How Students Work to Understand Their Group Mates.
Deitrick, Elise.
2019
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This dissertation conceptualizes student interactions in groups as intentional work to communicate and understand one another. In interdisciplinary education contexts, students use distinct types of listening and shared framings to understand their peers. The work presented in this dissertation develops a framework that illuminates evidence of students' listening within their discourse and illustrates ... read morehow this listening can affect a group's shared framing. The data used throughout this dissertation is part of the CodeR4Stats project, which integrates the R programming language into a high school statistics class. The selected data were analyzed using qualitative discourse analysis. The first empirical study (Chapter 4) illustrates that students shift epistemological framings to understand their peers during interdisciplinary group work. To switch epistemological framings to match a peer, students must be listening for their peers' framing. In Chapter 5, Van de Sande and Greeno's (2012) Perspectival Framing framework is modified to help illuminate distinct types of student listening, such as attending to framing. The use of Perspectival Framing also clarifies three dimensions of framing (epistemological, conceptual, and positional) which students are navigating. In Chapter 6, this modified Perspectival Framing framework is situated as a complement to the existing theoretical frameworks addressing the creation and maintenance of shared framings. Unlike previous frameworks which treat students' roles as static and assume they are equal participants throughout the group's work, Chapter 6's case study of a group over time demonstrates dynamic shifts in positional and epistemological framings. All of this work together addresses the question How do students work to understand their group mates? This work calls for the interdisciplinary STEM Education community to view student groups as dynamic systems where students do the work of listening and negotiating their framings over time. Additionally, it illustrates that listening happens and shared framings can be established even in asymmetrically positioned students. This means that in order to understand how a group negotiates framings over time, researchers must look at both moments where students are co-constructors and moments where they are asymmetrically positioned, as students flow between the two seamlessly and are working to understand one another in both.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2019.
Submitted to the Dept. of Education.
Advisor: David Hammer.
Committee: Michelle Wilkerson, Kristen Wendell, and Merredith Portsmore.
Keyword: Education.read less - ID:
- 1n79hh61q
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- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
