(NOTE: this is a blog post that distills the main ideas from a recent article published in Cognition and Instruction by myself and Rachel Scherr. To see the full journal article, go to: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2018.1496918)
On the first day of your first physics class in college, you sit down with three strangers. You feel uneasy with physics; it is something you hope to get through but do not dare to hope to excel at. You are expecting math – hard math – and you feel self-conscious about your algebra skills. You open the book and the first question asks you “(a) What do you think are the benefits of discussing your mistakes in physics? (b) Discuss your answer with your group.”
Your first thought is that of course you’re going to make mistakes in physics, but the last thing on earth you’d want to do is discuss them. You look up at your group mates and nervously laugh. What do you do next? Do you share what you are thinking? Do you make fun of the question? Do you just try and get through this weird exercise and steel yourself for the “real” physics?
The answer to this question has steep ramifications for students in physics classes that focus on collaborative sensemaking. Some groups dismiss instructional activities right off the bat, potentially setting the tone for the rest of the semester. Others have meaningful conversations about their own ideas from the start. What makes the difference between a group that engages, and a group that dismisses?
A growing number of physics courses emphasize collaborative learning by supplementing the traditional lectures and labs with weekly discussion sections. The discussions allow students to make sense of physics by connecting their ideas and experiences to understand new phenomenon. But this only works if students are willing to discuss and critique their own ideas in the first place. Since most students don’t expect to have to discuss their ideas in a physics class, it is a challenge for them to figure out how to begin and sustain physics sensemaking discussions with peers.
It is also a challenge for researchers to study how students manage to get into collaborative sensemaking discussions. To do so, we used video records to analyze in detail three student groups’ first discussions, looking for the factors that led to them being willing to share their ideas and critique them.
We found that one way groups manage this is by making fun of their own responses. By putting their ideas out there half-jokingly, they add a layer of protection. If the idea (or even their approach of taking the activity seriously) gets rejected, they can easily retract their seriousness; “I was just kidding”. However, sometimes the idea or the approach gets taken up, in which case there is no need to further distance themselves from the idea.
Making fun of their own response is not the only way students can play down their idea while still getting it out there. The can quote others, or introduce their idea with a hedge (“I’m not sure, but…”). We use the term epistemic distancing to refer to any of these moves in which students reduce their commitment to what they are saying.
We found that what seems to set apart the groups that engage with those that dismiss is their use of epistemic distancing. When a student distances themselves from their idea, it leaves room for the idea to be critiqued, rather than the student. This, in turn, makes space for the students to make sense of ideas together.
By using epistemic distancing, groups eased into substantive conversations without the speakers seeming to the others as taking themselves, their ideas, or even their activity together too seriously. Without epistemic distancing, groups tended to have conversations that shut down quickly. “It’s been proven that you learn from your mistakes” doesn’t leave much room for more ideas to be shared. On the other hand, groups that used too much epistemic distancing missed out on having substantive conversations because they avoided conflict to the point of not sharing what they really think. This sometimes resulted in dismissiveness: “Whatever.” When groups used epistemic distancing productively, they at least got to share their ideas, even if they got rejected. This led to more substantive discussion that helped students make sense of physics in terms of their own ideas.
An important ramification of this finding is that students who may seem to be joking, even “off-task”, could be subtly introducing ideas for discussion. We saw one instructor encourage initially dismissive students to productively make sense of unexpected “jumps” in a graph. The instructor moved from asking them bald questions, like “What happened there?”, to making space for uncertain ideas: “What do you think happened there, any ideas?” When students offered half-joking responses with laughter, the instructor listened to the ideas, took them seriously, and helped them develop the ideas further. The students then pursued those ideas in further discussions and experiments.
As researchers, these findings remind us how the conceptual dynamics of learning are bound up in the social and emotional. And as instructors, they show how we can encourage discussion by taking students’ ideas more seriously; even the not-so-serious ones.
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