Characterization of the Joint Elaboration of Conceptual Understanding and of Students’ Performances. Volcanoes and Earthquakes at Grade 5.

Author(s):

Jérôme Santini

Conference:

ECER 2009

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 03 B, Comparative Didactics

Paper Session

Time:

2009-09-28

14:00-15:30

Room:

NIG, HS 2G

Chair:

Helmut Johannes Vollmer

Contribution

This contribution aims at characterizing the joint elaboration of conceptual understanding in a case study of classroom sessions and tries to match it with students’ performances. In doing so, we intent to link a theoretical characterization of classroom practices with evidences from the classroom field. Our research field comprises four French 5th grade classes that are videotaped during the study of volcanoes and earthquakes. We also interviewed the teachers and collected the students’ productions to a research test. We analyze our corpus within the JATD or Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007; Sensevy et al., 2008). The fundamental viewpoint of the JATD is to consider teaching and learning as a joint action, cooperative and asymmetric, between the teacher and the students. This joint action is thought of as part of a language game (Wittgenstein, 1997) specific to didactic systems. Such learning games (Sensevy, 2007) are described using a system of theoretical categories (ibid.; Brousseau, 1997; Chevallard, 1992; Sensevy et al., 2005). Within the JATD, we refer to the conceptual understanding as the mastering of epistemic games (Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Santini, 2007). We then analyze the epistemic games that the students have the opportunity to deal with, explicitly or not, across the learning games, at multiple timescales of analysis (Tiberghien et al., 2007). We first conduct an analysis at the macro level to reduce our video data into synopses. Our aim here is to account of each videotaped teaching sequences and to characterize the classroom practices at a large timescale. From the results of this first analysis, we then choose two learning topics favourable to the comparison between the four classes: the structure of conic volcanoes and the mechanism of earthquakes. We analyze the dialectic between learning games and epistemic games for each of these two topics, and in each of the teaching sequences, at the meso level and at the micro level. This leads us to produce a fine characterization of the observed classroom practices. Relying on this second analysis and our theoretical framework, we make claims about the comparative efficiency of these practices. These claims are turned into conjectures that are tested with a set of data, coded from the students’ productions to the test, using non-parametric statistics. The validation of our conjectures warrants our qualitative analysis and provides us with some evidences about the comparative efficiency of the teaching practices of our case study.

Method

We collect a corpus composed of videotaped classroom sessions, audiotaped teachers’ interviews and students’ written productions to a research test. We analyze this corpus with a clinical approach to ordinary classes (Schubauer-Leoni & Leutenegger, 2002) and an a priori analysis formatted as a grid (Buty, Tiberghien & Le Maréchal, 2004). We pursue the qualitative analysis of our corpus with a quantitative analysis, in a continuum between the qualitative and the quantitative (Ercikan & Roth, 2006) within our clinical methodology. Following Chi (1997), we design a code to quantify the students’ productions to our research test. Our use of non-parametric statistics within a case study doesn’t aim to generalize to a larger population of individuals but to warrant our qualitative claims (Shaffer & Serlin, 2004).

Expected Outcomes

All along this case study, we characterize the dialectic between learning games and epistemic games with the categories of knowledge density and knowledge specificity. Our results show that the efficiency of the observed classroom practices depends not only on these two categories but also on a third one: the “distance” to the gain of conceptualization at stake. This distance may be thought of as the amount of “moves” the students need to play by themselves so as the teacher can legitimately acknowledge learning has occurred. We conclude that the efficiency of a teaching practice depends not solely on being inquiry-based or direct instruction, but also on a fine attunement of density, specificity and distance in the learning-epistemic games dialectic. Moreover, our results indicate that the efficiency and the equity of a teaching practice don’t imply each other.

References

Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Buty, C., Tiberghien, A., & Le Maréchal, J. F. (2004). Learning hypotheses and associated tools to design and to analyse teaching-leaning sequences. International Journal of Science Education, 26(5), 579-604. Chevallard, Y. (1992). Fundamental concepts in didactics: perspectives provided by an anthropological approach. In Douady R. & Mercier A. (Eds), Research in Didactique of Mathematics (pp. 131-168), Selected Papers, Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage. Chi, M.T.H. (1997). Quantifying qualitative analyses of verbal data: A practical guide. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6, 271-315. Collins, A., & Ferguson, W. (1993). Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and strategies to guide inquiry. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 25-42. Ercikan, K., & Roth, W-M. (2006). What good is polarizing research into qualitative and quantitative? Educational Researcher, 35(5), pp. 14-23. Santini, J. (2007). Jeux épistémiques et modélisation en classe ordinaire: les séismes au cours moyen. Didaskalia, 31, 47-83. Schubauer-Leoni, M.L., & Leutenegger, F. (2002). Expliquer, comprendre dans une approche clinique/expérimentale du didactique ordinaire. In Leutenegger F. & Saada-Robert M. (Eds), Expliquer, comprendre en sciences de l'éducation (pp. 227-251). Bruxelles: De Boeck. Sensevy, G. (2007). Des catégories pour décrire et comprendre l’action du professeur. In G. Sensevy & A. Mercier (Eds), Agir ensemble. L'action didactique conjointe du professeur et des élèves (pp. 13-49). Rennes: PUR. Sensevy, G., Mercier, A., Schubauer-Leoni, M-L., Ligozat, F. & Perrot, G (2005). An attempt to model the teacher’s action in mathematics, Educational Studies in mathematics, 59(1), 153-181. Sensevy, G., & Mercier, A. (Eds). (2007). Agir ensemble. L'action didactique conjointe du professeur et des élèves. Rennes: PUR. Sensevy, G., Gruson, B., Marlot, C., & Santini, J. (2008) The Joint Action Theory: introducing the approach. Symposium Practical Epistemology Analysis and Joint Action Theory in Didactics, European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Gothenburg, Sweden, 10-12 September 2008. Shaffer, D., & Serlin, R. (2004). What Good are Statistics that Don’t Generalize? Educational Researcher, 33(9), pp. 14–25. Tiberghien, A., Malkoun, L., Buty, C., Souassy, N., & Mortimer, E. (2007). Analyse des savoirs en jeu en classe de physique à différentes échelles de temps. In G. Sensevy & A. Mercier (Eds) Agir ensemble. L'action didactique conjointe du professeur et des élèves (pp. 93-122). Rennes: PUR. Wittgenstein, L. (1997). Philosophical Investigations = Philosophische Untersuchungen (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.), Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1953).

Author Information

Jérôme Santini

CREAD University Rennes 2

Toulon

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