Is promoting student participation enough to promote their learning?

COLEONI, ENRIQUE; BUTELER, LAURA; BAUDINO, NICOLÁS

Córdoba

Congreso; International Conference on Physics Education; 2014

IUPAP-UNC

The present work explores the dynamics of participations occurring in an introductory physics course at the university level. These dynamics are described in terms of the types of discourse established among students and between students and teacher. This description is characterized using the framework proposed by Aguiar, Mortimer and Scott [Learning From and Responding to Students? Questions: the Authoritative and Dialogic Tension. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(2), 174-193 (2010)]. At the same time, students? utterances are analyzed to probe for different concept learning processes in terms of Coordination-Class Theory, proposed by diSessa and Sherin [What changes in conceptual change? International Journal of Science Education, 20(10) 1155-1191(1998)]. Data are collected from two different classroom episodes in an Introductory Physics course of a career in Physics at the University of Córdoba, in Argentina. Results suggest that different types of student participation can be promoted by different actions carried out by the teacher. Beyond the distinction of these types of participation per-se, the work shows the different concept-learning processes that occur within each.