PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A new perspective to analyze argumentation and knowledge construction in undergraduate classrooms
Page: 931
Using argumentation to help understand how learning in a classroom occurs is a compelling and complex task. We show how education researchers can use an argumentation knowledge construction framework (Weinberger & Fischer, 2006) from research in online instruction to make sense of the learning in an inquiry oriented differential equations classroom. The long term goal is see if there are relationships among classroom participation and student outcomes. The research reported here is the first step: analyzing the discourse in terms of epistemic, social, and argumentative dimensions. The results show that the epistemic dimension can be better understood by identifying how students verbalize understanding about a problem, the conceptual space around the problem, the connections between the two and the connections to prior research. In the social dimension, we can identify if students are building on their learning partners’ ideas, or using their own ideas, and or both.