Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change

The goal of this paper is to construct an integrated approach to collaboration and conceptual change. To this end, a case of conceptual change is analyzed from the point of view of conversational interaction. It is proposed that the crux of collaboration is the problem of convergence: How can two (or more) people construct shared meanings for conversations, concepts, and experiences? Collaboration is analyzed as a process that gradually can lead to convergence of meaning. The epistemological basis of the framework of analysis is a relational, situated view of meaning: meanings are taken to be relations among situations and verbal or gestural actions. The central claim is that a process described by four primary features can account for students’ incremental achievement of convergent conceptual change. The process is characterized by: (a) the production of a deep-featured situation, in relation to (b) the interplay of physical metaphors, through the constructive use of (c) interactive cycles of conversational turn-taking, constrained by (d) the application of progressively higher standards of evidence for convergence. Convergent Conceptual Change 3 Learning by Collaborating: Convergent Conceptual Change Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. (Dewey, 1916, p. 34) ...the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and a co-efficient of the truth on one side, wilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. (James, quoted in Cremin, 1988, p. 400). The goal of this paper is to construct an integrated approach to collaboration and conceptual change. To do so, it examines a case of conceptual change from the point of view of collaborative conversational interaction. This paper proposes that the crux of collaboration is the problem of convergence: How can two (or more) people construct shared meanings for conversations, concepts, and experiences? Few theories account for the achievement of convergence in the face of tendencies for meanings to diverge. This potential for divergence is particularly acute in science education; misconceptions research (see reviews in Confrey, 1990; McDermott, 1984; Eylon & Linn, 1988) documents the unusually strong tendencies of students to construct non-standard meanings for scientific concepts. A serious account of science learning must provide an analysis of how convergence is achieved despite these tendencies. In order to understand students’ collaborative learning, it is helpful to reflect on scientists’ collaborative work. To converge on meaningful new theories, scientists collaborate. Ethnographic and sociological analyses (e.g. Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour, 1986; Mulkay, Potter, & Yearly, 1983) of scientific theory construction argue that scientific collaboration shares most the features of everyday, informal interaction, including the use of conversational turn-taking structures to negotiate meaning. Investigators of scientific conceptual change emphasize two differences that distinguish scientific work: (a) the production of visible displays that represent features of the world at an intermediate level of abstraction (e.g. Latour, 1986; Lynch, 1985; Miller, 1986) and Convergent Conceptual Change 4 (b) the interplay and recombination of metaphors drawn from experience to construct explanations (e.g. Einstein, 1950; Lightman, 1989; Boyd, 1979; Nercessian, 1988). Similar findings have emerged in studies of science learning. Conceptual change is seen as a process of learning to register “deep features” of situations (Chi, Feltovich and Glaser, 1980; Anzai & Yokohama, 1984; Larkin, 1983) and restructuring systems of physical metaphors (diSessa, 1983; diSessa 1987; Ogborn, 1985; Clement, Brown, & Zietsman, 1989). This paper takes the negotiation of meanings of relations between such deep-featured situations and theory-constitutive metaphors to be the focus of students’ collaboration in conceptual change. It builds on social constructivist (e.g. Vygotsky, 1978; Newman, Griffin, & Cole 1989) and situated action (e.g. Suchman, 1987) perspectives in order to account for students’ achievement of convergent conceptual change. Sufficient information for constructing shared knowledge is not contained by the social actions themselves, nor is it contained in the embedding situation. Only when the actions are considered in relation to the situation is sufficient information available to construct intelligible interpretations of what is taking place. Thus, the relations of actions and situations — “situated actions” are the essential units to which participants orient themselves in their efforts to succeed in convergent conceptual change. This view of knowledge is called a “relation theory of meaning” (Barwise and Perry, 1983). The central claim is that conversational interaction can enable students to construct such relational meanings incrementally. Specifically, it is argued that conversational interaction provides a means for students to construct increasingly sophisticated approximations to scientific concepts collaboratively, through gradual refinement of ambiguous, figurative, partial meanings. The basis for this claim is research in Conversational Analysis and Pragmatics (e.g. Levinson, 1983; Goodwin & Heritage, 1990). This research has identified conventional structures of face to face interaction that enable participants to construct, monitor, and repair shared knowledge (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Moreover, CA research shows that meanings can accumulate incrementally, subject to on-going repairs (Schegloff, 1991). In addition, it has identified standards of evidence that enable participants to gauge the degree to which knowledge is shared (Clark & Schaefer, 1989). Conversational Analysis (CA) has shown how convergent meanings can be achieved gradually through collaborative interaction. Convergent Conceptual Change 5 A process is proposed that integrates prior research about scientific collaboration and convergence of meaning in everyday conversation in order to analyze students’ convergent conceptual change. The four primary features of the proposed process are: (a) the construction of a “deep-featured” situation at an intermediate level of abstraction from the literal features of the world, (b) the interplay of metaphors in relation to each other and to the constructed situation, (c) an iterative cycle of displaying, confirming, and repairing situated actions, and (d) the application of progressively higher standards of evidence for convergence. The first two features describe the nature of the conceptual change that students achieve: the essence of the change occurs in the relation of deep-featured situations and theoryconstitutive metaphors. The latter two features describe the mechanism of convergence that enables incremental, social construction of concepts. Convergence is achieved through cycles of displaying, confirming and repairing shared meanings. A greater degree of sharing is gradually produced by joint use of meanings in situations that require progressively more constrained actions in order for attributions of shared knowledge to be warranted. The case study that follows argues for this claim, and the discussion addresses its potential generality. This analysis of conceptual change shares some features with prior analyses, but advances a particular stance on the role of collaboration. It shares, with contemporary cognitive theory, the emphasis on students’ construction of deep-featured situations and their restructuring of commonsense metaphors. It differs by taking the view that meanings are relational, and that collaboration provides a mechanism for achieving convergent relational meanings. Specifically the analysis argues that convergent conceptual change is achieved incrementally, interactively, and socially through collaborative participation in joint activity. A Puzzling Accomplishment This paper seeks progress on the issue of convergent conceptual change through microscopic analysis of a single case. The case involves two students, “Carol” and “Dana,” who engaged in discovery learning with the “Envisioning Machine” (Roschelle, 1991), a computer simulation of velocity and acceleration (i.e. a “Newtonian microworld,” diSessa, 1982; White, 1984). As the analysis will show, Carol and Dana cooperatively constructed an understanding of acceleration that constituted: Convergent Conceptual Change 6 (a) a large conceptual change from their previous concept, (b) a qualitative approximation to the scientific meaning of acceleration, and (c) a closely shared meaning among the two students. On the basis of these accomplishments, I argue that Carol and Dana achieved convergent conceptual change. Within this accomplishment lies a puzzle. The puzzle becomes obvious when one examines the protocol of the students’ interaction with each other and the computer. One would expect that convergence on a new shared understanding would require clear articulations of meanings, in the manner of scientific presentations of the concept of acceleration. For instance, the scientific definition of acceleration is “the derivative of velocity with respect to time.” Whereas scientific language is precise and literal in its meaning, Carol and Dana’s is only weakly suggestive of any particular meaning. For example, the protocol under analysis begins as follows: 1 D: But what I don’t understand is how the lengthening, the positioning of arrow 2 C: Ooh you know what I think it is? It’s like the line. Fat arrow is the line of where it pulls that down. Like see how that makes this dotted line. That was the black arrow. It pulls it. Carol and Dana’s use of language in this excerpt is typical of their language throughout the duration of their conceptual change process: there are large gulfs between the ambiguous expressions the students use and the precise meanings those expressions come to have. For example, later analysis will show that the key phrase in this dialog is “it pulls it.” In this phrase, the verb “pull” is a metaphor with many possible interpretations. Likewise, the pronouns that “pull” relates are highly ambiguous. Throughout their process of convergent conceptual change, Carol and Dana’s language continues to have this character—their actual utterances, taken in isolation, are virtually meaningless. Thus Carol and Dana’s language is not much like written scientific language. It is also hard to detect in the students’ behavior any patterns that are as strong as the hypothetico-deductive method. Moreover, Carol and Dana received no prior instruction on scientific descriptions or conceptions of motion. Nor can one attribute their learning directly to the structure of the computer simulation, as students who experience the same simulation construct widely Convergent Conceptual Change 7 divergent ideas (Roschelle, 1991). As a result, the means for convergent conceptual change therefore appear incommensurate with the outcome: How could Carol and Dana converge on a deep new conception with only figurative, ambiguous, and imprecise language and physical interactions at their disposal? This is the specific question the case study seeks to answer.