Developing a Climate of High-Quality Epistemic Discourse in Elementary Science

• In Event: Following the Thread From Planning to High-Quality Discourse About Science

Abstract

In this presentation, our basic assertion is that high quality epistemic discourse centers around engaging in argument. Argumentation in science education is typically focused on the making and warranting of explanatory claims about the world. We follow Manz’ (2014) recent formulation of argument as a discourse that arises to stabilize points of contestation that can arise just about anywhere in scientific work, including claims about the world and claims about how to investigate the world. Students, like scientists, can argue about the questions they are asking, how to carry out investigations, how to represent and interpret data, and so on. From this perspective, then, getting students to engage in high quality discourse requires creating and sustaining conditions where students are accountable to themselves and each other for what counts as knowing in particular classrooms.

Loosely, high quality epistemic discourse is talk in which students are focused on the substance of each other’s ideas, the epistemic status of claims (about the world or about efforts to investigate the world) is explicitly evaluated, and the standards of such evaluations are also made explicit. Our view is that such discourse arises mainly when students recognize a disagreement among publicly available claims in the classroom. Our analytic approach to analyzing the quality of epistemic discourse in the classroom is to look for assertions of claims in public talk, primarily whole class discussions. These may be claims about the world (e.g., the human leg contains 62 bones), or claims about how to investigate the world (e.g., obtaining an accurate count of bones requires counting multiple times and taking the modal answer). We then look for instances when multiple claims are recognized as discrepant, and how such discrepancies are, or are not, taken up by the teacher and students. In our work we have been most interested in what teachers do to create and shape opportunities for epistemic discourse.

In this presentation, we synthesize findings from a set of studies of elementary classrooms where students engaged in a range of what we consider to be from low to high quality epistemic discourse. Through this we advance some claims about the necessary features of classrooms where students engage in high quality discourse. First, students must be engaged with claims that are legitimately contestable. Contestability has to do with both the nature of the claims being made as well as the ways the status of claims are framed by teachers. Second, there must be material and semiotic resources available for students to use to settle such contests; that is, the means to decide one claim is better than another. Third, teachers can use specific talk moves to scaffold students’ participation in this stabilizing talk. Finally, such teacher talk is effective only to the extent students have authentic epistemic agency. We frame our discussion in relation to how they might inform the construct of epistemic climate (Muis & Duffy, 2013) in classrooms.

Authors

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles

• Noel D. Enyedy, University of California - Los Angeles

• Sihan Xiao, University of California - Los Angeles

• Elizabeth Horst Redman, University of California - Los Angeles