Developing Epistemologies for Meaningful Science Knowledge Building: A Longitudinal Comparison of Sixth- and Eighth-Grade Classrooms

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Overview of presented research
Current reforms in science education emphasize scientific practices as the means by which students develop and use scientific ideas (NRC 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013). These reforms draw upon a situated perspective of learning in which students learn through participating in a community of practice to make progress towards a shared goal (e.g., Brown & Campione, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991). In science classrooms, this shared goal is to build scientific knowledge that is useful for explaining the natural world. Scientific practices, then, are the ways that students engage to build that knowledge.

Supporting students in engaging meaningfully in scientific practices is challenging because we do not know much about what students learn about the process of engaging in scientific practices, or how they come to see value in engaging in those practices. Careful research has begun to characterize what student engagement in specific practices looks like over time (e.g., Schwarz et al., 2009). However, students can still engage in the “doings” of the practices without an understanding of how and why those practices are useful for building knowledge (i.e., by rote). In addition to “doing” the practices, students should come to develop “hows and whys” undergirding those practices: both the practical disciplinary heuristics for how to build knowledge and why those epistemic heuristics are useful (Berland et al., 2015; Manz 2014) and a sense of epistemic identity that guides how they can participate in those practices in integral ways and why doing so is valuable to them (Nasir & Hand, 2008). My dissertation examines how classroom communities that successfully engage students meaningfully in scientific practices develop these epistemic “how and why” understandings that guide and undergird their knowledge building work.

My analysis views classrooms as communities of practice that are organized around an epistemic goal: building knowledge about the natural world. This theoretical lens defines learning as shifts in participation in practices, which indicate “the development of knowledgeably skilled identities in practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 55). In other words, learning requires both changes in “content” and disciplinary practices associated with that content, and changes in identity in terms of how one’s interaction with others positions them in particular ways with respect to their roles, responsibilities, and power in the context of that interaction. In alignment with this view of learning, I use two complimentary conceptual frameworks to analyze classroom members’ participation in service of their epistemic goal. The first, Epistemologies-in-Practice, identifies four key epistemic heuristics that are visible in students’ practice and productive for disciplinarily authentic engagement in scientific practices (Berland, et al., 2015). The second, practice-linked identities, identifies characteristics of the context of communities of practice that are conducive for supporting the development of students’ identities as they engage in the practices of that community (Nasir & Hand, 2005; 2008). I focus this second framework to look particularly at students’ epistemic practice-linked identities, or the ways that students position themselves and are positioned as knowledge-builders. Together, these frameworks propose a model for epistemological development that necessarily includes both conceptual and identity-related dimensions.

In this poster, I present results from analysis of a 6th grade chemistry unit and an 8th grade earth science unit that provide empirical support for my theoretical model of epistemological development. These units represent the first and last full units enacted during students’ 6th-8th grade science career. I highlight how the classroom communities’ epistemologies for science developed over the course of the 6th grade unit and over the course of the 8th grade unit. I draw parallels to identify similarities in the types of knowledge-building work that the classroom communities are engaged in, and use those parallels to then draw comparisons that highlight the distinctions in students’ use of disciplinary epistemologies in practice and in opportunities for developing epistemic practice-linked identities between these two time points. Future work will examine the four units enacted between 6th grade chemistry and 8th grade earth science to further articulate how these shifts gradually occurred over time.

Preliminary results
Over the course of the 6th grade chemistry unit, the classroom community’s answers to two epistemic considerations shifted. These epistemic considerations are questions that students implicitly consider and demonstrate an answer through their engagement in knowledge building work (Berland et al., 2015). In this abstract, I present how the classroom community’s answer to one of these considerations, “What kind of answer are we working to build?”, shifted over time. The poster will present similar data for two other considerations: “How does the idea we are trying to build relate to other phenomena and ideas?” and “How do we justify the ideas we are using?”

The classroom community’s implicit answer to the epistemic consideration “What kind of answer are we working to build?” shifts from providing “other accounts,” such as definitions and facts, to increasingly building mechanistic accounts: identifying underlying factors that could give rise to the phenomena they are discussing and reasoning through how and why those factors matter (Figure 4b). This represents learning of content, as students were developing particle models of matter that allowed them to explain physical phenomena more mechanistically. However, I argue that it also represents epistemic learning in that students to continue to identify the same types of underlying factors (entities such as particles, properties such as time and temperature, and behaviors such as bouncing and colliding), and they increasingly identified behaviors and spontaneously played out the implications of those behaviors as the unit progressed. In addition, the teacher’s prompts for various types of accounts remained relatively consisted throughout the unit (Figure 4a); students were not simply providing more mechanistic accounts because the teacher was asking questions that prompted them to do so more frequently. This suggests that not only did students learn that they were trying to build mechanistic accounts, they did so with increased flexibility in playing out the implications of their explanations, and they found those types of accounts to be useful enough to continue providing them even when the teacher was prompting for other accounts.

In addition, the classroom community’s epistemic identity shifted over the course of the unit from a classroom community that demonstrates knowledge through “idea show-and-tell” to one that builds and evaluates knowledge by seriously considering and modifying students’ proposed ideas. This shift provided increased participation by students in roles that positioned them as epistemic agents: rather than only stating their own ideas, students increasingly responded to others’ ideas by elaborating on them, modifying them, or refuting them. In addition, the teacher provided frequent demonstrations of high epistemic affect (Jaber & Hammer, 2015) early on, such as responding to students’ statement of ideas with, “What?! That’s so interesting!” or “Isn’t that crazy??” Her demonstrations faded over the course of the unit, giving way to expressions of epistemic care: reminding students of the importance of listening to each others’ ideas, and making sure that each student-proposed idea was clearly expressed and understood before others responded to it. As her expressions of epistemic care increased, students’ expressions of excitement in response to epistemic changes, such as when they thought of a potential explanation or after a peer clarified an idea, also increased. Taken together, these analyses suggest that the teacher first positioned herself as experiencing high epistemic affect from the initial ideas that students were “showing-and-telling.” This both validated the early contributions students made and modeled that these ideas were themselves inherently interesting and excitingly puzzling. The students too began responding with interest and excitement; as they did, they took on roles as epistemic agents who were actively engaged with their own and each others’ ideas. The teacher’s shift to a caring, supportive role affirmed and supported students as burgeoning knowledge builders.

Analysis of the relationship between the classroom community’s answers to the epistemic considerations and their epistemic identity in 6th grade is forthcoming, as is the parallel analysis of the 8th grade earth science unit and the comparisons between the two.

Significance
This study provides empirical support for how epistemic factors, including disciplinary criteria and practice-linked identities, are evident in students’ knowledge building work in practice. In particular, these two cases taken from a larger longitudinal study demonstrate the interconnectedness of how disciplinary epistemic considerations, students’ roles as epistemic agents, and expressions of epistemic affect and care contribute to developing epistemologies that guide students’ engagement in scientific practices. Additionally, the comparison of these two cases highlights how these epistemic factors may shift over the course of three years, providing an empirically-based hypothesis for epistemological development to be further developed through analysis of data from the time in between. Overall, this study contributes to our growing understanding of what students’ meaningful engagement in classroom scientific practices looks like and offers implications for how teachers can support it.

Author

• Christina R. Krist, Northwestern University