Precisely coordinated transitions among spatial-orientational behavioral clusters help stabilize local patterns of student thinking¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2012 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Students moved in and out of worksheet-oriented, strip-oriented, and mutual-attention behavioral clusters with remarkable synchrony, and feedback from spatial arrangement and orientation is proposed to stabilize local patterns of thinking. → Frank 2012

Evidence¶

Frank 2012¶

Frank, B. W., and Scherr, R. E. (2012). Interactional processes for stabilizing conceptual coherences in physics. Submitted to PRST-PER. https://journals.aps.org/prper/ doi:10.1103/physrevstper.8.020101

q2 · i? · qualitative · r2

Participation-based video analysis in Section 4.B.1 of three behavioral clusters. During the initial discussion the students transitioned eight times between worksheet- and strip-oriented clusters, and "The transitions are precisely coordinated (though not centrally directed)."

"The transitions are precisely coordinated (though not centrally directed), suggesting that feedback from participants’ spatial arrangement and orientation helps to stabilize local patterns of thinking."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Synchronized collective behaviors oriented to strips and worksheets dynamically stabilize the students' initial activity and thinking — possibly the same claim (merge candidate)
• Material arrangement of artifacts (strips centered and ordered by length, worksheets held close) affords and stabilizes the initial pattern of activity; later decentralization enables new patterns — related
• The physical stability of material artifacts such as stacked tickertape strips and worksheets stabilizes students' attention, action, and knowledge use — related
• Changes in the constraints of activity (attention, object location, interaction patterns) provide opportunities for new locally stable patterns of thinking to take hold — related
• A network of three mutually overlapping intuitive ideas (less distance implies less time, bunched up means faster, faster implies less time) stabilizes students' initial thinking — related
• Shifts from the blue to the green behavioral cluster correspond to shifts from completing the worksheet to discussing ideas — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• A teaching assistant's arrival shifts group behavior to the red cluster, corresponding to framing the activity as listening to the TA — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Coordinating attention between whole-strip length and dot spacing does not disrupt and may stabilize the idea that shorter strips take less time — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• A student's animated off-worksheet statements can function as bids for a frame change that the group may accept or ignore — related
• Pairs managed mutual awareness through spatial and temporal affordances and developed attention-getting protocols finer-grained than turn-taking — related