Explanations from intra- and inter-group discourse: Students building knowledge in the science classroom

This article discusses the relation and patterns of intra- and inter-group discourse as middle school students explain particular phenomena. We present a framework of the dynamic process involved in generating collaborative knowledge. Our focus is on connecting students' thinking and experience with science concepts and explanations. Using the perspective of learning as a social activity, we are interested in science teaching that engages students in collaborative inquiry as a means for learning science content. Specifically, we examine the role of shared inquiry and the nature of consensus-building in students' development of explanations from a collaborative knowledge-building stance. Student discourse, in small (intra-group) and large (inter-group) contexts, is examined as an explicit mode of inquiry. While additional study is needed, we contend these two forms of discourse (constructive and generative; dialectic and persuasive) effectively promote progressive discourse and thereby facilitate shared coherent explanations of phenomena. If we now consider dialectics rather than method as the logic of science, the whole image changes because of the essential, constitutive role played by interlocutors. Due to this role, science becomes a game with three players: an inquiring mind, or, more realistically, a group of the communityC ₁, natureN, and another group of the communityC ₂. (Pera, 1994, p. 133).