Exploring the Teacher’s Role in Discourse and Social Regulation of Learning: Insights from Collaborative Sessions in High-School Physics Classrooms

Abstract

Science educators incorporate collaborative engagement in model-based argumentation to meet curricular goals and build students’ capacity for scientific epistemic and social practices. During collaboration, groups encounter various challenges (e.g., lack of task understanding) and engage in social regulation to overcome them. However, little is known about whether and how various contextual factors (e.g., teacher presence, classroom climate, or academic discipline) can influence the nature of students’ collaboration and social regulation. The purpose of our qualitative case study was to examine how one such contextual factor, teacher presence, related to high school students’ discourse interactions and social regulation of learning during a collaborative model-based scientific argumentation task. In one classroom, the teacher was continuously present during groups’ discussions. In the other classroom, the teacher was intermittently present. We found that groups with a continuously present teacher had high on-task engagement that was teacher-led, with the students relying on the teacher for regulation. Groups with intermittent teacher presence had more off-task interactions but also engaged in more dialogic argumentation discourse with each other, initiating and enacting more modes of social regulation of learning than the other groups. These findings suggest that teachers must thoughtfully manage their presence and absence to instruct, model, scaffold, and fade their support for both scientific argumentation and the social regulation skills necessary to productively enact that argumentation, intentionally varying emphasis on one or the other. These findings highlight the importance of future research on teacher presence and other contextual factors that can affect how students collaborate and learn.

Acknowledgments

We thank the teachers and students who participated in this study. We are grateful to Erik Jacobson, Executive Editor, and the three anonymous journal reviewers for their helpful feedback and guidance on previous versions of this article. We also thank Bethany Daniel, Sarah Lee, and Lana Ćosić, Editorial Assistants, for their tireless work and support.

Declaration of interest

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No. 1316347 to the Pennsylvania State University and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1144081 to Dalila Dragnić-Cindrić. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.