Affordances of computers in teacher-student interactions: The case of interactive physics™

The study reported here is part of a larger project designed to understand student learning during conversations with their teacher over and about a computer-based Newtonian microworld (Interactive Physics?). At the focus of this report are affordances of the microworld to a teacher who engaged his students in conversations about representations of phenomenal objects and conceptual entities that constitute the microworld. The study shows how the teacher used the context of Interactive Physics? to identify students' ways of seeing and talking science. He then implemented a series of strategies to make forces “visible” to students. Data are provided to illustrate that students' learning was not local but persistent, so that they used appropriate canonical science talk without teacher support. The conclusion focuses on Interactive Physics? as a tool that does not embed meaning as such, but takes on meaning as part of the specific (scientific) practices in the context of which it was used. This view of science as a discourse helps us to see scientific literacy not as the acquisition of specific facts and procedures or even as the refinement of a mental model, but as a socially and culturally produced way to thinking and knowing, with its own ways of talking, reasoning, and acting; its own norms, beliefs, and values; its own institutions; its shared history; and even its shared mythologies (Roseberry, Warren, & Conant, 1992, p. 65).