Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Differences that make a difference 367
might say a lot concerning the effectiveness of an intervention, the intervention
itself has to be investigated in order to gain certain insights that are useful to its
design.
Among science and mathematics educators, these and similar arguments have
resulted in a number of projects that address the relation between detailed investigations
of interaction and educational design. In a series of early studies, relevant to
our study, Roschelle investigates a Newtonian microworld simulating velocity and
acceleration. Roschelle (1990) presents and discusses a number of principles that
have guided the design of the technology, including an overall metaphor of scientific
visualization, a specific emphasis on epistemic fidelity, extending engagement
with the problematic situation, supporting focus and context, enabling communicative
action and learning by doing. Despite these careful considerations, he
later notes that, “only 6 of 14 students converged on explanations that were like
scientists explanations” (Roschelle, 1992, p. 241). Focusing on a single case where
two of these six “successful” students were working with the microworld, Roschelle
asks, “How can two (or more) people construct shared meanings for conversations,
concepts, and experiences” (ibid., p. 236). By analyzing the interaction,
he shows how the students’ achieve what he calls a convergent conceptual change
even though they did not present articulations in the form of scientific definitions
such as “acceleration is the derivative of velocity with respect to time.” Instead of
talking in versions of textbook science, the students’ interaction was filled with
utterances such as the following, “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.” (ibid., p. 244). Without
access to what the students are doing or the graphical symbols referred to, these
utterances lose their meaning. It is hard to see that they are talking about physics
at all. Despite this, Roschelle argues that this kind of discussion is important for
the students’ convergent conceptual change. In fact, he notes that this particular
utterance contains a key phrase “it pulls it,” which is present in the interaction of
successful groups and absent in the unsuccessful groups. Thus, utterances like the
one above are used as examples of productive ways of reasoning in the lab.
Analytical approach and research methods
While Roschelle investigated several students working with one particular technology,
and to some extent divided the students into successful and unsuccessful
ones, we are interested in contrasting the local enactments of two technologies. In
contrasting activities afforded by probeware and Graphs & Tracks, we do not claim
that the technologies force the students work in certain ways: we do not argue for
any version of technological determinism. Nevertheless, the local organization of
the students’ practical actions and practical reasoning – when using probeware and
Graphs & Tracks respectively – were relatively uniform, which makes it possible
to uncover, describe and analyze some of the differences between the investigated
settings. In the analysis, we draw on a corpus of studies that are conducted under