Margareta Enghag

The relation between students’ communicative moves during laboratory work in physics and outcomes of their actions

ABSTRACT In this case study, we explore students’ communication during practical work in physics at an upper secondary school in Sweden from a sociocultural perspective. We investigate the relation between the interaction and content of students’ communication and outcomes of their actions, with the purpose of finding new knowledge for informing teachers in their choice of instruction. We make discourse analysis of how students interact but also of what students are discussing in terms of underlying content at a linguistic and cognitive level. Twenty students divided into five groups were video recorded while performing four practical tasks at different stations during laboratory work about motion. An analytical framework was developed and applied for one group to three parts of the transcripts in which three different talk-types occurred. Discursive, content, action and purposive moves in the process were identified for each talk-type at both linguistic and cognitive levels. These moves represent information concerning what the teacher actually assigns students to do, and how students make meaning of the activities. Through these different communicative moves, students experience how laboratory work can enhance their competence to collaborate in a scientific environment with complex practical and theoretical questions to solve quickly. Implications of the findings are discussed.

A Teacher Professional Development Programme on Dialogic Inquiry

In this chapter we report and discuss inquiry-based science teaching/learning and more specifically dialogic inquiry, as a basis for a professional development programme for teachers. The pilot programme aimed at (1) considering teachers’ experience, (2) letting teachers develop their current lessons and (3) prompting teachers’ reflections on generic competencies coming from the theory about communicative approaches and writing in dialog. The intention was to make a long-term difference for science in schools due to teachers’ enhanced awareness of dialogic inquiry. We focus on the teachers’ experience of the research-informed professional development programme. The programme was designed with six meetings, when teachers met and reflected on different aspects of dialogic inquiry, based on video clips of good practice episodes from science lessons. Between the meetings, the teachers developed and analysed their own teaching by using instruments, developed by the researchers, to find out how they used their lesson time on different lesson activities, different communicative approaches and writing. We argue that the balance between dialogic inquiry as a deep meaning-making process and dialogic inquiry as a way to organise the lesson depends on the teacher’s experience, subject knowledge and their students’ interests and creativity. Findings show that teachers observed that too much time was spent on giving instructions, that the writing of hypotheses could be improved and that the teachers’ choice of lesson activities had an impact on learning opportunities. The difference between dialogic inquiry and inquiry is discussed.

The problem-solving process in physics as observed when engineering students at university level work in groups

The problem-solving process is investigated for five groups of students when solving context-rich problems in an introductory physics course included in an engineering programme. Through transcripts of their conversation, the paths in the problem-solving process have been traced and related to a general problem-solving model. All groups exhibit backward moves to earlier stages in the problem-solving process. These earlier stages are revisited by the groups for identifying sub-problems, setting parameter values or even restating the goal. We interpret this action as coming from the fact that the students have not yet developed a knowledge base and a problem-solving scheme. Connected to the backward moves in the process are opportunities for the group members to build such a knowledge base from contributions and experiences from all group members. Problem contents that induce such moves are identified and can thus be considered by science teachers when constructing problems for group work.