Students' Roles in Group-Work with Visual Data: A Site of Science Learning

Abstract

Learning science includes learning to argue with inscriptions: images used to symbolize information persuasively. This study examined sixth-graders learning to invest inscriptions with representational status, in a geographic information system (GIS)–based science investigation. Learning to reason with inscriptions was studied in emergent participation patterns in groups, operationalized as roles. Cross-case analyses compared developmental trajectories for two roles in each group: competitive challenger and quiet bystander. Role development mediated learning to reason with inscriptions, including (1) co-assembling “representational states” of data and (2) managing dialectical tensions of argumentation. Role was operationalized as a site of learning, intersecting individual and collective processes, rather than a mechanism of one impacting another. Distributed conceptions of practice support this approach for understanding how students learn to do science.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0337598. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The author expresses his appreciation to Carlos Rodriguez, Kimberly Alamar, José Trigueros, and Jennifer Mundt Leimberer for their collaboration and insights; the students who participated in this research for their patience; Isabel Arias, Sonia Oliva, and Luis Sanchez for their tireless work on data collection; Susan Goldman and Melissa Singer for their collaboration in this research and feedback on this article; and Noel Enyedy for his valuable insights and guidance.

Notes

¹This emphasis on persuasive argumentation resonates with Latour's (1990) sociohistorical analysis of scientific practices. According to Latour, the power of inscriptions lies not simply in their efficiency at graphically displaying quantities and relationships, but in the social affordances of these displays for mobilizing resources for particular purposes: “If you want to understand what draws things together, then look at what draws things together” (p. 60).

²This representation of earthquakes is simplified from that used by students in the GIS, in order to improve the print visibility of the figure. In MyWorld the students used three layers of earthquake data sets, divided by ranges of magnitude, with some differentiation of magnitudes by dot size and color. Volcano locations (all known, active or dormant) were represented by uniformly-sized red dots.

³The scientifically accepted boundary of Mt. Etna's plate does include all of Eurasia, a possibility that both Cecilia and Juanita pondered at various points in time, although never with confidence. The plate boundary favored by Violeta, marked “B” in Figure 4, is actually an outline of a part of the boundary (a wide swath of earthquakes), rather than a tracing of a boundary around a plate.

⁴Placa tectonica” is Spanish for “tectonic plate.

⁵See Singer, Radinsky, and Goldman (in press) for a discussion of the role of gesture in these exchanges.

⁶These purposes are in no way pre-determined by the data: this group might well have questioned how big a plate should be, what plate Mt. Fuji was on, or whether particular parts of their boundary could connect (all would have been relevant, given an ambiguous area near the Marianas Trench that the group spent time discussing). Other groups studying Mt. Fuji in other classes have engaged in these kinds of debates.