Cause & Effect: Assistant Professor Tina Grotzer

Name: Tina Grotzer, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’93
Title: assistant professor of education
Focus: science, consequences, and students

by Lory Hough

Observing in classrooms around the world, Assistant Professor Tina Grotzer noticed that when it came to understanding science, many students struggled with certain concepts like density and pressure, even when the best teachers were using the best practices. Unlike scientists, students tended to explain these concepts in simple, linear ways — you do this and then that happens. Although simple is fine for understanding some concepts — you kick a ball and it rolls — science often requires more complex thinking. As a former teacher, Grotzer responded by creating the Understandings of Consequence Project with funding from the National Science Foundation. Designed to help all students grasp the patterns of science, the project is also helping teachers by offering free online curriculum modules that have been adopted from Cambridge to the Dominican Republic. In May, Grotzer spoke to Ed. about the project, causality, and why you sometimes need to know that there’s a fish down the line.

What do you mean by linear thinking?

It is one of the earliest forms that we notice. A baby bats at a toy and the toy moves. From a Newtonian physics perspective, more is going on, but what is perceptually available follows a simple linear pattern.

Why do students approach science this way?

We tend toward efficiency. It makes sense in many instances. [Linear thinking] only gets us into trouble when it doesn’t capture the dynamics in question or we don’t understand the parameters of the causal system. If I just want to turn on the lights, I don’t need to know much about the circuitry or how the system works.

But sometimes you do.

Sometimes that efficiency gets us into trouble. If you walk a block from the Harvard Graduate School of Education toward Harvard Square, you’ll pass a plaque in the street with a fish on it that reads, “Don’t dump. Drains to Charles River.” If we don’t think about the extended consequences and dump oil down the drain, we create unintended problems elsewhere. Every time I pass by the plaque, I am reminded of the simplistic patterns that we fall into and why this reminder is so clever.

Why do we teach science this way?

Often parents and teachers teach in this way because they also attend to the simplified patterns. An example is how sinking and floating is taught in many primary grade classrooms. Often classes make lists of sinkers and floaters, focusing on the attributes of the object as the simple linear cause for the outcome. Yet whether something sinks or floats depends upon what it is in relation to — it is a relational causality. The same object will float in one liquid and sink in another. There are many instances where one may not need to know that. But if you want to understand the layers of the atmosphere, convection currents, and weather patterns, you need to understand sinking and floating as a relational causal concept. Teaching it as sinkers and floaters focuses students in ways that create problems in middle school.

You also found that students did not take into account indirect consequences to actions. Can you give an example?

Students understood that if all the green plants disappeared, then it would impact the things that ate green plants, the primary consumers, but didn’t realize that it also impacted things that ate the things that eat green plants, the secondary consumers. Some students didn’t spontaneously include those things and others explicitly rejected the connection, saying that they could eat other things. They were unaware of the domino causal pattern in energy transfer from the sun. Some students confused it with the cyclic pattern of matter recycling and thus were unaware of our critical and continual dependence on the sun.

How does the Understandings Project help with this?

We engage students in activities and games that reveal the underlying causal patterns — what we call RECAST activities. We also help students see these patterns in everyday life: sinking and floating as it relates to the lava lamp in their bedrooms, for example. Most importantly, we discuss the patterns directly, so that all students can think about them. We also talk about why these patterns are conceptually hard.

You were a teacher for 14 years. Do you ever miss it?

I miss the total immersion in the world of kids. But if I spent all of my time there, I would miss the world of ideas and the mental space to reflect deeply on the nature of learning. Now I get to do both — spend time in science classrooms and think deeply about it, too.

Go to www.pz.harvard.edu/ucp to access the project’s website and curriculum modules.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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photo by Mark Morelli