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Osborne, Jonathan
Academic Title
Other Titles
Kamalachari Professor of Science Education
Contact Information
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Program Affiliations
My research focus is a mix of work on policy and pedagogy in the teaching and learning of science. In the policy domain, I am interested in exploring students' attitudes to science and how school science can be made more worthwhile and engaging - particularly for those who will not continue with the study of science. In pedagogy, my focus has been on making the case for the role of argumentation in science education both as a means of improving the use of a more dialogic approach to teaching science and improving student understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry. I have led one major project on 'Enhancing the Quality of Argument in School Science Education'. From this we developed the IDEAS (Ideas, Evidence and Argument in Science Education) materials to support teacher professional learning. Nevertheless, much science, if not more, is learned outside the classroom and how young people learn in that environment and what it has to offer formal education is another focus of my work and I was one of the partners in the NSF funded Centre for Informal Learning and Schools (2002-7)
Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate
This project is a collaboration with Catherine Snow, and a research team from Harvard and with the Strategic Education Research Partnerships (SERP) group to understand, measure, and test the malleability of three contributors to reading comprehension that are both critical and often neglected: perspective taking, complex reasoning, and academic language skill. With $20 million in funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research team will embark on this project in July 2010. The work proposed here represents an extension of work that members of this research team have been conducting over the last four years developing a three-year, cross subject area academic language program called Word Generation. The program provides students with weekly opportunities to learn academic vocabulary, view controversial issues from multiple perspectives, engage in debate, and formulate and defend a position in an essay—a set of skills we argue are critical to deep comprehension. The project team will develop learning trajectories for each of the three contributors independently, and determine the extent to which they are interdependent. Researchers will conduct a longitudinal analysis to chart the movement of students along these trajectories with and without targeted interventions. The interventions the project team proposes to develop and evaluate will explore the potential of structured classroom discussion and debate to catalyze the ongoing development and integration of these skills, and their deployment for purposes of “deep comprehension.” The project will utilize the Word Generation program and will focus on 4th through 8th graders attending schools in a set of districts: Boston Public Schools (BPS), other smaller districts in Massachusetts including Brockton and Falmouth, and the San Francisco Public Schools. The team proposes to develop in-depth, 6-week units in science and social studies, which incorporate the Word generation program, for grades 4 through 8. Furthermore they propose to develop and test an approach to improving teachers’ capacity to support productive discussion by: a) providing richer professional development that extends over a longer period of time; b) incorporating strategies for discursive reasoning with text during classroom discussion; c) incorporating knowledge about students’ learning trajectories gleaned from the proposed research into the professional development, with concrete examples of students’ verbal and written production as they become more sophisticated in the targeted skills; and d) providing teachers with formative measures to probe student progress on the targeted skills during discussion. Professor Osborne will take the lead on the professional development component of the project.
Learning Progressions in Middle School Science Instruction and Assessment
CSET faculty member Jonathan Osborne is collaborating with Professor Mark Wilson, from University of California, Berkeley with the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) to develop and validate new assessments and to validate existing assessments for use in assessing student understandings of science. With $1.5 million in funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research team will embark on this project in July 2010. The project will address the following research questions (1) What is the nature of the learning progression in the content domain of Structure of Matter? (2) What is the nature of the learning progression in students’ ability to reason scientifically in the domain of Structure of Matter and also, generally? And (3) What is the inter-relationship between students’ ability to reason scientifically and their domain specific knowledge? In particular to what extent do the two covary? To address the research questions, project activities will be carried out over a four-year period from July 2010 through June 2014. The work will be organized around the research questions to develop and revise assessment materials for a number of middle school science domains.
Collaborative Research with Lawrence Hall: Investigating a Practicum Based Model of Professional Development.
This is an NSF Collaborative Research project which is funded by NSF led my Hilda Borko and myself. The post-doc on the project is Dr Eric Berson. The project started in 2012 and runs till 2016. The goal of the research element of the work is to investigate the efficacy of the model of professional development developed by Lawrence Hall. The focus of the professional development is to develop the skills and competencies of Grade 3-5 teachers to teach science with much more of a focus on argument and evidence. As well as including a one week workshop, the program also includes one week in which participants get to try out the new skills they have been learning with students on a summer school. The work is developing an observation instrument to evaluate teachers’ ability to engage their students in productive talk around argument, evidence and ideas in science.
The work is being conducted in a local school district with three cohorts of teachers. One who receives a one week workshop plus the practicum; another who just receive the one week workshop; and a comparison sample who will not receive the workshop till 2015. Data from the three sets of teachers will be compared to evaluate what changes, if any, have occurred.
Quote
"What matters in learning science is not only what we know but how we know what we know and how that knowledge came to be. Anything less offers only a partial view of the achievements of science."
Education
- B.Sc Physics Bristol University, 1972
- Post Graduate Certificate in Education, Cambridge University, 1973
- Masters in Astrophysics, Queen Mary College, University of London, 1976
- PhD (Education), King's College, University of London, 1996
Time at Stanford
Started Jan 1, 2009
Professional Experience
9 years of teaching physics and science in high schools (1973-1981)
3 years working as an Advisory Teacher in Inner London Schools (1982-1985)
King's College London
Lecturer in Science Education, (1985-1996)
Senior Lecturer in Science Education, (1996-2000)
Professor of Science Education, (2000-2003)
Chair of Science Education, (2003-2008)
Head of Department of Education and Professional Studies (2005-2008)
Courses Taught
- Policy and Practice in Science Education
- The Science Curriculum: Values and Ideology in a Contested Terrain
- Science and Environmental Education in Informal Environments
- Science Teacher Elementary Preparation 267
Recent Publications
Osborne, J.F & Dillon, J. (2008) Science Education in Europe. Nuffield Foundation: London.
Chin, C., & Osborne, J. (2008). Students' questions: a potential resource for teaching and learning science. Studies in Science Education, 44(1), 1 - 39.
Chin, C., & Osborne, J. (2010). Supporting Argumentation Through Students' Questions: Case Studies in Science Classrooms. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 19(2), 230 - 284.
Osborne, J. (2010). Arguing to Learn in Science: The Role of Collaborative, Critical Discourse. Science, 328, 463-466.
Osborne, J. F., & Patterson, A. (2011). Scientific argument and explanation: A necessary distinction? Science Education, 95(4), 627-638.
Claussen, Stephanie, & Osborne, Jonathan. (2013). Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital and its implications for the science curriculum. Science Education, 97(1), 58-79.
Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Osborne, J., Dillon, J., & Wong, B. (2012). Science Aspirations, Capital, and Family Habitus: How Families Shape Children's Engagement and Identification With Science. American Educational Research Journal, 49(5), 881-908.
Osborne, Jonathan, Simon, Shirley, Christodoulou, Andri, Howell-Richardson, Christine, & Richardson, Katherine. (2013). Learning to argue: A study of four schools and their attempt to develop the use of argumentation as a common instructional practice and its impact on students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50, 3, 315-347.
Current Activities
Member of the NRC panel drafting the framework for the new common core standards in science