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W. M. ROTH ET AL.
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Schaefer 1989, Rorty 1989, Edwards and Potter 1992, Pea 1993, Knorr Cetina
1995). A number of science educators recently suggested that what students
bring to school are not conceptions as individual properties, but ways of seeing
and speaking about the world which are characteristic of the communities in which
people participate (Marton 1984, Lemke 1990, Ueno 1993, Roth 1995). The form
and content of these discourses are, like other human practices, a function of the
particular context in which they are used to describe and explain phenomena.
However, we are not aware of any single study which looked at the consistency
of students’ explanations within a specific context (e.g. a ball held by a string in a
circular orbit) and across context (e.g. a space craft on a circular orbit).
The teacher must be aware of the discourses students bring to the classroom
because these interact in important ways with the ways of talking science that
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students are to appropriate in the science classroom. Whether teachers use a con
ceptual change approach or one based on learning as the appropriation of new
forms of discourse, they need to be aware of what students bring to the classroom.
With this knowledge, they can design their instruction of, and interactions with,
students in such a way as to bring about learning (Lemke 1990, Roth 1995).
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However, past research indicates that secondary school teachers are largely un
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aware of students’ science and are not very good at predicting student held con
et al.
ceptions (Watts and Zylberzstajn 1981, Osborne
1985, Berg and Brouwer 1991).
1983, Anderson and Smith
There is some evidence that ways of seeing and talking about phenomena
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related to physics are contingent on specifics of the context and may not be con
sistent across various settings, problems, problem formats, etc. (Ueno 1993,
et al.
McGinn
1995). If such inconsistencies exist, they may lead to situations
where teachers think that students understand what is prerequisite for a lesson
or unit, when in fact this knowledge is only partial or even conflicting. These
inconsistencies would lead to variations in the integration of new content.
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Teachers therefore need to understand students’ prior talk about relevant phenom
ena not only in terms of isolated aspects, but also in terms of a holistic ‘way of
talking.’
This investigation was designed to investigate patterns of students’ discourse
about rotational motion before and after an instructional unit on rotational motion;
the students had studied a related unit on uniform circular motion in the previous
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year. Two studies were designed. The first investigated students’ talk about rota
tional motion, its consistency within and across situations. The second study
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investigated students’ talk about the dynamics of rotational motion after a four
week unit on the topic.
Study design
Context of investigation
This article is part of a larger interpretive study concerning teaching and learning
of rotational motion in one Year 12 physics classroom of a state high school in the
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suburbs of a large Australian city. Over a six week period, an intensive data base
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was established that includes tests of student understanding prior and post instruc
tion, questionnaires as to students’ discourse about the nature of science, class
room learning environment and laboratory activities, a minimum of five interviews
Kharasch
