Explaining Newton’s Laws of Motion: Using Student Reasoning Through Representations to Develop Conceptual Understanding

• In Event: Roundtable Session 118
  In Roundtable Session: Learning Science Through Engaging With Its Representational Practices

Abstract

1. Objectives of study
In this study we aimed to investigate secondary students’ learning on the topic of motion when they engaged in a sequence of teacher-guided representational challenges where they were expected to make causal claims about this topic. The study aimed to identify (1) the reasoning processes used by students in responding to this sequence of representational challenges, and (2) teaching and learning principles that support this learning.
2. Theoretical framework
There is strong recent interest in researching students’ reasoning and argumentation in the science classroom (Alozie, Moje & Kajcik, 2010; Osborne, 2010), drawing mainly on Toulmin’s (1958) model of formal syllogistic reasoning. By contrast, our study, drawing on pragmatic semiotic theories of learning science literacy (Lemke, 2003), and epistemic accounts of science-learning as knowledge production through claim-making (Ford & Forman, 2006), investigated students’ use of informal practical reasoning around constructing explanatory accounts of classroom inquiry.
3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The mixed methods approach entailed collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data using a case study approach (Merriam, 1998). Methods included identification of patterns in students’ reasoning in classroom observation, student and teacher interviews, with independent and collective analyses of student artefacts, test results, classroom interactions, and interviews.
4. Data sources, evidence, objects
One teacher and 17 Year-10 students participated in the topic of motion in a natural classroom setting in Australia over 7 weeks. In a sequence of representational challenges students justified and refined their claims through interaction with peers and the teacher. Analysed data included videotaped lessons, student artefacts, and teacher and student interview transcripts.
5. Results
Students used a range of reasoning processes to generate and critique their own and others representations. These included informal, contextual reasoning based on observations and data collection, perceptual pattern-spotting, approximations, enactment and re-representation of experiments, dialogic classroom conversations and elaboration of contested perspectives to clarify claims, inductive reasoning from examples, deductive reasoning from principles to new cases, logical analyses of the adequacy and coherence of their own and others’ representational and re-representational claims, and negotiation of enacted and verbal/linguistic shared understandings. Students also found this approach to science far more motivating and effective compared to past traditional approaches.
6. Scholarly significance of study
We suggest that this teacher-guided student representational work provides critical learning opportunities for students’ conceptual learning. By using representations as contestable artefacts needing justification and elaboration, students practice habits of mind and reasoning skills central to scientific literacy. As noted by Ford and Forman (2006), unless school students learn to construct and interpret accounts of their observations and reasoning, and become active in the learning process, then their learning can become constrained and superficial. This paper indicates that students’ own language and representational work can function as a crucial resource and starting point for guided productive reasoning in this topic and more broadly in science.

Authors

• Bruce G. Waldrip, Monash University

• Vaughan Prain, La Trobe University