Hestenes and NGSS

While reading Hestenes, I had each of the NGSS practices up to refer back to throughout the article. The first NGSS practice, asking questions and defining problems, seemed to be important to Hestenes. He kept making a point that I definitely agree with,  “one cannot discover what one cannot conceive.” He goes on to say kids believe their job is to memorize facts and that this explains why so many students have a tough time grasping modeling. I believe this fits in with the first practice because in order for students to learn, they need to be asking questions. Hestenes does make a point to say that many students have misconceptions bout modeling, and I believe asking questions is the best way to break down the learning barriers. The second practice, developing and using models, was essentially the whole point of Hestenes’ article, as he believes the main objective of science instruction should be to teach modeling. Even one of the several general principles of experimental design is developing a model for phenomena from theory, which goes to show the importance of this practice.

Planning and carrying out investigations was touched upon in his explanation of experimental games. The objective of these games is to test and validate models. The experimental games have two major components: design and interpretation of data and the collection and interpretation of data, which leads to the fourth NGSS practice, analyzing and interpreting data. Hestenes talks about this practice when he refers to Zeroth law and other physical laws that are involved in increasing range and precision of kinetical measurements.  He explains how data are meaningful only to the extent that they are related to some conceptual model, and that the data should relate to some model or process to be useful. Using mathematics and computational thinking was touched on briefly. With the discussion of Newton's discovery of the binomial theorem as good index of his growing analytical and pattern recognition skills, and explaining that Newton was the first to apply calculus to practical problems, there was an evident importance of the meshing of mathematics and science.

The sixth NGSS practice, constructing explanations and designing solutions, was brought up when talking about how student attention should be directed at models and processes where patterns are found. I interpret this as actively construction explanation is essential to the model process and requires the utmost control of student attention. For engaging in argument from evidence
, Hestenes talked about how reflective thinking is essential for mastering technical skills. He made a point to say how practice is not enough. Lastly, for obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information, Hestenes talked about deployment games, which involve matching of models to empirical phenomena and data. Often a given model has already has already been validated in some empirical domain so the model is expected to account for new data. Using obtained information, evaluating it by seeing what can be added to add validation and communicating new findings can ultimately lead to new knowledge.