Making meaning in classrooms: Social processes in small-group discourse and scientific knowledge building

This study analyzed student talk in working groups during four laboratory investigations. Its purpose was to understand the process by which students solve scientific problems, the difficulties students encounter in developing the requisite pieces of scientific arguments while negotiating their social roles, and the ways these roles shape task engagement and the development and articulation of the arguments themselves. The discourse of 6 groups of four students each was audiotaped and 2 groups were videotaped during the planning, execution, and interpretation of student-designed experiments in a 10th-grade interdisciplinary science class. Goals of student engagement, knowledge building within an intellectual framework, and construction of scientific arguments were used to examine conceptual difficulties and social interactions. Within-group comparisons across labs and across-group comparisons within labs were made. It was determined that: (a) students became much better at using the scientific method to construct convincing arguments, and (b) specific social roles and leadership styles developed within groups that greatly influenced the ease with which students developed scientific understanding. The results demonstrate not only that knowledge building involves the construction of scientifically appropriate arguments, but that the extent to which this knowledge building takes place depends on students learning to use tools of the scientific community: their expectations about the intellectual nature of the tasks and their role in carrying these tasks out: and the access they have to the appropriate social context in which to practice developing skills. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The sound of music: Constructing science as sociocultural practices through oral and written discourse

In this article, we examine the oral and written discourse processes in a high school physics class and how these discourse processes are related to sociocultural practices in scientific communities. Our theoretical framework is based on sociological and anthropological studies of scientific communities and ethnographies of classroom life. We review the use of discourse analysis as a methodological orientation in science education and provide a logic‐of‐inquiry framing how we used discourse analysis in our ethnographic research. Our ethnographic analysis showed that, through students' participation in creating scientific papers on the physics of sound, their appropriation of scientific discourse was related to the framing activities of the teachers and the social practices established over time in the classroom. Our textual analysis of the student papers focused on how they used evidence to make claims. We explore the lessons learned from participating in the classroom of these students. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 883–915, 1999     

Missed Opportunities for Science Learning: Unacknowledged Unscientific Arguments in Asynchronous Online and Face-to-Face Discussions

We explored the scientific argumentation that occurs among university biology students during an argumentation task implemented in two environments: face-to-face in a classroom and online in an asynchronous discussion. We observed 10 student groups, each composed of three students. Our analysis focused on how students respond to their peers’ unscientific arguments, which we define as assertions, hypotheses, propositions, or explanations that are inaccurate or incomplete from a scientific perspective. Unscientific arguments provide opportunities for productive dissent, scientific argumentation, and conceptual development of scientifically desirable conceptions. We found that students did not respond to the majority of unscientific arguments in both environments. Challenges to unscientific arguments were expressed as a question or through explanation, although the latter was more common online than face-to-face. Students demonstrated significantly more epistemic distancing in the face-to-face environment than the online environment. We discuss the differences in discourse observed in both environments and teaching implications. We also provide direction for future research seeking to address the challenges of engaging students in productive scientific argumentation in both face-to-face and online environments.     

The Hourglass Approach: Analysing Science Classroom Discursive Interactions Through Intercontextual Lens

One of the challenges for analysing science classroom discourse is a better understanding of intercontextual relationships in the learning process. In this paper, we used orientations from ethnography in education to organise and propose an analytical metaphor called the hourglass approach. It involves three phases of analysis that correspond to the parts of the hourglass. The first phase involves obtaining a continuous cross section of classroom history and the intersections between sociocultural contexts and the science learning contexts, throughout this track record. The second phase involves discourse analysis of few selected events is the vertex of the hourglass. Finally, in the third phase, the analysis of interactions is focused on intercontextual relationships for the interpretation of science learning opportunities. We illustrate this approach based on interactions during science lessons in a first-grade class. In particular, we discuss, in greater detail, how a meaningful intercontextual element in the participants’ group (i.e. the gender norm), intermingled with the engagement of students in practices from the conceptual, epistemic and social domains of scientific knowledge.

     

Organising a culture of argumentation in elementary science

ABSTRACT

Most of the research on argumentation in science education has documented the myriad flaws in students’ argumentation, and the difficulties teachers have organising productive arguments in the classroom. We apply a sociocultural framework to argue that productive argumentation emerges from a classroom culture in which its practice meaningfully serves classroom goals. We present a case study using interaction analysis to contrast two elementary teachers’ efforts to organise productive scientific argumentation in their classrooms. One teacher used discourse moves to orient students to each other’s contributions in ways the other did not, reflecting differences in underlying aims for collective versus individual sense-making. This analysis shows that connecting discourse practices specifically to a goal of collective sense-making promotes productive argumentation.     

“You're going to want to find out which and prove it”: collective argumentation in a mathematics classroom

One of the proposals of the North American educational reform movement is that teachers should stress scientific argumentation more than the manipulation of symbols and algorithms in their mathematics instruction. The aim of this article is to apply some theoretical concepts, drawn from the fields of sociolinguistics and rhetoric, to the analysis of argumentation in a lesson conducted in an urban middle school classroom. Our analysis focuses on the implementation of the classroom teacher's instructional goals during a lesson on area measurement. As a result of our analyses, we found that she achieved her instructional goals of being nondirective in her teaching and getting students actively involved in arguing about mathematical concepts. The teacher was able to orchestrate discussion by recruiting attention and participation from her class, aligning students with argumentative positions through reported speech, highlighting positions through repetition, and pointing out important aspects of their arguments through expansion. In addition, we also found that her students differed in the way they framed the mathematical content of the lesson in terms of the facts or grounds, algorithms or warrants, premises or backings, as well as solutions or claims. Their arguments also varied in terms of explicitness and ability to integrate their classmates' arguments. In conclusion, we feel that discourse analysis, based on sociolinguistic and rhetorical theoretical frameworks, can be a valuable tool for the evaluation of educational reform in mathematics.     

Promoting cognitive and social aspects of inquiry through classroom discourse

We investigated how Chinese physics teachers structured classroom discourse to support the cognitive and social aspects of inquiry-based science learning. Regarding the cognitive aspect, we examined to what extent the cognitive processes underlying the scientific skills and the disciplinary reasoning behind the content knowledge were taught. Regarding the social aspect, we examined how classroom discourse supported student learning in terms of students' opportunities to talk and interaction patterns. Our participants were 17 physics teachers who were actively engaged in teacher education programs in universities and professional development programs in local school districts. We analyzed one lesson video from each participating teacher. The results suggest both promises and challenges. Regarding the cognitive aspect of inquiry, the teachers in general recognized the importance of teaching the cognitive processes and disciplinary reasoning. However, they were less likely to address common intuitive ideas about science concepts and principles. Regarding the social aspect of inquiry, the teachers frequently interacted with students in class. However, it appeared that facilitating conversations among students and prompting students to talk about their own ideas are challenging. We discuss the implications of these findings for teacher education programs and professional development programs in China.     

English language learners’ participation in the discourse of a multilingual science classroom

Recent science-education reforms have targeted students’ ability to ‘talk science’, especially in science classrooms. Prior research has shown that participation in scientific discourse in class is one of the most challenging scientific-literacy tasks, and particularly complex for English language learners (ELLs) at the upper elementary level. The present study explores this issue in a fourth-grade science classroom in the United States in which students from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds were studying together. Specifically, it analyzes the case of a focal Asian-background ELL who encountered challenges in her attempts to respond to the teacher’s questions and participate in the classroom academic discourse on earth science. Our analysis indicated that this ELL was unaware of the teacher’s expectations regarding the intertextual connections and academic language required to successfully accomplish science tasks. The ELL’s unexpected responses exposed a complex set of academic and social issues – notably, gaps between the teacher’s, students’, and ELL’s own expectations about language participation – that could have contributed to her supposed behavioural problems.     

Dialogic teaching and students’ discursive identity negotiation in the learning of science

This study sought to understand how dialogic teaching, as enacted in everyday classroom interaction, affords students opportunities for identity negotiation as learners of science. By drawing on sociocultural and sociolinguistic accounts, the study examined how students’ discursive identities were managed and recognized in the moment and over time during dialogic teaching and what consequences these negotiations had for their engagement in science learning. The study used video data of classroom interactions collected from an elementary science learning project and placed a specific analytic focus on four students in particular. The results reveal evidence of a rich variety of discursive identities exposed during dialogic teaching, thus demonstrating how the students’ identity negotiations were configured according to the social architecture of classroom discourse. Addressing the temporal dimension of dialogic teaching points out critical shifts in the students’ discursive identities, of which identification is argued to be pivotal when creating equitable science learning opportunities.     

Reasoning about data in middle school science

This case study illustrates instruction in an urban 6th‐grade classroom in which students were learning about mass, volume, and density by attempting to layer (stack) three miscible solutions with differing densities atop one another. The study examines classroom discourse and interaction on the basis of four teaching goals: (a) reaching consensus about which stacks were possible, (b) developing persuasive arguments that separated data from noise, (c) establishing social norms for collective inquiry, and (d) appreciating the epistemological status of scientific knowledge. The study traces the fate of three stacks that students claimed were possible after initial investigations with the solutions. These claims underwent a process of collective validation in which consensus without coercion was the goal, which illustrates emergent standards for backing claims with evidence, as well as for replicability, among the students. Students were successful in achieving three of the four goals, with some qualifications. In relation to Goal 3, which required generalization to other situations, somewhat less success is reported. Limitations in the current standards, difficulties of time allotment in current curricula, and establishing classroom cultures of inquiry are discussed. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 179–199, 1999     

Defining and Operationalizing Appropriation for Science Learning

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of transforming scientific discourse in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this article is to turn the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing, and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (A) an expression of a personal “signature“ idea, (B) grounded in the discipline, (C) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (D) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities, and (E) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within classroom. The study is grounded in an extended intervention on thermodynamics in an Italian secondary school class (grade 12).     

美国二维课堂语篇分析工具CDAT述要及其启示

科学知识的学习和运用都发生在以语言为中介的课堂情境中,它是提升学生科学素养的有效方式.Soon C.Lee教授和Karen E.Irving副教授开发出CDAT表,是一种可用于帮助教师和教育者用科学推理的视角识别其课堂话语模式的课堂话语分析工具,CDAT分析也可作为教师专业发展的新型渠道.基于对CDAT的阐释与研究,我...     

课堂争论对学生深度学习的影响:基于交互论证分析

课堂话语互动与学习辩证地联接在一起。学习科学的新发展要求不应仅仅研究课堂话语互动环境与结果,更需要实时分析课堂话语互动过程。交互论证分析超越了传统的静态的图尔敏论证模式,能够动态地实时分析课堂话语互动。基于此,本研究聚焦于争论这一典型的课堂话语互动形式,借助交互论证分析,对研究案例进行三步骤分析,不但揭示了学生话语互动中所运用的交互形式,阐明了话语互动质量,而且清晰地描绘了课堂话语互动如何促进个体的深度学习,学生个体的意义构建如何影响小组论断形成,以及作为机构代表的教师如何促进学生的学习。研究表明课堂争论有效促进了学生的深度学习,同时也进一步指出构建新型的教师角色的必要性。     

Lower track science students' argumentation and open inquiry instruction

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of open inquiry instruction with low achieving, marginalized high school students. Students with long histories of scholastic failure were asked to participate in question generation, experimental design, and argument construction as a part of their General Science course instruction. Videotapes were collected from daily science instruction, and entrance and exit instruction interviews were conducted using identical open‐ended problems. From this dataset, comparisons were made between students' entrance and exit interview responses representing change over time. Shifts in student responses coincided with renegotiated classroom norms for scientific discourse. Results are reported for five students in the form of assertions. Students' arguments were observed to shift toward those more consistent with the nature of the scientific arguments including: (1) students' tentativeness of knowledge claims, (2) students' use of evidence, and (3) students' views regarding the source of scientific authority. Implications are discussed for research and practice in light of the national standards' call for universal scientific literacy. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 807–838, 2000     

Elementary students' views of explanation,argumentation, and evidence,and their abilities to construct arguments over the school year

Science includes more than just concepts and facts, but also encompasses scientific ways of thinking and reasoning. Students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds influence the knowledge they bring to the classroom, which impacts their degree of comfort with scientific practices. Consequently, the goal of this study was to investigate 5th grade students' views of explanation, argument, and evidence across three contexts—what scientists do, what happens in science classrooms, and what happens in everyday life. The study also focused on how students' abilities to engage in one practice, argumentation, changed over the school year. Multiple data sources were analyzed: pre‐ and post‐student interviews, videotapes of classroom instruction, and student writing. The results from the beginning of the school year suggest that students' views of explanation, argument, and evidence, varied across the three contexts with students most likely to respond “I don't know” when talking about their science classroom. Students had resources to draw from both in their everyday knowledge and knowledge of scientists, but were unclear how to use those resources in their science classroom. Students' understandings of explanation, argument, and evidence for scientists and for science class changed over the course of the school year, while their everyday meanings remained more constant. This suggests that instruction can support students in developing stronger understanding of these scientific practices, while still maintaining distinct understandings for their everyday lives. Finally, the students wrote stronger scientific arguments by the end of the school year in terms of the structure of an argument, though the accuracy, appropriateness, and sufficiency of the arguments varied depending on the specific learning or assessment task. This indicates that elementary students are able to write scientific arguments, yet they need support to apply this practice to new and more complex contexts and content areas. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 793–823, 2011     

Knowing When You've Brought Them in: Scientific Genre Knowledge and Communities of Practice

Increasingly, researchers in the learning sciences are appealing to notions of community to shape the design of learning technologies and curricular innovations. Many of these designs, including those in the area of project-based science, show strong promise; but, it is a challenging matter to understand the influences of these innovations in a detailed enough fashion to refine them over time. This work demands sensitive, theoretically grounded ways to assess the depth to which particular facets of innovations help enculturate students into communities of discourse and practice. Taking genre theory and the sociology of science as points of departure, I demonstrate a unique approach to the problems of developing and assessing students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. The research I discuss revolves around students' use of a professional scientific genre of scientific writing, the Research Article or Introduction, Methods, Results, Discission (IMRD) report (Swales, 1990), as they compose reports about their own original research. Using data from an innovative project-based high school science class, I demonstrate how genre use provides a window on the effectiveness of a learning environment in helping use discipline-specific tools of persuasion. In the classroom studied here, students developed e-mail mentoring relationships with volunteer scientists across the United States and Canada. Working in partnership with the teacher, these "telementors" served not only as inquiry guides for students, but also as a critical audience that helped shape the arguments they made about their research. Detailed analysis of the final reports produced by teams of students in the class revealed a significant relation between their fulfillment of the customary persuasive functions of a scientific research article and sustained correspondence with their telementors. A significant relation was also observed between sustained dialogue with telementors and careful hedging of knowledge claims. I situate these findings within a body of theory that suggests the value of telementoring relationships consists not only the ongoing advice and guidance they furnish, but in the ways that a professional audience shapes students' ideas about the sorts of arguments that are called for in science class. Because the analysis of genre use is a relatively noninvasive way to examine students' understandings of scientific persuasion (as compared with survey instruments or pull-out interviews), this method can serve as a useful tool for reformers wishing to compare the outcomes from iterations or conditions of design experiments that aim to develop students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. It may also make a useful transfer measure for a wide range of classroom innovations that aim to cultivate scientific reasoning and persuasion, such as science-oriented tools for computer-supported collaborative learning.     

Secondary science students’ beliefs about class discussions: a case study comparing and contrasting academic tracks

The dialogue that occurs in science classrooms has been the subject of research for many decades. Most studies have focused on the actual discourse that occurs and the role of the teacher in guiding the discourse. This case study explored the neglected perspective of secondary science students and their beliefs about their role in class discussions. The study participants (N?=?45) were students in one of the three differentially tracked chemistry classes taught by the same teacher. Findings about the differences that exist among students from different academic tracks are reported. While it seems that epistemological beliefs focusing on content are common for the students in this study, the students' social framing in the different tracks is important to consider when teachers attempt to transition to more dialogic forms of discourse. Some key findings of this study are (a) students’ beliefs that science is a body of facts to be learned influenced the factors they deemed important for whole-class discussion, (b) students from the lower-level track who typically were associated with lower socioeconomic status were more likely to view their role as passive, and (c) students’ comfort level with the members of the class seemed to influence their decisions to participate in class discussions.