Student Behavior and Epistemological Framing: Examples from Collaborative Active-Learning Activities in Physics
Rachel E. Scherr and David Hammer
arXiv:0712.0211
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 03:25:00 GMT
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. 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 understanding of the nature of the activity affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. Previous analyses have found evidence of framing primarily in linguistic markers associated with speech acts. In this paper, we show that there is useful evidence of framing in easily observed features of students' 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.
(This paper has been submitted to Cognition and Instruction, the arxiv.org posting is of the preprint draft.)
