Unpacking Sensemaking

Abstract

Learning science involves an ongoing process in which learners construct and reconstruct self‐explanations and evaluate their relative soundness. This work coordinates and aligns complementary methodological and theoretical approaches to learning to both unpack sensemaking and better understand the conditions that facilitate it. I conceptualize people's sense of what constitutes a good explanation as taking place along a multidimensional metric and discuss three dimensions of this metric that are central to the evaluation of explanations of phenomena in the physical world: (1) intuitive knowledge, (2) mechanism, and (3) framing. The study operationalizes each dimension in terms that can be empirically tracked in students’ talk, gestures, and social interactions. The power and function of the multidimensional metric is illustrated through its account of the evolution of self‐generated explanations of two seventh‐grade girls who attempt to understand why a plastic bottle shrinks when air is pumped out of it. The analysis demonstrates that the framework can explain conviction in an explanation, preference for one explanation over another, and the complex conditions that facilitate this change. Methodological and practical implications are discussed.

Disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in school science

“…At first glance, the tension described above seems to be an issue of content fidelity . The students (i.e., Jean) experienced it as a tension between the perspective of common school science, which is expressed by the requirement to get the right answer, and personal relevance, which calls for individual sensemaking (i.e., self‐generated explanations that are targeted to oneself rather than the teacher and aim to make sense of the phenomena in question; see Kapon, ). However, from the teacher's point of view, this case is substantially different and more complex than the previous one.…”

“…The meaning we ascribe to the term personal relevance is drawn from the literature on relevance as well as the contemporary discussions of authenticity cited above. We also build on our own work on students’ sensemaking (Kapon, ; Kapon & diSessa, ) and appropriation (Levrini, Fantini, Pecori, Tasquier, & Levin, ; Levrini, Levin, & Fantini, ). For us, personal relevance encompasses students’ sense of benefit, value, and meaningfulness, as well as agency as users and generators of what is learned.…”

"Charges are everywhere": A case of student sensemaking about electric current

“…We then analyzed these episodes using construct of framing, based on the work of Russ et al [9] and Kapon [4] . Framing is commonly understood as a person's sense of "what's going on here?"…”

“…Some have studied it as a stance that students take towards science learning, a way that they frame their activities. From this perspective, students who are trying to make sense of physics are approaching the subject with a specific goal, to build an explanation that achieves coherence between the principles we teach and what they otherwise know to be true about the world [2][3][4]. Other researchers have studied it as a cognitive process that students engage in, in which they connect and integrate new, formal knowledge with their existing knowledge.…”

Messages in a Bottles: Valuable Insights from and by Researchers

“…Citing Paul Thagard's admiration of conceptual coherence, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.21248/abstract () provides a valuable message about the process of “sensemaking.” To the uninitiated, sensemaking appears straightforward: a teacher works with students to develop sensible ideas about a phenomenon. However, the author bestows a message in a bottle in the form of reasoning resources: (a) intuitive thinking, (b) causal mechanisms, and (3) contextual framing.…”