Student Behavior and Epistemological Framing: Examples from Collaborative Active-Learning Activities in Physics

Abstract

The concept of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics is useful for understanding student reasoning. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's framing affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We find evidence of framing in easily observed features of students' collaborative behavior. We apply this observational methodology to explore dynamics among behavior, framing, and the conceptual substance of student reasoning in the context of collaborative active-learning activities in an introductory university physics course. We find evidence that certain student behaviors indicate and support a relatively sophisticated epistemological framing of these activities, one in which students discuss the substance of the ideas at hand.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Andrew Elby, E. F. Redish, and the other members of the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Maryland for substantive discussions of this research. Raymond Hodges, Ayush Gupta, and Luke Conlin served as additional coders for inter-rater reliability. We also thank Luke Conlin for his contributions to the preparation and analysis of data. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (REC 0440113).

Notes

¹ Frames, scripts, and schemata are related and overlapping terms in the fields of linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. An overview and history of the uses of these related terms appears in ch. 1 of Tannen (1993).

² Linguistic markers include omissions, repetitions, negatives, modals, and so on and are described in ch. 1 of Tannen (1993).

³ There is the possibility of the speaker acting as though she is engaged in a lively discussion while in fact not experiencing genuine engagement. For frame analysis in the context of acting, see Goffman (1986).

⁴ Students' names are pseudonyms.

⁵ These groups were not the only “watchable” groups; some videotaped groups were not classified. These groups included average, above-average, and below-average students as measured by their overall performance in the course. “Watchable” groups were not typically better than average or more successful in mastering the conceptual content of the tutorials, except to the extent that on-task groups tend to do better than off-task groups.

⁶ This result is partially to be expected: because peers' activity together is mutually constructed, it is natural that they should share their framing of a given situation and therefore participate in the same behavioral cluster. On the other hand, it seems possible that individuals could “opt out” of the framing mutually constructed by the others in the group. This article reports brief occurrences of such opting-out or mismatch of framings. However, the great majority of the time, peers share the same behavioral cluster.

⁷ Sometimes, for example, they exhibit “green” behaviors with a TA nearby or even joining the discussion.

⁸ The episode continues for another 12 conversational turns before the students shift back to blue cluster behaviors.

⁹ His reasoning is not correct; see Russ and Hutchison (2006) for a discussion about correctness and mechanistic reasoning.