The Dynamics of Students' Behaviors and Reasoning during Collaborative Physics Tutorial Sessions

TL;DR

This study explores how students' physical behaviors and verbal reasoning during physics tutorials are interconnected, revealing that behavioral modes correlate with the quality of scientific explanations and reflect their epistemological framing.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis linking students' observable behaviors, their epistemological framing, and reasoning quality during collaborative physics tutorials.

Findings

Certain behavioral modes strongly correlate with high-quality explanations.

Behavioral dynamics reflect students' epistemological framing.

Behavioral and reasoning patterns are dynamically coupled during tutorials.

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of student behaviors (posture, gesture, vocal register, visual focus) and the substance of their reasoning during collaborative work on inquiry-based physics tutorials. Scherr has characterized student activity during tutorials as observable clusters of behaviors separated by sharp transitions, and has argued that these behavioral modes reflect students' epistemological framing of what they are doing, i.e., their sense of what is taking place with respect to knowledge. We analyze students' verbal reasoning during several tutorial sessions using the framework of Russ, and find a strong correlation between certain behavioral modes and the scientific quality of students' explanations. We suggest that this is due to a dynamic coupling of how students behave, how they frame an activity, and how they reason during that activity. This analysis supports the earlier claims of a dynamic between behavior and epistemology. We discuss implications for research and instruction.