Contribution to Learning: A Lens to Understand and Encourage Students’ Engagement With Physics

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Laws of Attraction: Developing and Maintaining Interest in STEM Fields

Abstract

This paper draws on the concept of contribution to activity to argue for and use its affordance to understand and foster students’ engagement in science education and changing the role they can play in science. Using cultural-historical activity theory and Engeström’s “Change lab” method of intervention in two introductory physics courses, I used contribution as a necessary lens to understand the role of students as well as facilitating their understanding of themselves while taking part in a short-time activity of a course. Analysis of the change lab conversations and students’ interviews, show that the proposed intervention opened a way for students to understand their roles, resources and engagement in the course in a new light.

Author

• Sanaz Farhangi, New York University