Mark
Enfield
Elementary Science Teacher Educator |
School of Education Peabody Hall
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Education
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Research
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Education MSU - Elementary Methods UNC - Elementary Methods Science for Elementary Teachers
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Service
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Dissertation
My
dissertation can be found here as a PDF
File. Following the link to the PDF File
is the abstract of the dissertation. Please
contact me at the above address if you have questions.
“IT JUST FLIES”: JOINT CONSTRUCTION OF
ACCOUNTS IN
ELEMENTARY SCIENCE CLASSROOMS
Abstract
Increasingly elementary classrooms use
whole group
discussions to help students make sense of ideas; this includes science
teaching and learning. Science teaching
and learning faces particular problems in this practice.
We know that students hold naïve conceptions
of phenomena that challenge development of understandings of science
ideas. Students in whole group sense
making
discussions naturally introduce naïve conceptions.
Therefore one question asks whether this
practice facilitates students’ making sense of phenomena, challenging
students’ naïve conceptions, and learning scientific ideas. In
addition,
the social and linguistic demands of discussions privilege students who
tacitly
understand the logic of scientific discourse, who have greater command
of
language, and who have higher social status in the class.
The goal is that students will
collaboratively construct accounts that make sense of phenomena in the
natural
world; but this is not easy. Patterns in
video-recorded discussions show that students’ interests lay in jointly
constructing accounts that describe how to control phenomena. Such accounts sound like descriptions of how
to do things to achieve certain outcomes.
When discussions attempt to generate this kind of account, more
students
participate and there is increased use of shared utterances. However, science also attempts to generate
accounts that describe and explain phenomena free from human action. In this study, when the teacher (also this
researcher) attempts to shift students’ towards accounts that describe
phenomena free of human intervention, problems arise.
Students make fewer attempts to speak or
share utterances. Furthermore, the
discussions become triadic, involving only the teacher and one or two
students. Thus I argue that to support
students’
collaboration they need opportunities to pursue accounts that are
meaningful
and useful to them. In addition, to
learn scientific modes of communication, instruction needs to include
careful
and deliberate actions that help students learn to construct scientific
accounts. To help young students learn
language and how
to use language, while simultaneously learning science, places heavy
demands on
classroom teachers. Teachers need
support to facilitate learning language, ideas, practices, and how to
jointly
construct accounts of phenomena that are meaningful to students and
also
scientific accounts of phenomena in the world.