Epistemic Network Analysis of Exemplary Transactive Discourse Patterns in Middle School History Class

• In Event: 1-146 - Employing Quantitative Ethnography and Epistemic Network Analysis to Model Emotions and Discourse in Moral Development

Integrative Statement

This presentation discusses findings from a study that applied ENA to middle school history students’ peer discourse as they engaged in lessons designed to stimulate moral reasoning. Data for this analysis came from a year-long intervention with middle school teachers and students in a northern California school district (Midgette, et al., 2017). In that project, teachers worked together in lesson study groups to create lessons that addressed goals for student learning of history, along with the additional goal of promoting students’ moral development. This analysis was guided by a social domain theory framework for moral and character education (Nucci, 2009; Nucci, et al, 2015), which promotes small group peer discourse as a means of generating high-level reasoning.
Using the transactive discourse coding scheme (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1983) to ground our analysis, we found an exemplary pattern of discourse at particular points in students’ conversations. We saw five instances where representational and operational transacts were co-occurring at higher rates than during the same group’s other rounds of discourse. By closely examining the transcriptions of these instances, and utilizing techniques from discourse analysis and microanalytic research (Erickson, 2005), we attempted to shed light on the evolution of ideas during these intervals of intense transactivity, and flesh out the reasoning strategies that students employed. This presentation will focus on two of these instances where this pattern emerged and a certain amount of common ground was reached. I discuss potential implications of these styles of engagement for the role of discourse in moral development and education.
A key component of this analysis is the discourse protocol that students were instructed to use during these focal lessons. For example, the seventh grade lesson was related to feudal Japan. Students were instructed to take turns paraphrasing, elaborating, agreeing, and disagreeing with each other’s arguments, but often, they departed from the protocol to pursue an interesting line of inquiry. During the lesson on Japan, one student presented his group with a logical insight that rendered the dilemma a “lose-lose” situation. In the sequence of speech acts that follow, this student’s group-mates are challenging him and asking him to clarify his insight, which led to the high density of representational-operational connections.
These descriptive analyses are considered in light of the ENA results, which showed significantly different discourse patterns occurring between various rounds of structured discourse activities. Performing a close reading of the transcripts allowed us to investigate how students were interacting with the instructions and sentence-starters of these protocols. While transactive discourse has previously been conceptualized as a mechanism for measuring individual growth, this analysis takes the peer group as the unit of analysis, considering transactive discourse as a joint achievement. These findings have implications for how teachers can facilitate responsive engagement (Laden, 2012), a key component of critical moral education (Nucci, 2017), in their classrooms.

Author

• Robyn Ilten-Gee, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author