Epistemic distancing plays a critical role in student groups' construction of a safe space for collaborative sensemaking in physics tutorials¶

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 use hedging, joking, quoting, and questioning to soften their stances, protecting themselves from affective risk and enabling generation and evaluation of ideas. → Conlin 2012

Evidence¶

Conlin 2012¶

Conlin, L. D., & Scherr, R. E. (2012). Making Space to Sensemake: Epistemic Distancing in Small Group Physics Discussions. Preprint under review. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Making+Space+to+Sensemake

q2 · i? · qualitative · r2

Close qualitative discourse analysis of videotaped first discussions of three tutorial groups from a ~2,000-hour corpus at the University of Maryland. The article reports that "epistemic distancing played a key role" in each group's safe space; no effect size is printed.

"A core finding is that epistemic distancing played a key role in each groups' construction of a safe space to collaboratively make sense of mechanisms."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• A TA's intervention that incrementally added epistemic distancing to his questions shifted a dismissive group into sensemaking with a lasting effect — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• A new group member's heavily distanced bid to discuss shifted the Bronze group's norms toward sharing and evaluating ideas — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• The yellow behavioral cluster corresponds to a joking frame in which ambiguous tone protects students who venture risky ideas — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Both too much and too little epistemic distancing can shut down group discussion — related
• Tutorial groups varied widely in when they first entered collaborative sensemaking, from about 13 minutes to nearly 53 minutes of tutorial time — related
• Four distinct, reliably codable behavioral clusters appear in collaborative tutorial video data — related