Associate Director Doug Clark
Wins a Spencer

Awarded as either a two-year/half-time, or one-year/full-time
stipend, the fellowship supports scholars conducting research in
critical areas of education.

Working in the United States, Turkey, China, Korea and Mexico,
Clark will use his Spencer fellowship to investigate how student
thinking about core science concepts varies across languages and
cultures and the ways in which students encounter these concepts
in their everyday lives.

Clark hopes that his findings will help underserved U.S. student
populations because “most science education in this country has
traditionally focused on monolingual English speakers. As a result,
the science education curricula developed through the research
has been tailored by default to the needs of monolingual English
speakers. This research will help clarify the actual level of variation
in students’ conceptual change processes resulting from differences in culture or language.”

Clark is assistant professor of science education in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education. He
is also an associate director of CRESMET. He completed his doctorate and postdoctoral work at the
University of California at Berkeley where his research on conceptual change and technology earned
him the School of Education’s Outstanding Dissertation Award. Clark completed his M.A. and
teaching credentials at Stanford University and taught science to all grades six through 12 in a variety
of diverse public and private schools in Arizona and California. His current research investigates
students’ conceptual change processes in science; he also explores technology-enhanced environments
that can support students’ learning in science.

Doug Clark, Spencer Proposal Abstract The proposed study investigates students’ understanding of the scientific concept of “force” in Turkey, China, Korea, Mexico and the United States. The study will contribute to the resolution of a central controversy among researchers of conceptual change regarding the structure and coherence of students’ science knowledge. The study will employ an analytic framework developed through ongoing research at Arizona State University along with two other analytic frameworks representing the predominant theoretical positions in the field. The goal is to apply and extend the analytic framework to provide a topological perspective (i.e., identifying coherence at different levels of behavior) for examining the integration of elemental and theorylike perspectives simultaneously. The study will contribute to this important theoretical debate by integrating multiple levels of analysis, allowing more precise questions to be addressed about the nature of students’ knowledge structures. This study will additionally clarify the role of methodological and semantic/cultural differences in the findings of researchers on opposing sides of the controversy. Finally, findings about differences in how students from Mexico and other countries think about science topics like force and motion in comparison to U.S. English monolingual students (who are more frequently studied) will inform the development of curricula that better support the underserved diverse student populations in U.S. classrooms.