Cultivating a higher level of student agency in collective discussion: teacher strategies to navigate student scientific uncertainty to develop a trajectory of sensemaking

ABSTRACT

In a traditional lecturing environment, students possess limited agency in accepting or rejecting information provided by teachers. A higher level of student agency involves opportunities and actively identifying uncertainties and collaborating with peers to deepen understanding within the classroom community. Teachers play a crucial role in guiding students through sensemaking by addressing uncertainties and assisting in solution development. Student uncertainty is recognized as a pedagogical resource, engaging them in sensemaking and enhancing agency levels. This study analyzed 28 whole-class discussions led by seven science teachers, identifying three phases: problematization, coherence negotiation, and new understanding enactment. The teachers employed eight strategies leveraging student scientific uncertainty as pedagogical resources within three sequential methods: eliciting awareness of uncertainty (e.g., creating hybrid, ambiguous, and problem-solving spaces), seeking a coherent understanding (e.g., connecting students' lived experiences to empirical data for coherence, juxtaposing different interpretations to build consensus, and weaving together student ideas for coherence), and demonstrating new understanding (e.g., transference, translation). By embracing uncertainty, students become agents of sensemaking, contributing to a collaborative learning environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Student agency
• scientific uncertainty
• teacher-student dialogue
• sensemaking

Acknowledgement

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s)and do not necessarily reflect those of NSF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The research presented in this study was approved by Arizona State University Human Subjects and Internal Review Board with approval number # STUDY00005411.

Notes

1 Due to the limited funding, each project could only finically support the author to collaborate with 1–3 teachers. Therefore, the author secured several small-scale grants over six years to explore the research questions focusing on how science teachers leverage student scientific uncertainties to develop a trajectory of sensemaking.

2 For the following paper, ‘the author’ will be used ‘I’ to replace.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF): [Grant Number 2100879].