While conceptual uncertainties position students to engage in the disciplinary practices of science in meaningful ways, that engagement is dependent on how students respond to and manage such uncertainties. The current study examines various epistemological, social, and affective dynamics and how they influence the management of conceptual uncertainties in one group of middle school students in a science classroom. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we found that students’ persistence in disciplinary engagement is not only dependent on the presence and recognition of conceptual uncertainties but also on how students take up and manage challenges along epistemological, social, and affective dimensions. Our work can inform educators interested in supporting students to navigate the complex and multidimensional dynamics of collaborative sensemaking in service of promoting disciplinary engagement in science.
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Negotiating Tensions in Collaborations and its Role in Disciplinary Engagement in Science
While recent reforms in science education envision engaging students in doing science as a way to learn science, less is known about how such an engagement can take hold in the classroom. In an effort to address this gap, this study examines the dynamics of students’ disciplinary engagement in small groups in a middle school science classroom. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we conducted a comparative case analysis of three groups of students to examine the dynamics of their engagement along conceptual, epistemological, social, and affective dimensions. Through this analysis, our findings highlight tensions that emerge along these dimensions and the ways in which students negotiate these tensions in ways that support or hinder disciplinary engagement.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1720587
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10330973
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association
- ISSN:
- 0163-9676
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to understand the ways in which students' thinking can be maintained throughout the trajectory of science lessons. Past research in this area tends to foreground either the curriculum or teachers' practices. We propose a more comprehensive view of science instruction, one that requires attention to teachers' practice, the instructional task, and students' engagement. In this study, by examining the implementation of the same lesson across three different classrooms, our analysis of classroom videos and artifacts of students' work revealed how the interaction of teachers' practices, students' intellectual engagement, and a cognitively demanding task together support rigorous instruction. Our analyses shed light on their interaction that shapes opportunities for students' thinking and sensemaking throughout the trajectory of a science lesson. The findings provide implications for ways to promote rigorous opportunities for students' learning in science classrooms.
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