ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education, shares a course paper from her first semester in a design based research course taught by Dor Abrahamson in fall 2012. She describes several challenges elementary students encounter when learning about animal lifecycles, including making one-to-one comparisons, coordinating different temporal scales, navigating scientific vocabulary, and interpreting schematic depictions of organisms' lifecycles. The author describes solutions to design problem and provides an analysis that highlights potential disconnects between children's ways of thinking and the representational forms commonly used in classroom contexts. She provides a rationale for and shares some design solutions, each reflecting different design choices. The author shares her methods and reflections on the design process, informed by J. Bamberger and D. Schon's conceptualization of learning as an ongoing reflective process of building and rebuilding with materials.
