Transitions in students’ epistemic framing along two axes

We use epistemological framing to interpret participants’ behavior during group problem-solving sessions in an intermediate mechanics course. We are interested in how students frame discussion and in how the groups shift discussion framings. Our analysis includes two framing axes, expansive vs narrow and serious vs silly, which together incorporate and extend prior work on how students frame discussions in physics education research. We present markers for where discussion falls on these axes. We support our conclusions with both microanalytic excerpts of discussion and overall analysis of 75 hours of video-based data. We find that the group spends most of its time in more serious framings, and slightly more than half of its time in more narrow ones. The teaching assistant is the participant who initiates the largest number of frame shifts, and her shifts include bids to all quadrants in the expansive or narrow and serious or silly plane.

Figure 1

The frames plot. Expansive or narrow is on the vertical axis and serious or silly is on the horizontal axis. The outer box delineates discussion framing (in the box) from nondiscussion framing (out of the box). Time stamps in each location indicate the time the group entered the frame. The data in this plot are a representative sample of 30 minutes of HHS.

Figure 2

Each slice denotes the fraction of time in each quadrant.

Figure 3

Who initiates a transition to another frame.

Figure 4

Moves that TAs use to transition to another frame.