What Contributes to Students "Doing Science" in Classrooms?

• In Event: 14.014 - A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation About Productive Disciplinary Engagement

Abstract

In a fifth-grade classroom, students were discussing how molecules pack together or spread apart when objects are cooled and heated—a model from their textbook. When a student brings up that water expands in a freezer, another student, Jared, points out an inconsistency: If molecules pack together when they freeze, shouldn’t water should get smaller instead of expanding? Jared’s peers don’t immediately see the problem. For several minutes, they debate how the size of an ice cube compares to the size of liquid water and what it means for molecules to “spread out” or “pack together.” Once they agree on the problem, they work to address it and come up with a revised model for how water molecules pack together.
We present this as an episode of students’ disciplinary engagement in science, as a part of a larger project to examine how “doing science” starts and sustains in classrooms. To select examples of doing science, we screened classroom videos with a team of professional scientists, choosing episodes they saw as science. In this way, we identified clear, uncontroversial examples to analyze; for the purposes of this project, we decided to avoid the challenge of defining precise boundaries.
We presented 16 episodes to our team, primarily from elementary classrooms and undergraduate courses; nine passed as clear examples. We developed an approach to analyzing the dynamics, drawing on existing methodology around video analysis (Derry, et al., 2010), knowledge analysis (diSessa, 1993; Tannen, 1993), and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). We then conducted detailed moment-to-moment analyses of each example, to examine what contributed to the classroom dynamics, and then looked across the cases for patterns.
We will present three themes for this symposium:
1) Positioning as not understanding: In all episodes, someone positioned themselves as not understanding a phenomenon or idea, and this was consequential for the conceptual, epistemological, and social dynamics. For example, Jared positioned himself as uncertain about how a model could explain everyday observations.
2) Formulating a problem: In most but not all of the episodes, students worked to identify, articulate, and motivate an inconsistency or gap in their understanding. Jared, with help from another student, worked to convince the class there was an inconsistency, which involved finding different ways to explain it.
3) Epistemic vexation: In all episodes, students displayed feelings of “vexation” around the inconsistencies they observed. Jared’s puzzlement was evident in his tone and vivid gestures as he argued for his question. As other students noticed the inconsistency, they also displayed signs of confusion and irritation. We argue that these feelings helped drive their engagement.
We will discuss how these themes connect to the notion of problematizing (Engle & Conant, 2002; Engle, 2012) and to emerging work on students’ experiences, understandings, and feelings of uncertainty in science (Manz, 2014, 2015; Engle, 2012).

Authors

• Jessica Watkins, Tufts University

• David Hammer, Tufts University

• Jennifer Radoff, University of Maryland - College Park

• Anna McLean Phillips, Tufts University