Structuring Class Conversation to Allow Variations in Students' Ideas About Condensation

• In Event: 28.071 - Designing for and Engaging With Heterogeneity in Students' Thinking in Science

Abstract

Purpose

Supporting the exploration of multiple ideas in science classrooms is challenging yet desired work. The research community’s focus has largely been on students’ emerging practices (Manz, 2015; Schwarz et al., 2009). We build on these conversations, as part of a larger project, by following the lifeline of ideas to explore why certain ideas are taken up more readily than others, and how negotiating ideas is necessary to understand students’ shared practices. Our poster focuses on a teacher’s facilitation moves that foster the consideration of heterogeneous ideas about condensation in ways that support the students’ shared efforts to build knowledge together.

Perspectives

We take a genetic perspective on the trajectory of students’ ideas (Saxe et al., 2009) helps to illuminate the conditions that allow students to consider a variation of ideas and what contributes to certain often unexpected ideas being more attractive than others.

Methods & Data Sources

We collected data from a 3-session classroom intervention design (Table 1) using a computational modeling tool, (blinded for review), with 5th graders trying to model condensation. We conducted a content analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to detail how students negotiated multiple ideas and how facilitation supported particular kinds of interactions.

Results
We found certain conditions useful to students’ consideration of multiple competing ideas, that mapped to teacher’s moves, representational tools, and participation structures (e.g., group discussions, gallery walks). For example, on the second day, the students watched a video where condensation appeared on a glass filled with ice and water. One student, Sheree, offered that “fog” appears on the glass because “It came from the room temperature or something.” The teacher asked her to elaborate on the idea of “room temperature,” Sheree suggested the place was “hot” and the ice melted with the water. The teacher asked her to explicate the relationship between hot air and the “fog.” Sheree offered that “it is cold water or something.” The teacher summarized her idea as “something about the combination of hot air and cold water.” The teacher’s questions allowed the word “fog,” which can hold many meanings, to persist while asking the student to attend to consistency between aspects of her idea. The teacher, without specifying what “fog” is, related the question “where does [the fog] come from?” to students’ daily experience riding in heated cars in cold weather. Some students agreed with this observation further supporting the idea of temperature differentials, while one student, James, challenged the conditions when fog appears on car windows “the car is not on and the heat is not on” but there is fog outside. The teacher’s moves that emphasized on consistency with everyday experiences, coupled with the generative ambiguity of “fog” created conditions where multiple ideas could be considered.

Significance

This poster highlighted a teacher’s facilitative moves in maintaining conditions where students’ ideas were negotiated to develop more refined models and explanations about condensation.

Authors

• Yara Shaban, Tufts University

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University