PERC 2024 Abstract Detail Page
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| Abstract Title: | Learners' engagement in sensemaking |
|---|---|
| Abstract Type: | Talk Symposium |
| Abstract: | Sensemaking is a central epistemic practice in doing physics. How do physics learners engage in different forms of sensemaking? How do learners build a sense of understanding? What are the individual, social, discursive, and cultural (disciplinary and others) mechanisms that lead to the emergence of a novel explanation or insight from a sensemaking process, or inhibit learners' productive engagement in the process? How do processes of sensemaking unfold at the individual and collaborative levels? This session brings together four presentations that explore different aspects of these questions from different theoretical perspectives, in a variety of contexts of learning physics. |
| Session Time: | Parallel Sessions Cluster 1 |
| Room: | Harbor I |
Author/Organizer Information | |
| Primary Contact: |
Shulamit Kapon Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel |
Parallel Session Information | |
| Format Description: | - Orientation (2 minutes) - Four presentations (18 minutes each: 16 minutes talk & 2 minutes clarifying questions and turnover) - Synthesis and framing of the big questions (6 minutes) - Open discussion with audience (10 minutes) |
| Moderator: | Shulamit Kapon, Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel |
Symposium Specific Information | |
| Presentation 1 Title: | A causal diagram representation for communicating resource coordination challenges and goals in qualitative covariation |
| Presentation 1 Authors: | Eric Kuo, Departments of Physics and Curriculum & Instruction, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| Presentation 1 Abstract: | Though students possess productive resources for qualitative covariational inference in physics (i.e. "If X increased, what can you infer about Y?"), they may not apply those resources in canonically correct ways. How can these productive resources be leveraged for building normative physical reasoning? This constructivist process has been described using theoretical metaphors, such as "resource re-coordination" or "knowledge refinement." While useful for describing an orientation towards learning, the weakness of these metaphors is that they do not communicate any details about the resource re-coordination process. In this talk, I will illustrate how a causal diagram representation can communicate a widespread core issue in qualitative covariational inference: coordination of multiple, simultaneous covariational relationships. I will show how this causal diagram representation can connect documented reasoning errors in PER literature and can describe one dimension of resource re-coordination needed to align student reasoning with canonical physics. I will end by discussing strengths and weaknesses of this approach for deepening our understanding of qualitative covariational reasoning in physics and communicating the process of resource coordination. |
| Presentation 2 Title: | Supporting students' productive engagement with difficulties |
| Presentation 2 Authors: | David Hammer, Departments of Education and Physics & Astronomy, Tufts University |
| Presentation 2 Abstract: | Explicit description of "student difficulties" in PER generally defines them as recurrent, incorrect ideas or patterns of reasoning. The patterns are especially difficult to address when students are not troubled by them; instruction generally begins with eliciting and confronting the incorrect lines of reasoning. It is when students experience the difficulties that they may be motivated to resolve them and make progress toward canonical understanding. That is, within these accounts, students' experiencing difficulties in an essential part of learning. Scholarship on sensemaking has argued for a shift of priories. It attends to students' experiencing difficulties not only as a pedagogical approach toward canonical understanding but as a target of instruction in itself. Physicists, we can all recognize, are professional learners: Their work entails finding, describing, and engaging with gaps and inconsistencies in their own and the field's understanding. Part of a physicists expertise is in self-assessment, in recognizing when something doesn't seem right, and in seeking to pin that down. For students, learning physics must mean, in part, learning to engage in these activities, or as many accounts describe, practices, of finding, describing, and engaging with what they do not know. In recent years, PER has begun to study how students' feelings entangle with what they think of as knowledge and learning, that is with how affect entangles with epistemology; as well as how social interactions and institutional contexts play roles. The dynamics are highly complex and take place on a wide range of scales. For my part in this session, I will present examples from research and teaching that provide evidence of affective, social, and epistemic dynamics, to argue for the importance of this research for PER going forward. |
| Presentation 3 Title: | Non Sensemaking: A commognitive analysis of teachers' discussions about measurement uncertainty |
| Presentation 3 Authors: | Ofek Sivan, Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel David Perl-Nussbaum, Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Edit Yerushalmi, Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel |
| Presentation 3 Abstract: | We focus on the collaborative sensemaking of physics teachers when engaged with a professional development task focused on measurement uncertainty in the context of a professional learning community. Our aim is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the theory of commognition to shed light on the challenges and opportunities involved in collaborative sensemaking in this context. To this end, we analyze the discursive interactions between the peer teachers and between them and the community leader, while exploring solution to the task. The task design intends to lead participants to acknowledge the limitations of the prevalent discourse of physics teachers regarding measurement uncertainty, as a precursor to a process in which they internalize the canonical discourse of the scientific community. Commognition, developed in the context of mathematics education research, perceives learning as becoming a participant in the specific discourse of a particular professional community. It provides tools to analyze sense-making by mapping different facets of the discourse - keywords, visual mediators, narratives and routines, as well as the meta-rules that govern them. Appropriating a new discourse involves reconciling the commognitive conflicts between the different discourses. The design of the professional development tasks required a characterization of the prevalent and canonical discourses, as discussed in central policy papers, that call for change in the instruction of experimental practices, particularly measurement uncertainty. We will present this characterization, demonstrate how it inspired the design of the professional development task, and apply it to analyze commognitive conflicts. We show how different discursive meta-rules held by teachers lead to unacknowledged commognitive conflicts and hinder sensemaking, and highlight unrealized opportunities in the discussion. |
| Presentation 4 Title: | Epistemic and social features of the emergence of insights in collaborative sensemaking |
| Presentation 4 Authors: | Tom Reshef-Israeli, Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel Shulamit Kapon, Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel |
| Presentation 4 Abstract: | Authentic problems in science and engineering differ from end-of-chapter problems: the scientific ideas and strategies required for their solution and the relevant variables are not predefined, often there is additional knowledge that needs be identified as missing and be learned, etc. Moreover, in many cases these problems cannot be solved individually, and require collaboration. We present an analysis of collaborative sensemaking (~80 minutes) of a group of three students (Ph.D. in mathematics, M.Sc. in industrial engineering, and a 4th year undergraduate student in electrical engineering) during a lesson for pre-service physics teachers. The group worked on an authentic problem that none of them could solve alone within the given time frame. By conceptualizing group members and the external resources they used (e.g., AI chatbots) as a distributed knowledge system, we analyze the group discourse in the joint problem space; i.e., the openly shared knowledge structures that support collaboration in problem-solving. We present an illustrative episode to articulate three theoretical claims: (1) The convergence towards a correct solution within the problem's accuracy limitations during collaborative sensemaking is facilitated in two key ways. The first involves the implementation of reliable processes to achieve epistemic ends (e.g., avoidance of false belief), where the reliable processes are grounded in disciplinary knowledge. The second is the epistemic dependence between group members, when one collaborator grounds his/her beliefs in statements of another collaborator, based on the other's relative expertise. (2) The design features of the problem, the framing of the task and the instructors' discursive prompts can activate and facilitate students' use of reliable disciplinary-based epistemic processes; (3) Students' extended familiarity with their group members (knowledge, skills, preferences, etc.) facilitates the extent of their epistemic dependence. |
