Lee, Yew-Jin

The paper presents a case study report of two high school students’ explanation of addition reaction during an interview. It aims to characterise students’ discourse dealing with the concepts of reaction mechanism from a multimodal communication perspective. The research addresses the following questions: (1) What roles do the different communicative modes play within students’ discourse? (2) What are the relationships among communicative modes used by the students? A theoretical framework based on multimodal communication and social semiotics which guided the analysis of the students’ discourse and the results of the analysis are presented in the paper. Implications for teaching and learning of science are also drawn from the study.

Does nonverbal cues increase the propensity of teachers’ instructive discourse and at the same time assesses students’ cognitive construction of knowledge? The researches that attest to the effectiveness of gestures are by far those conducted on younger children. Few of such research have been done on college students and in Science subjects. As such a randomized pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design of 14 matched pairs were tasked to watch one of the two videotaped lessons on a topic in Biology. In the video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson, the teacher produced gestures to illustrate concepts while in the video-cum-slides-only lesson the teacher did not produce any gestures. In a post-test of 10 Multiple-Choice-Questions attempted by these 28 students, students who watched video-cum-slides-only lesson scored a mean of 7.6 while students who watched video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson scored a mean of 6.2. 7 of these matched pairs further underwent a feedback session with the teacher while the other 7 did not. A follow up test showed that students who had feedback given scored higher and progressed from a discordant stage of gesture-speech mismatch to the concordant stage of gesture-speech match of a right concept while those without feedback regressed.

This dissertation builds upon and extends theorizing in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), which is a recent addition to the sociocultural analysis of learning, identity, and history. Drawing largely on longitudinal fieldwork conducted in a salmon hatchery in British Columbia, specifically, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, more generally, the present studies affirm the possibility of learning in mundane work environments as well as discovering what it means to learn and be an expert in the workplace. In addition, the results show how institutions that aspire to be learning organizations have to provide access to participation to all its members. The findings reported here also sensitize workplace researchers to issues of identity inherent during the process of interviewing besides articulating a new, non-dualistic conception of organizational identity and organizational identification. The necessity of examining the cultural-historical dimensions of work activity situates the activity of salmon enhancement in context in a final study. All these different but related investigations of work indicate that unless a strongly dialectical stance is maintained throughout activitytheoretic analysis, cultural-historical theories will not advance. This important methodological and theoretical principle has manifested itself in the following dialectical tensions underlying this dissertation: subject|object, individual|collective, and agency|structure.

Research on argumentation has increased our understanding of knowledge construction, group learning, and scaffolding structures in CSCL although analyses of argumentation pose many difficulties. This could be due to the many theoretical positions that can be taken when approaching discourse data. In this paper, we use three popular analytic methods (interactional, content-specific, and linguistic) to compare the same fragment of scientific argumentation by Grade 4 children in Singapore. We show the complementary emphases and strengths of each disciplinary position as well as their weaknesses. The results imply that analytic methods arising from different disciplinary positions can potentially broaden our overall understanding of using argumentation in CSCL.

One of the goals of inquiry-based teaching and learning of science is for students to learn the processes of inquiry and to apply these processes in new situations to construct new knowledge for themselves. Very often, students who are exposed to inquiry activities encounter conceptual conflicts that do not align with their pre-conceived ideas. How these conflicts are resolved provide different types of learning experiences for the learners. Interaction talk during hands-on science inquiry activities provides a good source of information on how students deal with conceptual conflicts and, in particular, how they apply inquiry skills to resolve these conflicts. The analysis of talk in interaction amongst a group of six grade five students in a Singapore school has surfaced at least three ways whereby students construct and shape their learning in an inquiry-based science activity through the ways they deal with conceptual conflicts: (a) domineering voices in a group can prematurely curtail alternative ideas and concepts in dealing with a conceptual conflict; (b) a peer expert in a group can scaffold learning for a student facing a conceptual conflict; and (c) learners draw on inquiry skills to resolve cognitive conflicts arising from anomalous results or behaviours during hands-on investigations.

This paper draws on Foucault to (a) describe the production of classroom discourse in relation to how ordering manifests within the discourse, and (b) to explicate how chemistry classroom discourses are not fixed but are the site of constant contestations of power as displayed in an eighty minute high school lesson on organic chemistry in Singapore. This microanalysis of discourse provides opportunities to reconstruct how teachers teach and dispels the notion that power is uniquely their sovereign possession. Classroom instruction is in fact a complex activity that coordinates power/knowledge production through communication. Examining classroom instruction through Foucaultian lenses uncovers the taken for granted nature of communication and illustrates the capillary relations of power and knowing.

This paper describes how five elementary school students learnt about environmental science and the nature of science as they were engaged in Knowledge Building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003) during a Nature Learning Camp project. Unlike the emphasis on "doing" in inquiry-based project work, which precludes making cutting edge discoveries by students, Knowledge Building channels students‘ attention on the continual advancement of group ideas and thus opens the way for appropriating the scientific process of knowledge creation. This is because it takes advantage of a young child‘s inquisitiveness to develop him/her to become a mature knowledge producer as he/she pushes up his/her level of understanding. In this study, we tracked the knowledge development of this group of students and its process as they studied about plants. Using qualitative discourse analysis, we found advancement in students‘ ideas about science process skills and the nature of science. However, much support from the teacher was needed for knowledge advancement to take place; the teacher played an important role in engaging the students in sustained talk around the topic and in directing the focus for on their own, students‘ talk was rather shallow and ideas were fleeting. We conclude that to engage students in Knowledge Building effectively, science argumentation skills are important discourse skills to develop.

Over the past three decades, science educators have accumulated a vast amount of information on conceptions––variously defined as beliefs, ontologies, cognitive structures, mental models, or frameworks––that generally (at least initially) have been derived from interviews about certain topics. During the same time period, cultural studies has emerged as a field in which everyday social practices are interrogated with the objective to understand culture in all its complexity. Science educators have however yet to ask themselves what it would mean to consider the possession of conceptions as well as conceptual change from the perspective of cultural studies. The purpose of this article is thus to articulate in and through the analysis of an interview about natural phenomenon the first principles of such a cultural approach to scientific conceptions. Our bottom-up approach in fact leads us to develop the kind of analyses and theories that have become widespread in cultural studies. This promises to generate less presupposing and more parsimonious explanations of this core issue within science education than if conceptions are supposed to be structures inhabiting the human mind.