Abstract
We use epistemological framing to interpret participants’ behavior during group problem-solving sessions in an intermediate mechanics course. We are interested in how students frame discussion and in how the groups shift discussion framings. Our analysis includes two framing axes, expansive vs narrow and serious vs silly, which together incorporate and extend prior work on how students frame discussions in physics education research. We present markers for where discussion falls on these axes. We support our conclusions with both microanalytic excerpts of discussion and overall analysis of 75 hours of videobased data. We find that the group spends most of its time in more serious framings, and slightly more than half of its time in more narrow ones. The teaching assistant is the participant who initiates the largest number of frame shifts, and her shifts include bids to all quadrants in the expansive or narrow and serious or silly plane.
Highlights
Previous research on students’ epistemic framing in learning contexts has shown that students’ framing can influence their choice of learning strategies, their enjoyment of learning activities, and what is learned [1,2,3]
The students are not using the general applicability of mathematics to frame a problem expansively; instead, they are focusing on the mechanical details of a specific problem in order to solve a tightly defined question so that they can get an equation and write it down
The results of this study indicate that the teaching assistant (TA) has a significant influence on how students epistemologically frame their learning environment and that TAs are often the instigators of transitions from one frame to another [1]
Summary
Previous research on students’ epistemic framing in learning contexts has shown that students’ framing can influence their choice of learning strategies, their enjoyment of learning activities, and what is learned [1,2,3]. In 2009, Scherr and Hammer published an analysis of students’ body language, gaze behavior, and verbal prosody and identified four main clusters of behaviors which were correlated with students’ epistemic framing [9] These clusters corresponded to frames of joking, completing the tutorial worksheet, discussion, and listening to the TA. In our data we saw a wide variety in the nature of students’ discussions, and noticed some striking differences in the way students were framing the scope of applicability of the topic under discussion This variation in the narrowness or expansiveness of the discussion echoed earlier work on expansive framing [2] and real-world connections [10], and suggested a need for a look at students’ discussion that could distinguish the finer details of the goal and scope of their discussions. We briefly introduce our data set before engaging with the goals of the paper; we conclude with a discussion of why this theory is important from both research and practice perspectives
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