Table 5 Transcript of a 4-min NextGenPET FOLC conversation about students searching the internet for answers. All names are pseudonyms. Formal concepts (FC) are in bold, and lived concepts (LC) are in italics. Turns of talk represent a continuous flow of conversation
Turn | Speaker | Transcript |
|---|---|---|
1 | Wallace | The other issue I have, which is... I think this mainly arises because we meet only twice a week for such a short time, so the module gets drawn out over a few weeks, is some students go away and google how magnetism works, and so suddenly they’ll be talking about domains. Okay, so this is kind of skewing the process. |
2 | Courtney | Yeah, but I’ve found that in my experience anyway, if they go away and they come back with domains that they usually don’t have any idea how they actually work. |
3 | Wallace | No, yeah, that’s true. |
4 | Courtney | They try to use domains to explain whatever, and they can’t, and so the rest of the class is like, “Well, never mind that. We’ll just forget... ” |
5 | Wallace | I think that is true. They google the answer, but they’re not really quite understanding what’s going on still. I’m not too worried about that. It was just funny when they suddenly start pulling out these words. |
6 | Carter | Kind of seems like it’s evidence about the students’ epistemology, like I feel like they don’t have very sophisticated views about what it means to understand something. |
7 | Courtney | Oh, they don’t. |
8 | Carter | Because science context, what it means to understand something, and so for them understanding means like knowing the term or being familiar with the term when we’re trying to give them an experience that’s so much different view of what it means to understand something, and there’s a tension there. |
9 | Courtney | Yeah, they want to memorize. “I must memorize.” |
10 | Carter | I had a student after the quiz, he was in my office complaining, different student than the other one that I mentioned earlier, he’s going about how he understands everything in this class, because after all this class is like baby physics, and he learned it all in high school, but he just can’t explain it the way that I want him to. He went on and on and on and on. I tried to provide some, “Have you thought about maybe writing an outline of the key bullet points that you wanna hit in your explanation, and only then start... ” |
11 | Carter | I just tried everything I could to get him to reflect on maybe “I don’t fully understand it.My struggles are evidence that I don’t fully understand it.” Every time I tried to hand it back to him, he just kept handing it back to me. Like, “No, this is so easy, and I just... yeah, I can’t explain it the way you want.” Oh God, just leave. |
12 | Courtney | Right. |
13 | Yin | What is domain? I’m sorry I don’t think I fully understand. What kind of question that they google? |
14 | Wallace | Oh, this is they’re googling... they’re basically trying to google how ferromagnetism and iron gets magnetized, so they come across the idea of magnetic domain, certain small regions that are polarized in the magnet. |
15 | Wallace | They generally don’t really understand what that means. They just start using these words because it’s something they’ve seen. |
16 | Carter | Yin, have you taught the magnetism unit? |
17 | Yin | No, but I am very much looking forward to it. |
18 | Carter | Yeah, it’s so awesome. I would encourage you... you gotta find a way |
19 | Wallace | Despite these problems, and I think it is really good, and I think the students are getting a lot out of it. |