Ingeborg Krange

What does it mean? Students’ procedural and conceptual problem solving in a CSCL environment designed within the field of science education

This article discusses the relationship between procedural and conceptual problem solving in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment designed within the field of science education. The contribution of this article, and our understanding of this phenomenon, is anchored in our socio-cultural interpretation, and that implies distinctive inputs for the design and re-design of these kinds of learning environments. We discuss institutional aspects linked to the school as a curriculum deliverer, as well as to the presentation of the knowledge domain and the construction of the CSCL environment. The data is gathered from a design experiment in a science setting in a secondary school, and video data is used to perform an interaction analysis. More specifically, we follow a group of four secondary school students who solve a biological problem in a computer-based 3D model supported by a website. Our findings are clear in the sense that the procedural types of problem solving tend to dominate the students’ interactions, while conceptual knowledge construction is only present where it is strictly necessary to carry out the problem solving. Based on our analyses, we conclude that this can be explained partly by how the knowledge domain is presented and how the CSCL environment is designed, but that the main reason is linked to the institutional aspects related to the school as curriculum deliverer where its target is to secure that the students actually solve problems that are predefined in the syllabus list. We argue that this affords some particular challenges, linked to making conceptual knowledge constructions in science education explicit in the CSCL environment, and to encouraging the teachers and the school as a curriculum deliverer to give this kind of knowledge construction a prioritised value.

A Transactional Approach to Transfer Episodes

In this article we present an analytical framework for approaching transfer episodes—episodes in which participants declare or can be declared to bring prior experience to bear on the current task organization. We build on Dewey’s writings about the continuity of experience, Vygotsky’s ideas of unit analysis, as well as more recent developments in continental philosophy to develop a transactional approach that involves reconceptualizing the notion of experience. In this view, experience is not something that individuals have but an analytical category that denotes the unity of whole persons, their material and social environment, and their changing transactional relations (mutual effects on each other) across time. In the 1st part of the article, we present the theory and contrast it with past and present literature on transfer. In the 2nd part, we develop the methodological implications and analyze an episode of transfer from a technology-enhanced science education curriculum in which students were presented with analogous models of scientific phenomena across different tasks. We describe instances of recognition, of analogical reasoning, and of how students applied theoretical knowledge in terms of transactional units of change. We conclude by discussing implications with regard to further theoretical development and educational practice.

What Happens When You Push the Button? Analyzing the Functional Dynamics of Concept Development in Computer Supported Science Inquiry.

In this article we analyze how the joint cognitive system of teacher and student actions mediated by cultural tools develops sense making of science concepts, and the use of concepts as tools for explaining phenomena and processes related to energy and energy transformation. We take a sociocultural approach to the analysis of how material and digital learning resources become tools for thinking and reasoning. We combined ethnographic descriptions with analysis of video records of classroom interactions in a high school and examined how a teacher and a group of students engaged in a computer-supported collaborative inquiry. Our results show that students through inquiry are enabled to make sense of concepts and their experiences with resources and also to use science concepts as explanatory tools. However, this is mediated by the teachers’ practices for supporting students, such as providing relevant clues for them to continue their inquiry, eliciting their initial understanding of concepts thereby making them available for further development, pressing for explanations, and reformulating their explanations. The teacher is continuously alternating between withdrawing and making students inquire by themselves and supporting their inquiry. In and through such social interactions, materials and digital tools become tools for thinking. We argue that one of the practical implications of our study is that it is crucial that teachers explicitly draw students into their system of activity throughout the entire learning trajectory and that the teachers and students together make sense of science concepts for explaining energy transformation.

Design and use of a networked 3D-learning environment: the situated conditions of awareness information

Recent research has to a limited extent explored the situated conditions of different kinds of awareness information in distributed collaborative learning environments. We approach this issue by developing a set of design principles related to a networked 3D-learning environment. The principles constitute the following relationships outlined from socio-cultural perspectives: actor-object, object-object, and actor-actor. In these relationships among students, we illustrate how awareness information is shaped and developed throughout their social interactions during task solving. We conclude by emphasising the importance of meta-communicative actions as part of meaningful knowledge construction in distributed collaboration. In addition, we identify four tensions between the design principles and the actual knowledge construction.