Vol. 10 No. 3

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Knowing When You've Brought Them In: Scientific Genre Knowledge and Communities of Practice

D. Kevin O'Neil

Increasingly, researchers in the learning sciences are appealing to notions of community to shape the design of learning technologies and curricular innovations. Many of these designs, including those in the area of project-based science, show strong promise; but, it is a challenging matter to understand the influences of these innovations in a detailed enough fashion to refine them over time. This work demands sensitive, theoretically founded ways to assess the depth to which particular facets of innovations help enucleate students into communities of discourse and practice.

Taking genre theory and the sociology of science as points of departure, I demonstrate a unique approach to the problems of developing and assessing students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. The research I discuss revolves around students' use of a professional scientific genre of scientific writing, the Research Article or Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, (IMRD) report (Swales, 1990), as they compose reports about their own original research. Using data from an innovative project-based high school science class, I demonstrate how genre use provides a window on the effectiveness of a learning environment in helping use discipline-specific tools of persuasion.

In the classroom studied here, students developed e-mail-mentoring relationships with volunteer scientists across the United States and Canada. Working in partnership with the teacher, these "telementors" served not only as inquiry guides for students, but also as a critical audience that helped shape the arguments they made about their research. Detailed analysis of the final reports produced by the teams of students in the class revealed a significant relationship between their fulfillment of the customary persuasive functions of a scientific research article and sustained correspondence with their telementors. A significant relation was also observed between sustained dialogue with telementors and careful hedging of knowledge claims. I situate these findings within the body of theory that suggests that value of telementoring relationships consist not only the ongoing advice and guidance they furnish, but in the ways that a professional audience shapes students' ideas about the sorts of arguments that are called for in science class.

Because the analysis of genre use is a relatively noninvasive way to examine students' understandings of scientific persuasion (as compared with survey instruments or pull-out interviews), this method can serve as a useful tool for reformers wishing to compare the outcomes from iterations or conditions of design experiments that aim to develop students' understanding of persuasive practices in the scientific community. It may also make a useful transfer measure for a wide range of classroom innovations that claim to cultivate scientific reasoning and persuasion, such as science-oriented tools for computer-supported collaborative learning.


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Beyond Adoption to Invention: Teacher-Created Collaborative Activities in Higher Education

Mark Guzdial, Jochen Rick, and Colleen Kehoe

The potential learning benefits of the web are diminished due to the complexity of creating interactive, collaborative web-Based applications. The CoWeb is a collaborative Web site that allows users to create collaborative applications with great flexibility. The CoWeb facilitates open authoring where any user can edit any existing page or creating new pages. Using the CoWeb, both teachers and students have invented a wide variety of educational technology that has led to teacher inventiveness.


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Constructivism in Practice: A Comparison and Contrast of Apprenticeship and Constructionist Learning Environments

Kenneth E. Hay and Sasha A. Barab

This article compares and contrasts 2 summer camps. Future Camp 97 is based on assumptions consistent with constructionism and Scientists Apprentice Camp 97 consistent with legitimate peripheral participation. These 2 learning environments create an opportunity to do an empirical, as opposed a strictly theoretical, comparison of what has been frequently lumped under the term Constructivism. The goal of this article is twofold. First, to move the discourse away from comparing constructivist learning environments solely to traditional learning environments. The 2nd goal is to move away from talking of a single constructivist learning environment, and instead to explore the nuances of learning environments based on different theoretical assumptions. Toward these ends, we analyze 2 summer camps in terms of theoretical assumptions, community and groups, participant roles, practices and other evidence of learning. We conclude with a discussion of similarities and distinctions between these 2 learning environments, highlighting issues of ownership, authenticity, power, and task structure.


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Affodances of Collaborative Software Design Planning for elementary Students' Science Talk

Yasmin B. Kafai and Cynthia Carter Ching

Although educational research and practice has found many benefits to long term and complex design activities, an issue of growing concern is that students might lose sight of science learning while diverting their attention to design aesthetics, collaborative management, and technology. A question is whether or not science is actually separate from these aspects; it may be that science permeates the design environment and is thus contented within these other activities. To investigate this possibility we followed a classroom of 33 students, divided into 7 teams, and we examined their science discussions as they planned for creating instructional software designs. Specifically, we investigated which conversational contexts gave rise to science talk. We found that a focus on the fine-grained details of the instructional science designs themselves and the contributions of more design-experienced students played an important role in the sophistication of the science context in the planning discussions. In examining less productive contexts for science talk, we found that a conversational focus in planning discussions on collaboration and software issues, as well as the science focus of the software designs, impacted the quality of science integration. In our discussion, we address the issue of which design contexts afford opportunities for richer discourse and the implications for other project-based design activities.


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