Meta-Theoretic Competence for Computational Agent-Based Modeling

Authors

Hillary Swanson, Utah State UniversityFollow
Uri Wilensky, Northwestern University

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Proceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Learning, Design, and Technology

Author ORCID Identifier

Hillary Swanson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5953-6780

Uri Wilensky https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9591-3109

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Publication Date

6-21-2024

Journal Article Version

Version of Record

First Page

38

Last Page

46

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

In the U.S. context, science standards encourage educators to engage students in modeling practices, including computational modeling. While much work has investigated the productivity of computational modeling with respect to students' development of scientific content knowledge, less work has focused on students' development of knowledge and skills for participation in computational modeling practices. A first step in understanding how these practices develop is examining students' activity in the context of computational modeling environments with attention to the productive moves they make. These moves can provide insight into the knowledge they bring to their learning, which may be foundational to the development of more sophisticated engagement in computational modeling practices. This paper presents empirical results of an investigation of the knowledge one student brings to her interaction with a computational modeling microworld as she models the spread of disease.

Recommended Citation

Swanson, Hillary, and Wilensky, Uri. "Meta-Theoretic Competence for Computational Agent-Based Modeling" Proceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Learning, Design and Technology. 2024, pp. 38-46. https://doi.org/10.1145/3663433.3663458