Knowing When You've Brought Them in: Scientific Genre Knowledge and Communities of Practice

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers in the learning sciences are appealing to notions of community to shape the design of learning technologies and curricular innovations. Many of these designs, including those in the area of project-based science, show strong promise; but, it is a challenging matter to understand the influences of these innovations in a detailed enough fashion to refine them over time. This work demands sensitive, theoretically grounded ways to assess the depth to which particular facets of innovations help enculturate students into communities of discourse and practice. Taking genre theory and the sociology of science as points of departure, I demonstrate a unique approach to the problems of developing and assessing students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. The research I discuss revolves around students' use of a professional scientific genre of scientific writing, the Research Article or Introduction, Methods, Results, Discission (IMRD) report (Swales, 1990), as they compose reports about their own original research. Using data from an innovative project-based high school science class, I demonstrate how genre use provides a window on the effectiveness of a learning environment in helping use discipline-specific tools of persuasion. In the classroom studied here, students developed e-mail mentoring relationships with volunteer scientists across the United States and Canada. Working in partnership with the teacher, these "telementors" served not only as inquiry guides for students, but also as a critical audience that helped shape the arguments they made about their research. Detailed analysis of the final reports produced by teams of students in the class revealed a significant relation between their fulfillment of the customary persuasive functions of a scientific research article and sustained correspondence with their telementors. A significant relation was also observed between sustained dialogue with telementors and careful hedging of knowledge claims. I situate these findings within a body of theory that suggests the value of telementoring relationships consists not only the ongoing advice and guidance they furnish, but in the ways that a professional audience shapes students' ideas about the sorts of arguments that are called for in science class. Because the analysis of genre use is a relatively noninvasive way to examine students' understandings of scientific persuasion (as compared with survey instruments or pull-out interviews), this method can serve as a useful tool for reformers wishing to compare the outcomes from iterations or conditions of design experiments that aim to develop students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. It may also make a useful transfer measure for a wide range of classroom innovations that aim to cultivate scientific reasoning and persuasion, such as science-oriented tools for computer-supported collaborative learning.