Anita Roychoudhury

Science discourse through collaborative concept mapping: new perspectives for the teacher

The study reported here is part of a larger project designed to understand the construction of meaning during collaborative concept mapping. The focus of this report is the teacher who engages students through the emerging concept maps in reflections about their knowledge of scientific concepts and how they are integrated in a larger framework. It is based on data collected over a two‐year span with about 150 students in ten sections of junior and senior physics. The data include video‐taped concept‐mapping sessions, concept maps produced during these sessions and those produced individually at home, reflective essays by the students, and the teachers reflective notes. Based on the data sources, three major dimensions were constructed. First, concept maps served as conscription devices which enlisted the participation of students and their teacher who constructed and used them for a variety of purposes. Second, the teacher engaged students in reflections about their knowledge through the conscription dev...

Interactions in an open-inquiry physics laboratory

This is a naturalistic study of interactions in an open‐inquiry physics laboratory. The following aspects‐‐the nature of student‐‐student interactions, the nature of the peer group‐‐teacher interactions, the interactions involved in task management, and the views of students toward group work‐‐indicated some patterns. Primarily, students negotiated in a collaborative mode, an adversarial mode, and by following a majority rule. During the planning and the data interpretation phases of an experiment, interactions were primarily verbal and took shape according to the behaviour of participating individuals. From the analysis of the degree of participation by different members of a group, three major patterns of interaction emerged: symmetric, asymmetric, and shifting asymmetric. During the planning and the data interpretation sessions, interactions between the teacher and students were either a Socratic interlocution or a discussion between a coach and novices. During the data collection stage, the teacher pr...

The nature of scientific knowledge, knowing and learning: the perspectives of four physics students

The views on knowing and learning which students bring to school are likely to interact with other ideas in the ecology of the classroom. Yet little is known about these interactions. The present study was conducted to describe in detail students’ epistemological commitments and their concurrent views of knowing and learning physics. The study was interpretive, using multiple data sources to achieve a triangulation of data. Four students from a private high school for boys serve as paradigm cases representative of the diversity of views. The epistemologies of these students ranged from objectivist to radical constructivist. In spite of these differences, there were aspects of a constructivist learning environment which all four students liked, though for different reasons. It was concluded that the experiences in a constructivist learning environment are not enough to help students understand the tentative nature of scientific knowledge as long as their understanding is measured against the norms of canon...

Student involvement in learning: Collaboration in science for PreService elementary teachers

ConclusionThe present study provided insights regarding the interactions that take place in collaborative science laboratory and regarding the outcome of such interactions. Science laboratory experiences structured by teachers have been criticized for allowing very little, if any, meaningful learning. However, this study showed that even structured laboratory experiments can provide insightful experience for students when conducted in a group setting that demanded interactive participation from all its members. The findings of the present study underscored the synergistic and supportive nature of collaborative groups. Here, students patiently repeated explanations to support the meaning construction on the part of their slower peers and elaborated their own understanding in the process; groups negotiated the meaning of observations and the corresponding theoretical explanations; students developed and practiced a range of social skills necessary in today’s workplace; and off-task behavior was thwarted by the group members motivated to work toward understanding rather than simply generating answers for task completion.The current findings suggest an increased use of collaborative learning environments for the teaching of science to elementary education majors. Some teachers have already made use of such settings in their laboratory teaching. However, collaborative learning should not be limited to the laboratory only, but be extended to more traditionally structured classes. The effects of such a switch in activity structures, increased quality of peer interaction, mastery of subject matter content, and decreased anxiety levels could well lead to better attitudes toward science among preservice elementary school teachers and eventually among their own students.

Nonmetric Multidimensional Item Analysis in the Construction of an Anxiety Attitude Survey

The present study addresses some of the problems of traditional item analysis during the construction of attitude instruments by using a convergent analysis of three metric and nonmetric multivariate techniques for item analysis. Employing data from a recent administration of a science anxiety questionnaire, the use of maximum likelihood factor analysis followed by oblique rotations, multidimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analysis is shown. A high reliable instrument with equally reliable subscales is developed in the process. The reliability of the instrument and its subscales lie between .88 and .92.