Micro-Changes in Scientific Explanations as a Result of Kinesthetic and Sensory Experience

• In Event: 52.069 - Just a Minute! New Methods for Observing Conceptual Change in STEM

Abstract

Science and mathematics education researchers have learned a great deal about student thinking and conceptual change from interviews with youth, although it bears noting that the “sit down and answer questions” format has long been the dominant form of researcher-participant interaction. As attention has broadened to consider that non-linguistic communication modalities are critical for learning and thinking (e.g., Hall & Nemirovsky, 2012), it is incumbent upon us as a research community to consider the implications of engaging multiple modalities for the study of micro-changes that take place in thinking and learning. For instance, should we reasonably expect that student thinking through a word problem about projectile motion would yield the activation of different knowledge than a situation where a student actually throws a heavy object and explains why it behaves in the way that it did? The goal of this presentation is to examine how such kinesthetic and sensory engagements like those can influence student thinking related to physics. It is informed by work in embodied cognition (e.g., Abrahamson & Lindgren, 2014; Barsalou, 1999; Wilson, 2002) in addition to the Knowledge-in-Pieces framework (diSessa, 1988) that has already been successfully used to pursue fine-grained analysis of science and mathematics knowledge in use.

To date, some initial evidence is appearing from a corpus of semi-structured interviews (N=24) that slight, but discernable, changes in knowledge activation take place when students physically enact a scenario and talks about it rather than when they talk about it devoid of any immediately related sensory experience (Author, 2016). As will be discussed in this presentation, work still remains in terms of articulating the nature of micro-change phenomena as they involve embodied sensory experiences. Through a video-recorded case of a high school student tasked with explaining how gearing in a multi-speed bicycle worked, immediately riding a bicycle in different gear settings, and then again explaining how gearing worked, I will show how many of the same knowledge elements remain cued but configurations of causal relations change. Furthermore, I will discuss by way of detailed process analysis how what is perceived as most salient and relevant as a causal entity changes in response to what a student physically feels and experiences at the time they are asked to produce some explanatory reasoning.

Increasing our awareness of how embodiment plays a role in thinking and learning may help shape what we consider to be influences on student learning. For instance, it is widely recognized that students can learn to solve various problems when they are talked about in the classroom but then show vastly different thinking when they use such knowledge out in the rest of the world. By characterizing how everyday physical experiences affect formal disciplinary knowledge, we should be able to make more progress in helping students to develop robust conceptualizations that are considerate of what they feel and experience in everyday life.

Author

• Victor R. Lee, Utah State University