Students' Past Experiences as Resources for Scientific Knowledge Construction in Small-group Discussions

Abstract

Science curricula emphasise the need to connect the science learned at school with out of classroom experiences and phenomena, as well as to learn more than just scientific facts. This thesis analyses student discourse in peer led small group discussions during science classes, studying how students’ past experiences are brought into these discussions. Focussing on grade 7, in the science classes of an alternate school, involving both discussion-based and investigative tasks. Employing a sociocultural lens and performing discourse analysis at the utterance level and episode level, this study identifies the ways in which students’ autonomous invoking of past experiences during science class group discussions supports their knowledge construction and engagement with the many facets of science. The results of this analysis show that talking about past experiences while discussing science topics helps students engage with particular science process skills, enables them to translanguage more often, and debate about different epistemic framings; whereas the lesson objectives weren’t explicitly addressed in those same conversations. Episodes in which past experiences were mentioned were more likely to occur in discussion based tasks rather than investigative tasks. These findings support the incorporation of peer-led group activities with open-ended prompts to support a richer and more holistic engagement with science as a practice, rather than as a set of facts; even though it might appear that the students aren’t directly talking about the lesson or topic.