Leema K. Berland

In pursuit of consensus: Disagreement and legitimization during small group argumentation

In recent years, an emphasis on scientific argumentation in classrooms has brought into focus collaborative consensus-building as an instructional strategy. In these situations, students with differing and competing arguments are asked to work with one another in order to establish a shared perspective. However, the literature suggests that consensus-building can be challenging for students because their interpretations of the argumentative task and context may not enable their productive engagement with counter-arguments and evidence. In this paper, our goal is to explore the ways in which interactions of students support or inhibit their consensus-building. To that end, we examine and describe three cases that represent different ways in which initially dissenting students try to work towards a consensus with their peers. Through these cases, we demonstrate that legitimization of disparate or incorrect ideas can enable students whose arguments rely on incorrect ideas to feel that their ideas were heard and valued by the rest of their group. As such, we suggest that this legitimization is important because it can help students ‘save face’. This enables students to move away from the competitive and persuasive aspects of argumentation towards interactions that align more closely with sensemaking and consensus-building.

Confusing Claims for Data: A Critique of Common Practices for Presenting Qualitative Research on Learning.

We question widely accepted practices of publishing articles that present quantified analyses of qualitative data. First, articles are often published that provide only very brief excerpts of the qualitative data themselves to illustrate the coding scheme, tacitly or explicitly treating the coding results as data. Second, articles are often published that treat interrater reliability solely as a matter of justifying the coding scheme, without further attention to the variance it makes evident in the process of coding. We argue that authors should not treat coding results as data but rather as tabulations of claims about data and that it is important to discuss the rates and substance of disagreements among coders. We propose publication guidelines for authors and reviewers of this form of research.

Students’ Framings and Their Participation in Scientific Argumentation

Researchers studying student argumentation have begun to focus attention on students’ sense of purpose—what they see themselves as trying to accomplish. This brings the field into contact with an established body of research on framing, which studies how people form a sense of “what is it that’s going on here?” (Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). That literature depicts framing as a dynamic process that is sensitive to context, occurring within and among individuals through subtle, meta-level messages. We give a brief review of research on framing, including epistemological framing (Redish, E.F. (2004). A theoretical framework for physics education research: Modeling student thinking. In E. F. Redish & Vicentini (Eds.), Proceedings of the Enrico Fermi Summer School Course, CLVI (pp. 1–63). Bologna, Italy: Italian Physical Society.), and discuss its significance for researchers and educators interested in studying and fostering scientific argumentation in the classroom.

Math, Science, and Engineering Integration in a High School Engineering Course: A Qualitative Study

Engineering in K-12 classrooms has been receiving expanding emphasis in the United States. The integration of science, mathematics, and engineering is a benefit and goal of K-12 engineering; however, current empirical research on the efficacy of K-12 science, mathematics, and engineering integration is limited. This study adds to this growing field, using discourse analysis techniques to examine whether and why students integrate math and science concepts into their engineering design work. The study focuses on student work during a unit from a high school engineering course. Video data were collected during the unit and were used to identify episodes of students discussing math and science concepts. Using discourse analysis, the authors found that students successfully applied math and science concepts to their engineering design work without teacher prompting when the concepts were familiar. However, explicit teacher prompting and instruction regarding the integration of less familiar concepts did not seem to facilitate student use of those concepts. Possible explanations and implications are discussed.

Student Learning in Challenge-Based Engineering Curricula

In recent years, there has been a demand to teach engineering in high schools, particularly using a challenge-based curriculum. Many of these programs have the dual goals of teaching students the engineering design process (EDP), and teaching to deepen their understanding and ability to apply science and math concepts. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this study examines whether a high school design engineering program accomplishes each of the two goals. During the 2010–2011 school year, over 100 students enrolled in the same design engineering course in seven high schools. Evidence of learning and application of the EDP is accomplished by triangulating student interviews with pre-/post-tests of EDP-related questions and a survey of design engineering beliefs. To determine whether students could apply science and math concepts, we examined content test questions to see if students used science and math ideas to justify their engineering work, and triangulated these results with student interviews. The results are mixed, implying that although there is some learning, application is inconsistent.

Explaining variation in student efforts towards using math and science knowledge in engineering contexts

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that in classes that take an integrated approach to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, students tend to engage in fulfilling goals of their engineering design challenges, but only inconsistently engage with the related math and science content. The present research examines these inconsistences by focusing on student engagement, or effort, towards math and science concepts while working on an engineering challenge, through the lens of expectancy-value theory. Specifically, we examine how students’ perceptions of the value of math and science and expectancy for success with the math and science relate to the efforts they put towards using math and science while working on engineering challenges. Our results suggest that subjective task value significantly predicts efforts towards both math and science, whereas neither expectancy, nor the interaction between expectancy and value predicted effort. We argue that integrated learning environments need to help students understand how the domains of math, science, and engineering support their work in fulfilling the engineering project design goals. In other words, we argue that we, as educators, must help students to recognise the value of each of the domains addressed within STEM integrated learning environments. This paper discusses strategies for accomplishing this goal.

Developing a Vision of Pre-College Engineering Education

We report the results of a study focused on identifying and articulating an ‘‘epistemic foundation’’ underlying a pre-collegiate focus on engineering. We do so in the context of UTeachEngineering (UTE), a program supported in part by funding by the National Science Foundation and designed to develop a model approach to address the systematic challenges facing this work—from identifying learning goals, to certifying preand in-service teachers for engineering courses to developing a research-based high school engineering course. Given the systemic nature of the UTE approach, this model is positioned to serve as a starting point to further the conversation around two of the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Standards in K-12 Engineering Education (2010) central recommendations for future work in this area: (1) Identification of core ideas in engineering, and (2) creation of guidelines for instructional materials. Toward that end, project faculty and staff were interviewed and/or surveyed about their views on the goals and outcomes of engineering and engineering teacher education, as well as strategies design to reach these goals and the warrants for them. Data were analyzed following a grounded protocol. The results align well with previous efforts to identify ‘‘core engineering concepts, skills, and dispositions for K-12 education’’ (National Academy of Engineering Committee on Standards in K-12 Engineering Education, 2010, Annex to Chapter 3).