Joshua Danish » Papers

Paper: ‘Kindergarten and First-Grade Students’ Representational Practices While Creating Storyboards of Honeybees Collecting Nectar’

Joshua — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:05:13 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Phelps, D. (2010). Kindergarten and First-Grade Students’ Representational Practices While Creating Storyboards of Honeybees Collecting Nectar. In K. Gomez, L. Lyons & J. Radinsky (Eds.), Learning in the Disciplines: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2010) – Volume 1, Full Papers (pp. 420-427). Chicago IL: International Society of the Learning Sciences.

ABSTRACT: A productive approach to studying the role of representations in supporting students’ learning of science content is to examine their representational practices. The current study examines kindergarten and first-grade students’ representational practices in a similar context—the creation of storyboards—both before and after a curricular intervention in order to highlight those aspects of their practices that changed while engaging in a superficially similar task. Analysis of the students’ storyboards reveals considerable improvement after the intervention. Analysis of the students’ practices as they changed over time is also presented by examining the students’ interactions, with a focus on their discussions of the science content and the representations themselves.

Paper: ‘Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations’

Joshua — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:45:51 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2007). Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students’ representational activities: the notions of meta-representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first-grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize results from interviews regarding the design choices that they made. Analysis of the semistructured pre- and postinterviews reveals that students attend to the content domain, local activity, and their personal preferences when evaluating representations. Analysis of video case studies that followed the students as they created their representations further reveals several key mediators of the students’ representational activities, including other students, task constraints, the teacher, and local norms for what constituted a ‘good representation.’ In addition, the data show that these norms shifted over time as new content was covered in the class, and were appropriated in interaction with other students. Finally, both sets of analyses reveal that students often face competing constraints when creating their representations, and resolve these constraints through a complex set of negotiations.

Paper: ‘Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations’

Joshua — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 01:45:02 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2006). Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Bloomington, IN. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper we compare two contexts where students were inventing representations; a 2nd and 3rd grade classroom creating a shared representation, and a kindergarten and 1st grade classroom creating unique representations. Contexts for developing shared representations are those in which a class attempts to jointly construct one representational form to solve a given problem. In contrast, contexts for inventing unique representations emphasize individual representational choices with no explicit attempt to create a shared representational form. Drawing on and comparing data from two recent studies we use the Negotiated Representational Mediators (NeRM) framework to analyze young children’s activities oriented towards the production, evaluation, and modification of representational forms. Both cultural contexts lead to a convergence toward normative representations as well as continuing to diverge in the form of individual acts of creativity and agency. We argue that despite these similar trends, the different contexts support unique aspects of representational practice.

Paper: ‘Emergent tensions between statistics education and culturally relevant pedagogies’

Joshua — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 02:04:24 +0000

Enyedy, N., Mukhopadhyay, S., & Danish, J. A. (2006). Emergent tensions between statistics education and culturally relevant pedagogies. In A. Rossman & B. Chance (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS). Salvador Brazil: IASE.

Paper: ‘A Work of Goodness: When a Simple Vote Reveals Children’s Representational Ideas and the Classroom That Helped Produce Them’

Joshua — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:43:05 +0000

Danish, J. A. (Spring, 2006). A Work of Goodness: When a Simple Vote Reveals Children’s Representational Ideas and the Classroom That Helped Produce Them. CONNECTIONS.