In the last few decades, there has been growing attention to situated or distributed perspectives on learning and cognition. The purpose of this study was to examine science learning in classroom settings through the lens of distributed cognition. A particular focus of this study was on the public space of interaction that includes participants' interactions with each other and with artefacts in the environment. / Focusing on the event of student experiment design, two science lessons were videotaped in this study, in which a class of Grade-seven participants was asked to investigate the scientific theme of gravity by designing parachutes and pendulums. The video-stimulated post-lesson interviews with both teacher and student provided complementary data in order to understand their practice in these lessons. / The analysis of two science lessons reveals the different functions of language, gestures, and material objects and their relative significance in the process of student meaning making and knowledge construction. It shows that (1) the language of science is best understood as an artefact employed by the participants to achieve mutual understanding; (2) gestures and other forms of non-verbal acts build the connections between the conceptual and the physical worlds, and provided perceptual resources that foregrounded the salient aspects of their environment; and (3) material objects helped the students to understand each other by disambiguating references to objects, but (4) material objects constrained student sense-making. The analysis also demonstrated that (5) the learning activity was enacted through the participants' deployment of a range of artefacts, and (6) the manipulation of conceptual artefacts was interdependent of the manipulation of material objects. / Building on the theoretical framework of distributed cognition, this study was able to document the students' learning processes by investigating classroom interactions in great detail. The findings and techniques resulting from this study will help teachers and researchers to achieve a better understanding of science learning in classrooms and the role of artefacts in this learning and assist them to improve the learning environments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/270011 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Xu, Li Hua |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Restricted Access: Abstract and Citation Only |
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