Theory and Methods for Sociocultural Research in Science and Engineering Education

Front matter

TEACHING AND LEARNING IN SCIENCE SERIES

THEORY AND METHODS FOR SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Introducing original methods for integrating sociocultural and discourse studies into science and engineering education, this book provides a much-needed framework for how to conduct qualitative research in this field. The three dimensions of learning identified in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) create a need for research methods that examine the sociocultural components of science education. With cutting-edge studies and examples consistent with the NGSS, this book offers comprehensive research methods for integrating discourse and sociocultural practices in science and engineering education and provides key tools for applying this framework for students, pre-service teachers, scholars, and researchers.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii List of Contributors x Foreword: Meeting Methodological Challenges xiv

Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre

1 Framing Issues of Theory and Methods for the Study of Science and Engineering Education 1 Gregory J. Kelly and Judith L. Green

Index

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

2.1 Example of ethnographic field notes, cooked

2.2 Example of a transcript with message units

2.3 Analyzed transcript with action units

2.4 Example of an event map from the Light and Shadows unit

2.5 Graph of the interactions of case study girls throughout the Light and Shadows unit

2.6 Web format depicting Molly’s authoring identities-in-practice and positioning as a science learner

3.1 Engineering is Elementary (EiE) list of records for qualitative analysis

3.2 Sample transcript 1

3.3 Sample transcript 2

3.4 Sample transcript 3

5.1 Average improvement scores per attempt at improvement by the groups’ video recorded

6.1 Driving questions, activities and core ideas

6.2 Sources of data and timeline of data collection

6.3 Order of analysis from classroom interactions back to prior FAs and DTM decisions

6.4 Reproduced students’ worksheet on global data exercise

6.5 Reproduced students’ poster on CO, data comparisons

6.6

Students’ reproduced sheet for planning the wind blades design

37 38 39 40

54 59 60 63

115 132 133

135 140 144 viii

Figures and Tables

7.1. Overview of logic of inquiry about students’ emotional sense-making of climate change in an environmental science course

7.2 Subset of questions in the inquiry to explore what counted as emotional expressions

7.3 Subset of questions in the inquiry to make salient the nuances of emotional expressions

7.4 Subset of questions in the inquiry to analyze how individuals-within-the-collective emotionally engaged with particular aspects of climate change

7.5 Subset of questions in the inquiry to examine why emotions were expressed differently across time and space

8.1 Example Studio Code timeline

8.2 A section of the event map showing the highlighted transcribed events and episodes within each event

8.3 Example coding framework table

9.1 Meeting-level event map from the September 24, 2014 meeting

9.2 Excerpt of an episode-level event map of the September 24, 2014 meeting

9.3 Initial domain analysis

9.4 Excerpt from year-long event map with codes

9.5 Conversational factors that construct associated with moreand less-generative talk

9.6 Concept map: “Chemistry Phenomena” episode, September 2014

10.1 Researcher actions (x is a kind of y)

10.2 xis a kind of aspect influencing conceptualizing phenomena to be studied

Tables

4.1 Phases of constructing an archive of records

4.2 Field notes example

4.3 Overview of construction of curriculum intervention

4.4 Portion of event map format

4.5 Sample transcript

5.1 A description and comparison of the activities in the experimental curriculum (EiE) and the comparison curriculum (E4C)

5.2 Descriptive statistics of the classrooms studied

174 192

192 197 213

214 215 219

221 237

80 81 84 87 90

107 108

Figures and Tables ix

5.3 An excerpt from an event map demonstrating the features and how they are used to organize activity, note times, and code for failure cause, type, and teacher reaction 110 5.4 An example of a transcript using Jeffersonian symbols 112 5.5 The rubric developed for assessing systematic improvement

including journal page references and examples 114 5.6 A description of characteristics and examples of the four

identified causes of failure 117 6.1 Event map of day 2 presenting phase and sequence units 137 6.2 Event map of day 3 presenting phase and sequence units 146

7.1 Emotional expression codes in the early stages of the logic of inquiry that would later evolve into four dimensions

(aboutness, frequency, type, and ownership) 169

8.1 Participant background 187

8.2 Research questions, data corpus, and analysis 189

10.1 x is a way to conceptualize the phenomenon to be studied 240 10.2 If... then logic that demonstrates the link between theoretical

propositions and implicated actions 244

10.3 Analysis methods and technological tools 248

10.4 Exemplars of transparent research practices 253

CONTRIBUTORS

Judith L. Green, University of California, Santa Barbara, emerita

Judith is an Emerita Professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As an Emerita Professor, Judith is engaged in developing new understandings with colleagues in pre-kindergarten through higher education contexts. Her research directions focus on developing understandings of how the Interactional Ethnographic approach supports research on social and discursive opportunities for learning and academic knowledge construction across disciplines through ongoing programs of research.

Elizabeth Hufnagel, University of Maine

Beth is an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Maine. Her research explores the ways learners and teachers emotionally make sense of science and learning through discourse in a variety of science learning settings. She teaches both secondary and elementary science methods courses as well as graduate seminars in science and mathematics education research.

Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre, Universidade de Santiago de

Compostela, Spain

Marilar is an Ad Honorem Professor of Science Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Her research focuses on students’ engagement in argumentation and epistemic practices, through classroom studies and longitudinal designs. Her recent research explores the use of evidence by kindergarteners and the interface between critical thinking and argumentation on socioscientific issues. Outside science education Marilar is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction, and children’s fiction and she has been recently elected for the Royal Galician Academy (RAG).

Contributors xi

Matthew M. Johnson, Pennsylvania State University

Matt is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Center for Science and the Schools in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests focus on how teachers learn about epistemic practices through in-service teacher professional development programs and how they provide opportunities for students to engage in them to learn disciplinary content.

Gregory J. Kelly, Pennsylvania State University

Greg is a Professor of Science Education and Senior Associate Dean for Research, Outreach, and Technology in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. His research explores issues of knowledge and discourse in science education settings. Greg teaches courses on teaching and learning science in secondary schools and uses history, philosophy, and sociology of science in science education. Recent research includes development of theories of epistemic cognition and analysis of engineering classrooms.

Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki

Kristiina is a Professor of Education and Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is also the founding member and scientific director of the Playful Learning Center. Her research is grounded in sociocultural theories of human learning and development and interactional sociolinguistics. She investigates tool-mediated learning and communication in various settings, including early childhood centers, schools, libraries, science centers, and teacher education settings. She also addresses methodological questions in the analysis of social interaction in learning and education. Her current research centers on multiliteracies, STEAM education, play and learning, digital childhoods, learning across contexts, children’s agency and identity, resilience, as well as visual participatory research.

Peter R. Licona, Elizabethtown College

Peter is Assistant Professor of PK-12 STEM Education at Elizabethtown College. Peter teaches courses on elementary, middle, and secondary science and mathematics methods and a course on cultural and linguistic diversity in PK-12 classrooms. His research program focuses on the intersection of culturally and linguistically diverse students and science education, with a focus on bilingualism.

Scott P. McDonald, Pennsylvania State University

Scott is an Associate Professor of Science Education in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on teacher learning, framed as professional pedagogical vision, of ambitious and equitable science teaching practices. He also studies student learning in Earth and Space Sciences, specifically learning progressions in Plate Tectonics and Astronomy.

Alicia M. McDyre, Pennsylvania State University Alicia is an Assistant Professor of Education and Director of Curriculum and Instruction Field Experiences in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State xii Contributors

University. Her research explores the teaching and learning of science in early childhood classrooms, identity work in young children, and the authoring and positioning of girls during science instruction.

Rachel Mulvaney, Parkville Middle School and Center of Technology in Baltimore County, Maryland

Rachel is a Sixth Grade Mathematics and Science Teacher at Parkville Middle School and Center of Technology in Baltimore County, Maryland. Rachel teaches science topics such as ecosystem interactions, forces and motion, and earth and space science. Her special areas of interest include climate change within STEM education, particularly in a middle school setting.

Amy Ricketts, Purdue University

Amy is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University. Her research explores the complexities of supporting science teacher learning across the career span. Amy is a former K-8 science teacher of thirteen years, and has taught science methods courses for pre-service teachers. Recent research includes negotiating the (sometimes) conflicting learning goals of various stakeholders in a school—university partnership. Most importantly, Amy strives to learn with and from teachers.

Asli Sezen-Barrie, University of Maine (Orono)

Asli is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum, Assessment and Instruction in the College of Education and Human Development at University of Maine (Orono). Her research focuses on sociocultural dimensions of science teachers’ professional learning while utilizing discourse analysis, interactional ethnography, and practices of climate science. Dr. Sezen-Barrie teaches courses on formative assessments, learning theories, and science teaching methods. Asli’s recent research includes teachers’ and their students’ engagement into epistemic practices and the use of epistemic tools in science and engineering classrooms.

Audra Skukauskaite, Independent Researcher

Audra is an Independent Researcher, Research Consultant and Full Professor of Research Methodology, who teaches qualitative research as an adjunct for doctoral programs in Social Sciences and Integrated Medicine and Health at Saybrook University. Over the past two years, she has begun collaborations with the Lemelson-MIT program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she consults and conducts ethnographic research focusing on invention education. She also serves as a Senior Research Scientist for an EU-funded four-year project in health care education in Lithuania and a program chair for the Qualitative Methodologies section of the Measurement and Research Methodologies division of the American Educational Research Association. Audra’s research, teaching, and consulting interests focus on learning, teaching, conducting, and publishing research in systematic and transparent ways. Her primary interest is in research methodologies, with the specific focus on how ethnographic epistemologies, discourse-based studies, and qualitative research enable studying and understanding complex social and learning environments within and across different fields.

Contributors xiii

Arzu Tanis Ozcelik, Aydin Adnan Menderes University, Turkey

Arzu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education in the College of Education at Aydin Adnan Menderes University, Turkey. Her research focuses on teacher learning of reform-based models of teaching, namely ambitious science teaching practices, and teachers’ development of professional pedagogical vision around learning and teaching of science. Arzu teaches courses on physics, science teaching methods, and practices of science and technology to elementary and middle school majors. She also has studies on astronomy education and informal educators’ instructional practices.

Carmen M. Vanderhoof, Pennsylvania State University

Carmen is a Graduate Research Assistant for Professor Kelly and pursuing her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction (Science Education) at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests are classroom discourse processes, elementary engineering education, STEM integration, group dynamics surrounding decision-making, multimodal literacy, multiple representations, and the intersection of multiple discourse analysis tools with multimodal and ethnographic perspectives.

FOREWORD Meeting Methodological Challenges

Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre

The first paper authored by Greg Kelly that I read was published in 1993, when I was beginning my career in the University of Santiago de Compostela, moving from conceptual change towards the study of argumentation. Kelly, Carlsen, and Cunningham (1993) proposed, twenty-five years ago, to take into account the contributions from Science Studies — history, philosophy, and sociology of science — in science education research, framing it in a sociocultural perspective. That paper, together with Duschl’s (1990) proposal and a postdoc visit to Peter Hewson in 1992, which gave me the opportunity of being inside Sister Gertrud Hennessey’s classroom, changed my ways both of “seeing” events in science classrooms and of “seeing” science education research. As Galileo tells 10-year-old Andrea in Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo, “to look is not to see.” Andrea argues that he can see the sun moving, and that understanding the earth orbit is far too difficult for he is not yet 11, and Galileo replies that this is exactly why he wants Andrea to understand it.

For, since I began teaching in high school in the 1970s, I had been interested in learning and knowledge justification. In understanding how 11-year-olds learn science, in learning how to support them in “seeing” scientific phenomena through particular theoretical lenses. Graduating in biology in 1969, at a time when in Spain pedagogical training for teaching and science education research did not exist, I bought two books, Piaget’s The Origins of Intelligence in Children and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, in an effort to learn some theory about education. During the five years of the biology degree, I only had the opportunity to enroll in one course about history of science and to read Benjamin Farrington’s Science and Politics in the Ancient World. From Piaget I learnt that knowledge is actively constructed by the learner. In Postman and Weingartner’s book I found ideas from Dewey,

Foreword xv and a recommendation that school should develop in students the anthropological perspective, observing their own culture as if it were a foreign tribe, a suggestion that would be brilliantly developed by Latour and Woolgar (1986).

My trajectory can be representative, or in Heap’s terms an example, of Spanish — and most European — science education scholars beginning to build research communities in the 1980s. Our background consisted solely of science concepts, methods, and approaches. Thus, many of the first research efforts were grounded in methods drawn from science. Heap (1995) pointed out that educational research — even when identifying itself as qualitative — often retained empiricist conceptions and criteria. In my context this trend was heightened in most of science education work, which attempted to legitimize science education research within empiricist frameworks. Different types of obstacles, epistemic, related to research traditions, experiential, and even affective, among others, needed to be overcome in order to engage in science-in-the-making studies, as suggested by Kelly and colleagues (1993). A few years later, after meeting Greg Kelly and cooperating with him in the first argumentation session in a NARST conference in 1997, I became familiar with Judith Green’s insightful approaches. An influential example of their work together is the framework for examining students’ discursive practices in a physics laboratory (Kelly, Crawford, & Green, 2001). Since then, scholars interested in what happens inside science classrooms, and how to account for it, have learnt much from both their theoretical contributions and their methodological proposals. Kelly and Green have developed insights and research methods to examine classroom discourse, and the book structure organized around eight empirical chapters illustrating specific methods gives it an innovative nature, while the rigor and depth of the contributions anticipate that it will soon become a classic.

Although I mentioned above science classrooms and science education, it needs to be noted that an original feature of the book is including engineering in its focus, which reflects one of Kelly’s current research interest (Cunningham & Kelly, 2017a; 2017b), aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (NGSS Lead States, 2013).

Methodology matters, and there is a thirst for robust reference books about it. Educational research about science and engineering has tended to have a stronger focus either on theoretical approaches or on empirical findings about learning and teaching. Methodological issues specific of these fields have, as a consequence, been given less attention. A substantial amount of scholarly work about science and engineering is grounded in domain-general research methods, from which we have much to learn but that are less suited to address some domain-specific issues. Domain-specificity is one of the methodological challenges that this volume seeks to meet, and which makes it a work of unique value. A second one is to tackle the three-dimensional learning, integrating core ideas, crosscutting concepts and practices, emphasized in the NGSS. A third challenge is to show xvi Foreword how rigorous qualitative research can make visible how science and engineering concepts, processes, and practices are socially constructed.

The volume is particularly strong from a methodological perspective, addressing issues that have been previously unresolved or understudied, or approaching more familiar problems in a new way. An instance is the construction of identities-in-practice of kindergarten girls as science learners, investigated by Alicia McDyre, in the Chapter 2. As she points out, most gender research in science has been about adolescents, and I will add that Early Childhood Education has received little attention. It should be noted, and praised, that gender is addressed in that early chapter, the first one reporting a study. Equity is also the focus of Peter Licona’s chapter about the methodological decisions made in his study with bilingual students engaging in argumentation about the socioscientific issue of endangered species. The examination of emotional expressions, undertaken by Elizabeth Hufnagel in the context of environmental science and climate change, is another understudied issue. Hufnagel articulates a framework for the study of emotions in science classrooms, creating in the process the notion of aboutness to refer to the object of the emotion. Elementary engineering provides the context of two chapters: Johnson explores the joint social construction by students and teachers of failure and improvement in engineering design projects, and Vanderhoof carries out a multimodal analysis of engineering design, with a view towards transferability to other studies involving student-student interactions and a focus on student-produced artifacts. Asli Sezen-Barrie and Rachel Mulvaney tackle an original issue, how to build coherence among scientific concepts and related epistemic practices, in the area of climate science, through Informal Formative Assessments (IFAs). Learning science and engineering is dependent on how teachers teach, therefore on how teachers are enculturated, and two chapters propose new ways of looking at teacher education: Arzu Tanis Ozcelik and Scott McDonald focus on how pre-service science teachers develop what they term professional pedagogical vision related to ambitious science teaching, and the new challenges posed by the NGSS. Amy Ricketts analyzes a professional learning community, and how the teachers belonging to it developed a culture of reflective critique through conversations of a generative nature.

The emphasis on methodological challenges means that the focus of each of these chapters is a reflection about the process of research itself, discussing not only the final form of research questions, rubrics, or tools for analysis, but in particular the decisions made during the process, and even — as examined by Hufnagel — the changes in the logic of inquiry, as data were collected and analyzed. In other words, we get access to the science-in-the-making of these studies and dissertations, to the metaknowledge that went into this research, or that was generated during it. This explicit layout of reflections is another feature that makes this book unique. As Kelly and Green point out in Chapter 1, their goal is to make visible ways of developing and explaining processes

Foreword xvii involved in designing, conducting, and constructing warranted accounts from discourse analysis. Reflection about the research processes combines the three types of critical discourse identified by Kelly (2006): critical discourse within group, concerning developmental and definitional work regarding a research group’s central theories, assumptions, and key constructs; critical discourse regarding public reason concerning the epistemological commitments of the field of education regarding research methods; and hermeneutical conversations across groups, designed to learn from differences across traditions.

The book offers a systematic approach to the study of educational events, an approach that is empirical and emphasizes methodologies, but that is also theoretically grounded; for methods have foundations on particular theories. The research reported in these contributions is grounded in a sociocultural perspective, bringing together approaches from discourse analysis, interactional ethnography, and epistemology, weaving them in a coherent whole. The qualifier “systematic” is relevant for, as Kelly and Green discuss in the Chapter 1, some qualitative studies suffer from problems such as lack of systematic sampling, lack of theoretically grounded approaches for the study of large data sets, or failing to situate instances of learning in ongoing sociocultural practices.

All scholars who have been extensively involved in reviewing manuscripts for refereed journals, in evaluating research proposals for National Agencies (such as NSF), or even in supervising doctoral students, know that most flaws of research proposals or manuscripts relate to methodological issues. This book will be useful for researchers, first because of its systematic approach to methodology, as illustrated for instance in the questions discussed in Chapter 1, ranging from asking ethnographic questions to recognizing relevant data sources, elaborating data representations, or finding patterns. Second, it will be useful for the book’s range of examples, which develop all these questions and analyze a variety of dimensions about how the construction of science and engineering is accomplished.

An undercurrent running through the chapters is a commitment to equity, social justice, and a sustainable world. Two of the studies, Hufnagel’s, and Sezen- Barrie and Mulvaney’s, are situated in the context of climate change. In particular, Sezen-Barrie and Mulvaney take on the challenge of building coherence across concepts and epistemic practices utilized to justify the claim that humans are the main cause of current climate change. Denialism of anthropogenic climate change is an educational problem but, more seriously, it is a social and political issue impacting the earth’s future. As Sezen-Barrie, Shea, and Borman (2017) point out, climate change skepticism is not scientific skepticism, but rather denial. This raises a theoretical issue: concerns are currently shifting from a focus on understanding the tentativeness of scientific knowledge towards a focus on epistemic education empowering students to face “post-truth.” Chinn and Barzilai (2018) propose that a fully apt epistemic performance, on this dimension, would see abeyance as an option, but would judge that the scientific community consensus is sufficiently warranted. In order to examine such complex epistemic xviii Foreword performances in classroom practice, we will need sophisticated methods, as those analyzed in detail in this book.

As Galileo Galilei — at least the Galileo imagined by Brecht — struggled to teach a 10-year-old to “see” beyond the apparent, and to uncover the relationships between earth and sun, so educational researchers strive to uncover how science and engineering are socially, conceptually, and discursively constructed in classrooms. In doing so they will find guidance in the accomplished scholarship brought together in this volume and, in particular, in the reflections about what the authors-ethnographers learnt from their analyses.

Chinn, C. A., & Barzilai, S. (2018). Teaching scientific thinking in a post-truth world. Paper presented in the AERA conference. New York, April 13—17.

Cunningham, C. M., & Kelly, G. J. (2017a). Framing engineering practices in elementary school classrooms. International Journal of Engineering Education 33(1B), 295-307.

Cunningham, C. M., & Kelly, G. J. (2017b). Epistemic practices of engineering for education. Science Education (online first). https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21271.

Duschl, R. A. (1990). Restructuring science education: The importance of theories and their development. New York: Teachers College Press.

Farrington, B. (1965). Science and politics in the ancient world. London: Unwin University Books.

Heap, J. L. (1995). The status of claims in “qualitative” educational research. Curriculum Inquiry 25(3), 271-292.

Kelly, G. J. (2006). Epistemology and educational research. In J. Green, G. Camilli, & P. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complementary methods in education research (pp. 33-55). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kelly, G. J., Carlsen, W. S., & Cunningham, C. M. (1993). Science education in sociocultural context: Perspectives from the sociology of science. Science Education 77(2), 207-220.

Kelly, G. J., Crawford, T., & Green, J. (2001). Common tasks and uncommon knowledge: Dissenting voices in the discursive construction of physics across small laboratory groups. Linguistics and Education 12(2), 135-174.

Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

NGSS Lead States (2013). Next generation science standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children (M. Cook, Translator). New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press.

Sezen-Barrie, A., Shea, N., & Borman, J. H. (2017). Probing into the sources of ignorance: Science teachers’ practices of constructing arguments or rebuttals to denialism of climate change. Environmental Education Research. DOT: 10.1080/13504622.2017.1330949.

FRAMING ISSUES OF THEORY AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION