Imagining with improvised representations in CSCL environments

Abstract

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational possibilities and artifact meanings. Much of the research on student-generated representations examines situations in which students are asked by a teacher or researcher explicitly to produce representations. However, we need more knowledge about how students within CSCL settings introduce representations from outside of the designed environment or intended task in order to solve a problem. To unpack the processes of collaborative improvisation and meaning making, we take a sociocultural stance towards imagining. This stance involves considering the socially and materially situated ways that participants express new possibilities and alternative situations that extend beyond the present reality. Focusing on a specific task based on maps as disciplinary representations, we analyze video data of upper secondary physics students working in small groups in a co-located CSCL environment. To characterize shifts across boundaries of several modalities including the verbal and gestural, digital and physical, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional, we identify emergent representations as imaginative productions. The findings extend current research on collaborative meaning making by bringing attention to the processes through which improvised representations emerge. This knowledge is key to facilitating the discovery of representational possibilities in CSCL environments.

Reflections and looking ahead for CSCL: digital infrastructures, digital tools, and collaborative learning

“…A CSCL design would thus include the interaction between varying resource-choices of learners. Similarly, Steier et al (2019) propose attending to the improvised representations of students which emerge outside of the intended CSCL design or framework. Collectively, this suggests that an emerging perspective in the field includes the expansion of what we consider to be designed activity.…”

Learning with Friction—Students’ Gestures and Enactment in Relation to a GeoGebra Simulation

“…According to Prain and Tytler (2012), students' construction of their own representations allows them to focus on the purpose and relevance of representations in particular contexts and facilitates their understanding of relationships between objects, their representations and their meaning. In contrast to such studies where student-generated representations are explicitly prompted by the teachers, Steier et al (2019) argue that cases where students spontaneously generate representations have received insufficient attention in science education research. They have found that students often come up with new representations in a collaborative environment and that the development of unprompted representations is part of the process of making sense of a physical concept or phenomenon.…”

Knowledge Representation of Mathematics Education Program among Students in Euclidean Parallelism

“…Students who solve the problem with corresponding and alternate (interior/exterior) angles see pictures through a different perspective, such as railroads. An imagination expands the possibilities of representation [26]. The lines of g and k will seem to intersect if they are extended.…”