Characterizing Student Participation in an ISLE Physics Class

Abstract

Abstract. In the participationist perspective, learning is viewed in terms of how students transform their participation. However, many of the seminal papers discussing the participationist framework are vague on specific details about what student participation really looks like on a more fine-grained scale. As part of a larger project to understand the role of student participation in learning, we are trying to characterize the ways in which physics students participate in group activities and discussions while they are constructing new knowledge. The context for our study is a student-centered introductory calculus-based physics class structured around the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) philosophy. In this paper we will discuss some of the patterns of participation we have found and some of the challenges we have encountered in trying to code and quantify student participation from analyzing video data.

Social positioning correlates with consensus building in two contentious large-group meetings

“…Prior research and preliminary work of ours [9] suggest that students who make hedged statements to soften their position open up the space for collaboration and sense-making. A hedge is a phrase that can "soften" a statement.…”

“…This idea has been modified and extended so that we now understand that students can dynamically position themselves in a conversation thus creating a transient positional identity [11,12]. Research suggests that these positional identities and the bids or moves that people make to establish them can open up or close down the collaborative space to productive sensemaking [9,11,13].…”

“…Based on these ideas, we have refined a previously developed coding scheme [9], to identify students' positional moves during a conversation. The coding scheme is explained in Section III B.…”

“…The refined coding scheme retains five positional moves from the original framework [9]. A student who positions themselves as an "expert" providing an idea or answering a question can do so in a "firm" manner or "softened" manner, using hedges.…”

“…Looking at these students' discussions through a participationist lens [8], we compare and contrast the dynamics of social positioning for the two. We have refined and used a coding scheme that was developed previously [9], which now identifies five social positioning "moves" students use in conversation with each other.…”