Designing for Epistemic Development

A critical aim for education is to create opportunities for students to experience how knowledge is articulated in disciplines like science, mathematics, and engineering. To create these conditions for learning, the authors and teachers work together to design learning ecologies in which young students are initiated into the ways that scientists and mathematicians generate and revise knowledge. In this kind of developmentally oriented design research, we make and pursue conjectures about forms of scientific and mathematical practices that can be fruitfully approximated in classrooms. With educators, we design tasks; specialized forms of talk, gesture, and inscription; and tools and settings that support students as they generate and critique emerging concepts and practices. We illustrate this approach by describing how students in grades three and six encountered and grappled with variability, a concept that is central in both mathematics and sciences. Students measured, visualized, and modeled variability across a number of carefully chosen contexts. Here we describe class interactions that reflect the transformations that occurred in both their understanding of variability and their grasp of the disciplinary practices that they engaged.