boosting source in the interactional and instructional patterns of the Saudi EFL classrooms, and the significance of these metaphors at aforementioned settings was investigated in the present study. Focusing upon the perceptive design of the study, a survey was conducted to know the significance of the three metaphors in the interactional settings of the Saudi EFL classrooms. This study targeted Saudi EFL teachers’ attitudes towards the three delimited metaphors.. The respondents consisted of 200 Saudi EFL teachers drawn from the English Language Centers of the Saudi Universities. A 22-item Likert-scale questionnaire was designed to know the opinions of Saudi EFL teachers about the dynamic use of metaphors in the context of the Saudi EFL classroom. The findings of the study reflected that the Saudi EFL teachers represented by the cohort of this study presented a mixed attitudes towards the utilization of the three delimited metaphors. The findings show that a limited exposure of instructional metaphor may be one of the reasons of the poor performance of the Saudi EFL teachers. A limited exposure of acquisition metaphor may also be damaging the dynamics of teacher student interactional and instructional patterns inside the Saudi EFL classrooms. The findings further show that the teachers’ imbalanced use of class time and hardly any reliance on the coordinated interaction might be due to the limited exposure to the latest techniques embedded in the socialization metaphor. Although policy makers do not acknowledge the fundamental role of metaphors into classroom pedagogies, the participant-teachers recommended professional use of all the metaphors to achieve prerequisite dynamics of the EFL classrooms by fully acknowledging the applicability, appropriateness, and practicality of all the variables of acquisition metaphor.

Distributed Scaffolding in a Service-Learning Course

This article argues that the instructional scaffolding metaphor may be reconceived as distributed scaffolding when multiple means of influence are provided in a service-learning setting. In the service-learning course described here, the professor's role is largely as designer of activity settings for preservice teacher candidates, through which the students construct their own conceptions of teaching culturally diverse populations. The course involves a set of interrelated settings: a tutoring experience at the city's alternative high school; the reading of books from a menu of texts that cover a range of diversity topics; the discussion of these books in book club meetings independent of the professor's direct influence; and the whole-class discussion of these texts, led by each student book club. The distributed nature of the course scaffolding is illustrated with an excerpt from one book club's discussion.

Arrow of time: Metaphorical construals of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics

AbstractVarious features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literature, and challenges students face in appropriating these features have been explored. Using the framework of conceptual metaphor, this paper sought to identify explicit and implicit metaphors in pedagogical texts dealing with the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, an abstract and challenging domain for learners. Three university‐level textbooks were analyzed from a conceptual metaphor perspective, and a range of explicit and implicit metaphors were identified. Explicit metaphors identified include entropy as disorder, thermodynamics processes as movements along a path, and energetic exchange as financial transactions among others. Implicit metaphors include application and elaboration of the generic Location Event Structure metaphor, application of the Object Event Structure metaphor, and others. The similarities and differences between explicit and implicit metaphors found in the textbooks are also described. Two key pedagogical implications are discussed: that the selection of explicit instructional metaphors can be guided by consistency with implicit metaphors; and that the range of implicit metaphors found in pedagogical texts implies that a multiple instructional metaphor strategy is warranted. The depth of the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor and its implications for future research are also discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:818–848, 2012

Understanding needs embodiment: A theory‐guided reanalysis of the role of metaphors and analogies in understanding science

AbstractMany authors stress the importance of basing teaching on students' prior knowledge. To build a bridge between students' everyday knowledge and scientific concepts, the role of metaphors and analogies came into the focus of the science education community during the past two decades. Approaches using metaphor‐based teaching strategies often regard metaphors and analogies as teaching tools that can be adopted by a teacher. On the basis of the theoretical framework of experientialism, we argue that not only teaching but also thinking about and understanding science without metaphors and analogies is not possible. An analysis of studies dealing with metaphors and analogies in science education shows that instructional analogies and metaphors are often not understood as intended or not used by students in their own explanations. By reanalyzing 199 instructional metaphors and analogies on the basis of a metaphor analysis, we show that it takes more than making a connection to everyday life to communicate science fruitfully. We show that good instructional metaphors and analogies need embodied sources. These embodied sources are everyday experiences conceptualized in, for example, schemata such as containers, paths, balances, and up and down. For the analysis, we introduce the concept of conceptual metaphors for analyzing metaphors as well as analogies. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:849–877, 2012

Elaborated metaphors support viable inferences about difficult science concepts

Instructional metaphors scaffold learning better when accompanied by an elaboration. Applying structure mapping theory, we developed and used an elaborated instructional metaphor (text and illustrations) for introductory chemistry concepts. In two studies (N 1 = 44, N 2 = 57), college students with little chemistry background read either the elaborated metaphor, sub‐concept metaphor statements (e.g. an atom is like a tile) only or (Study 2) sub‐concept labels (e.g. atom) only. When asked to write what they knew about the sub‐concept, those in the elaborated metaphor condition wrote more sophisticated domain inferences than those in the other condition(s), p < .05. The elaborated metaphor helped participants construct accurate pre‐conceptual mental models that could prepare them for future learning (i.e. acquisition of new knowledge). The results also suggested that acquisition of high‐level concepts may require active learner transactions with the analogue, as can be had in interactive instructional game worlds.

Modifying the metaphor in order to improve understanding of control languages?the little-person becomes a cast of actors

The instructional metaphor is an important bridge to understanding, particularly when students are undertaking tasks that are conceptually difficult and outside their previous experience. It is suggested that the limitations of the implicit metaphor of the procedural control languages are the main cause of the problems experienced with delivering the control topic within the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) curriculum. These continue to dominate classroom practice despite Papert warning more than 25 years ago of the conceptual restrictions that they place on children’s thinking. It is also claimed that the procedural control languages do not provide an adequate representation of the underlying input–process–output model of control, and that this contributes to a systematic pattern of misunderstanding. Classroom trials of a graphic object-orientated language are related to a prior study made with the procedural control language Control Logo. The relatively more sophisticated mental models developed by students working with actor-lab are discussed in terms of the different underlying metaphors and the problem representation provided.

A River Runs Through It: A Metaphor for Teaching Leadership Theory

Executive Summary Leadership educators are some of the best teachers around when it comes to creating exciting, effective experiential learning opportunities, which teach students leadership skills. Where the curriculum and instruction falls short is when we try to teach leadership theory. Some courses and programs even omit theory as part of the curriculum. This article explores a new instructional metaphor for teaching leadership theory. The metaphor has been an effective tool for helping students understand the historical development of leadership theory as a foundation for the leadership skills they are learning.

In search of the architect of learning: a commentary on scaffolding as a metaphor for instructional interactions.

In this article, I accept Stone's invitation to reevaluate the metaphor of scaffolding, building on his helpful analysis. Specifically, I identify what has been appealing about the scaffolding metaphor by describing how, as an intervention researcher working with students with learning disabilities, I have used the metaphor to describe a specific instructional approach in my own research. Then, I revisit and critique scaffolding as an instructional metaphor. I also comment on Stone's assertion that a more explicit description of communicative interchanges is required to more clearly describe instructional scaffolding. Finally, I conclude that the scaffolding metaphor is fundamentally flawed and advance an alternative view that may more successfully promote correspondence between instructional activities and our emerging vision of the dynamics of teaching and learning.

Chapter 3: Going West to Get East

Theory and research on the dynamics of instructional metaphors, analogies, and models, children's ability to comprehend figurative language, and the effectiveness of figurative devices as instructi...