Enacting acts of authentication in a robotics competition: An interpretivist study

Abstract

While the science classroom primarily remains a site for knowledge acquisition through teacher directed experiences, other sites exist outside of the classroom that allow for student generation of scientific knowledge. These sites provide opportunities for linguistic and social interactions to play a powerful role in situating students' science learning experiences. Augmenting students' formal school science experiences with informal experiences outside of the classroom enables them to intersect their personal knowledge with canonical disciplinary knowledge. This allows for conditions of practice that are more relevant to the students. In this study we introduce the notion of acts of authentication to examine the nature of students' linguistic and social activities in an informal setting—a regional robotics competition. These acts of authentication are a) participating in talk (including everyday); b) participating in productive disciplinary engagement (by co‐constructing and critiquing knowledge); and c) being a member of a community of practice. We used Critical Discourse Analysis to examine students' and mentor's dialogic language to gain insights into the nature of their robotics experiences. Our findings indicate that the robotics experience offered rich opportunities for students to engage in acts of authentication. Our study offers conceptual insights into how the culture of the robotics activities both constructs and is constructed by the linguistic and social experiences of the students and their mentors. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 268–295, 2015

The Role of Robotics Teams’ Collaboration Quality on Team Performance in a Robotics Tournament

“…However, they did not explore the role of collaboration on team performance. Furthermore, both of these studies involved small samples: Verma et al () studied one team with nine individuals, and Jordan and McDaniel's study () included one classroom with 24 students working in groups of three to four members.…”

Representing scientific activity: Affordances and constraints of central design and enactment features of a model‐based inquiry unit

“…This is particularly true because teachers creating and cultivating these types of learning environments are faced with decisions about how best to scaffold student learning by helping students become familiar with both the tacit and more explicit knowledge of the scientific community (i.e., disciplinary core ideas in the NGSS), while at the same time supporting their familiarity and facility with the sense‐making practices that help the scientific community refine and arrive at explicit scientific knowledge. One context for thinking about this work is offered by Verma, Puvirajah, and Webb (), who describe participation in communities of practice:

Learners are initiated into communities of practice through various ways such as … working with experienced members of the community … The experienced and expert members of the community gradually familiarize the learner to both tacit and explicit knowledge and skills of the community while being inclusive of learner’s background … In this setting, one of the ways in which novice student participants are initiated into the knowledge and culture of a community is through appropriate support from more knowledgeable members of the community [i.e., the teacher] (p. 273).

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First-hand Experience with Engineering Design and Career Interest in Engineering: An Informal STEM Education Case Study

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“…School is accepted as a formal learning setting where students perform their social activities and make sense of their learning and understanding to seek ways of participating and being in the world (Verma, Puvirajah, & Webb, 2015). However, regular school environments discourage students from being more engaged and developing responsibility for their learning, which demotivates their understanding (Gardner, 1991).…”