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The purpose of this study was to interpret students' participation in terms of social and argumentation norms to improve understanding of social interaction in scientific argumentation. Therefore, the study sought to identify social and argumentation norms formed in group argumentation and to explore changes in students' participation as lessons progressed. Twelve lessons that included argumentation were delivered to 44 eighth graders in Korea. In each lesson, small group argumentation tasks were introduced after the teacher had explained the main concepts or after student-centred hands-on activities. We analysed argumentation in one focus group based on various data, including audiotaped and videotaped conversations, field notes and student interviews. In early lessons, discussions were always teacher-initiated and led by a high-achieving student, while other students rarely presented ideas. Moreover, students struggled to seek answers in a textbook and often used analogies and common sense to explain phenomena. They tended to accept others' opinions unquestioningly or ignore other low achievers' ideas in small group argumentation. In later lessons, we observed studentinitiated and more equally distributed discussions, in which students were likely to make claims or statements actively based on experimental results and scientific knowledge. Along with these changes in discussion style, some students were seen to support the building of social norms and argumentation norms in a group. Also, performing tasks and receiving guidance from the teacher helped to build students' epistemological norms about scientific argumentation.

In this study, we examined students' epistemological and positional framing during small group scientific modeling to explore their context-dependent perceptions about knowledge, themselves, and others. We focused on two small groups of Korean eighth-grade students who participated in six modeling activities about excretion.The two groups were purposefully selected because the students showed contrasting patterns of collaboration in modeling activities and sometimes showed significant shifts in their participation.We qualitatively analyzed the students' epistemological framing, positional framing, and modeling processes in each episode, based on their discourse and behaviors in the modeling practices. We found that the students' epistemological and positional framing were dynamically intertwined with each other and worked together to guide the students' participation in the group modeling. The students actively constructed and negotiated their perceptions about how to participate in the modeling practices, and those epistemological perceptions were closely related to how they positioned themselves and other participants in each context. This study suggests that it is important to attend to the dynamics of students' epistemological and positional framing in order to understand and facilitate the students' participation in science practice communities.

This study aimed to explore the effect on group dynamics of statements associated with deep learning approaches (DLA) and their contribution to cognitive collaboration and model development during group modeling of blood circulation. A group was selected for an in-depth analysis of collaborative group modeling. This group constructed a model in a similar fashion to a target model and demonstrated within-group dialogic interaction patterns. It was found that statements associated with DLA contributed to the collaborative group dynamics by providing cognitive scaffolding and enabling critical monitoring, which together facilitated model development and students' participation and understanding. In the model generation phase, the skills demonstrated indicated the use of statements associated with DLA as one student focused on the principles of blood circulation, thereby providing scaffolding for the other students. These students then generated another sub-model. In the model elaboration phase, statements associated with DLA elements such as request information of mechanism (AQ-a) and resolve discrepancies in knowledge (AQ-b) provided students with metacognitive scaffolding and enabled them to show their deep cognitive participation. Moreover, statements associated with DLA elements such as asking questions or metacognitive activity enabled the students to monitor others' models or ideas critically, showing that active cognitive interaction was taking place within the group. These findings reveal that individual learning approaches will bring a synergistic effect to a group modeling process and can lead to practical educational insights for educators seeking to use lessons based on group modeling.

The purpose of this study is to identify the epistemological features and model qualities depending on model evaluation levels and to explore the reasoning process behind high-level evaluation through small group interaction about blood circulation. Nine groups of three to four students in the eighth grade participated in the modeling practice. Their group models, which were represented by discourse and blood circulation diagrams, were analyzed for the development of the framework that informed the model evaluation levels and epistemological features. The model evaluation levels were categorized into levels one to four based on the following evaluation criteria: no evaluation, authoritative sources, superficial criteria, and more comprehensive criteria. The qualities of group models varied with the criteria of model evaluation. While students who used authoritative sources for evaluating the group model appeared to have an absolutist epistemology, students who evaluated according to the superficial criteria and more comprehensive criteria appeared to have an evaluative epistemology. Furthermore, groups with Level four showed a chain reaction of cognitive reasoning during the modeling practice concerning practical epistemology. The findings have implications for science teachers and education researchers who want to understand the context for developing students' practical epistemologies.

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