Students' Meaning‐making of Socio‐scientific Issues in Computer Mediated Settings: Exploring learning through interaction trajectories

Abstract

This article reports on a study concerning secondary school students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings. Our theoretical argument has as its point of departure the analytical distinction between ‘doing science’ and ‘doing school,’ as two different forms of classroom activity. In the study we conducted an analysis of students working with web‐based groupware systems concerned with genetics. The analysis identified how the students oriented their accounts of scientific concepts and how they attempted to understand the socio‐scientific task in different ways. Their orientations were directed towards finding scientific explanations, towards exploring the ethical and social consequences, and towards ‘fact‐finding.’ The students’ different orientations seemed to contribute to an ambivalent tension, which, on the one hand, was productive because it urged them into ongoing discussions and explicit meaning‐making. On the other hand, however, the tension elucidated how complex and challenging collaborative learning situations can be. Our findings suggest that in order to obtain a deeper understanding of students’ meaning‐making of socio‐scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology‐mediated settings, it is important not only to address how students perform the activity of ‘doing science.’ It is equally important to be sensitive with respect to how students orient their talk and activity towards more or less explicit values, demands, and expectations embedded in the educational setting. In other words, how students perform the activity of ‘doing school.’

Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by InterMedia, The University of Oslo, CMC (http://www.cmc.uio.no/) and Telenor R&I. The authors would like to thank their colleagues at InterMedia, the participants in the Ph.D. programme at the Faculty of Education ‘Communication, learning and ICT,’ Mona Nilsen, Thomas Ryberg, Trond Haugerud, and Cecilie Flo Jahreie, for very constructive feedback on drafts. Especially the authors want to thank Professor Roger Säljö, Dr Sally Barnes and Dr Sibel Erduran for feedback on this manuscript. Finally, thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. Jiménes‐Aleixandre et al. (2000) also use the term ‘doing lesson’ as equivalent to the term “doing school.”

2. The DoCTA‐NSS project was based on ideas from design based research (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992). Design experiments represent a critique of, and differ in interesting ways from, both laboratory experiments and naturalistic investigations (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004). For further descriptions of the project, see Wasson and Ludvigsen (2003).

3. See online: http://fle2.uiah.fi/

4. For further descriptions of the DoCTA‐NSS project, see Wasson and Ludvigsen (2003).

5. [ ] Text in square brackets represents clarifying information.

⌈⌊ Simultaneous/overlapping talk.

= Absence of discernible gap.

? Rising intonation.

: When a sound is longer than normal.

Underlined Emphasis in talk.

(.) Short pause in the speech.

CAPITALS Loud speak.