Some assembly required: How scientific explanations are constructed during clinical interviews

Abstract

This article is concerned with commonsense science knowledge, the informally gained knowledge of the natural world that students possess prior to formal instruction in a scientific discipline. Although commonsense science has been the focus of substantial study for more than two decades, there are still profound disagreements about its nature and origin, and its role in science learning. What is the reason that it has been so difficult to reach consensus? We believe that the problems run deep; there are difficulties both with how the field has framed questions and the way that it has gone about seeking answers. In order to make progress, we believe it will be helpful to focus on one type of research instrument—the clinical interview—that is employed in the study of commonsense science. More specifically, we argue that we should seek to understand and model, on a moment‐by‐moment basis, student reasoning as it occurs in the interviews employed to study commonsense science. To illustrate and support this claim, we draw on a corpus of interviews with middle school students in which the students were asked questions pertaining to the seasons and climate phenomena. Our analysis of this corpus is based on what we call the mode‐node framework. In this framework, student reasoning is seen as drawing on a set of knowledge elements we call nodes, and this set produces temporary explanatory structures we call dynamic mental constructs. Furthermore, the analysis of our corpus seeks to highlight certain patterns of student reasoning that occur during interviews, patterns in what we call conceptual dynamics. These include patterns in which students can be seen to search through available knowledge (nodes), in which they assemble nodes into an explanation, and in which they converge on and shift among alternative explanations. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 166–198, 2012

Unpacking Sensemaking

“…An underlying assumption in this work is that every self‐explanation a person believes in at a particular moment is based on a chunk of intuitive knowledge (Sherin et al., ). Furthermore, some chunks are relatively stronger than others.…”

Exploring the entanglement of personal epistemologies and emotions in students’ thinking

“…Recent empirical evidence supports a view of novice knowledge as more dynamic, unstable, and contextual [31,33,35,[56][57][58][59][60]. Researchers have argued for a similarly dynamic, contextual model of students' personal epistemologies [61] and emotions [37,50].…”

Education, communication, and science in the public sphere

“…One characteristic example of this approach is conceptual change, a theory which synthesized earlier work on prior knowledge (e.g., Piaget, 1974) into a framework for explaining how and why concepts might be resistant to change, and under what circumstances change could be facilitated (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982). More recent research on prior knowledge challenges the stability of mental models and offers a more fluid and dynamic picture of conceptual development (e.g., Sherin, Krakowski, & Lee, 2012).…”