Examining Dynamics of Student Disciplinary Engagement in Science

The recent reforms in science education envision engaging students in authentic practices of science and habits of mind (NRC, 2012); in other words, engaging students in "doing science." Science is a multidimensional endeavor (Davidson, Jaber, & Southerland, 2020; Pickering, 1995). The work of the scientists include various aspects--conceptual (kinds of knowledge such as "facts," "laws," "theories"), epistemological (ways of thinking and understanding such as "how to construct and evaluate scientific knowledge"), social (social norms and collaborations), and affective (emotional experiences--the "joy" of a successful experiment or "frustration" over a failed one). With science being a multidimensional endeavor, there is a need to view and understand students' disciplinary engagement in science as a multidimensional endeavor as well. Using a qualitative, naturalistic, case study research design, this dissertation generates an in-depth, multi-faceted understanding of the dynamics of students' disciplinary engagement in science classrooms by focusing on a single instance of disciplinary engagement of a group of four students in a middle school science classroom, examined from three different lenses. The main data sources for the three investigations in this dissertation are the audio and video recordings of classroom engagement and student interviews from a two-day long lesson--"Mechanisms of Evolution"--in a middle school science classroom. Additional data sources include student artifacts such as lab reports and claim-evidence-reasoning posters. The main analytical tool used throughout this study was multimodal discourse analysis that allowed for a focus both on the verbal and non-verbal cues to make inferences about the conceptual, epistemological, social, and affective engagement of students in small groups. In the first investigation, we examine the entanglement of the conceptual, epistemological, social, and affective dynamics that emerge in a small group as students encounter conceptual uncertainties arising from examining ambiguous data in science. Our findings from the first investigation demonstrated the ways in which students engaged in the epistemic work of science--analyzing data, generating claims, evaluating alternative claims, and challenging each other in service of developing a mechanistic reasoning for the scientific phenomenon. However, these findings also portray how overwhelming social and affective experiences along with persistent conceptual and epistemological conflicts have the potential to undermine the rich epistemic work of students. While the first investigation examines the dynamics of engagement of the whole group, the second investigation in this dissertation explores the shifts in discourse moves of a single student in that group with evolving argumentation goals and the influence of the shifting discourse moves on shaping opportunities for disciplinary sensemaking in a small group. Our findings from the second investigation demonstrated that as the local task goals (i.e., students' understanding of what is required or what needs to be done at a particular moment) evolve, similarly phrased discourse moves can have different effects on students' sensemaking opportunities. In other words, depending on the local task goals, the same phrase can be used dialogically or rhetorically, by the same student, resulting in opening up or closing off spaces for sensemaking. Complementing the first two investigations that examine the student engagement from the researchers' perspective, the final investigation in this dissertation centers student voices of their experiences in the lesson. Our findings from the third investigation highlight the differential experiences of students working in the same group when engaging with uncertainty and demonstrate how these four students experienced the same episode in different ways. Too, their perspectives allowed us to understand how their past experiences with one another in the classroom influenced the ways in which they experienced this episode. The differential experiences highlighted in the student reflections provide further insights into students' disciplinary engagement in science. Our findings from the three investigations considered together suggests that students' disciplinary engagement in science is not simple and straightforward. Rather, it is "messy" and multidimensional, with students managing both the epistemic and relational (i.e., pertaining to the collaborative work) aspects of science. The case analyzed in this dissertation presents a unique view of how students engaged in rich disciplinary work of science can become overwhelmed with the entanglement of dynamics along the multiple dimensions eventually undermining the epistemic work of the students. This study contributes to the growing body of literature examining the multidimensional nature of students' disciplinary engagement, students' negotiations of conflicts and tensions that arise during that engagement, and influential discursive moves that support and sustain disciplinary engagement. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. 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