Exploring Everyday Talk as Scientific Talk

• In Event: Activating Young Science Learners: Igniting Persistent Engagement in Science Learning and Inquiry

Abstract

The purpose of this poster session is to depict the results of an investigation of the following questions: (1) what does it mean to talk like a scientist? and (2) how might we analyze this children’s “talk” as a way to assess his or her “activation” in science. We situate this investigation within a particular perspective. A great deal of science learning, often unacknowledged, takes place outside school in informal environments—including everyday activities, designed spaces, and programs—as individual learners navigate across a range of social settings (NRC, 2009). In these environments, learners create both physical and virtual objects, engage in friendship-driven and interest-driven activities, and participate in everyday sensemaking. One of the principal lenses that we leverage in our efforts to understand what children understand, and how they understand it, is language.

With respect to science learning, especially in out of school contexts, language provides family members, mentors and interested others with a means for talking about science phenomena, scientific processes, scientific methods, and science objects. Talking science, as Lemke (1990,pg. 4) has argued, is indeed a “culturally transmitted resource for making meaning socially.” Children’s comments and descriptions that classify, compare, contrast, and consider the cause and effect about phenomena illustrate that students have ways of making sense of science even though their conceptual framing and vocabulary may not be “scientific” (Osborne & Freyberg, 1985) in the canonical sense (Gomez, 2007).

In this poster presentation, we offer theoretical and methodological frames for exploring everyday talk as scientific talk drawing from an empirical analysis of science talk by nineteen 6th graders from the San Francisco East Bay Area. Using a combination of interviews, digital photography, journaling, samples of student work and external validation with an online survey, we examine the specific science talk and language children choose to tell their stories, describe problems, and participate in situated activities that can signal how they understand science and engage in scientific ways of knowing. These analyses found that all children were able to both identify science in their world and readily offer descriptions of scientific phenomena, relating them to other ideas when considering both everyday science and canonical language as frames to examine talk. In addition, a subset of students was able to offer deeper explanations about processes and “talk” like a scientist, making comparisons, predictions, and recognizing anomalies in nature. The frequency of occurrences of this science talk correlated with their level of curiosity in science as measured by an online survey of science activation (p=.05,2-tailed).

The work presented herein offers a significant contribution to a growing body of evidence that considers science talk itself as an object of investigation (see Ash et al., 2008; Bruna, 2008; Lemke, 1990; Moje et. al., 2001), as well as a methodology used to capture science talk situated in different designed learning environments and the everyday activities of children. This work also offers important perspectives on the larger investigation of science learning activation by providing qualitative methods of inquiry that compliment quantitative measurement efforts.

Authors

• Sherry H. Hsi, University of California - Berkeley

• Megan R. Luce, Stanford University

• Kimberley Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles