Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how teachers could benefit from using Social Network Analysis (SNA) in their science classrooms to promote scientific argumentation.

Engaging in argumentation from evidence has become one of eight practices that students must learn in K-12 science classrooms. This emphasis on scientific argumentation, however, creates more challenges for teachers. They must fully understand classroom dynamics as well as patterns of participation, as scientific argumentation, by nature, is a highly interactive social practice.

This study proposes that SNA could be a useful tool for teachers to visualize and understand changes in interactions and dynamics over time. SNA is being used to describe and understand participation patterns in various classroom interactions, as well as instructional patterns. For example, SNA is used to examine peer influences on youth behavior (Ennett et al., 2006), the degree of using educational games for knowledge construction (Shaffer et al., 2009), and the nature of teacher networks (Penuel, Riel, Krause, & Frank, 2009). By utilizing SNA, teachers can observe and track changes in individual or group participation over time, which helps them reflect upon their teaching practices. In particular, this study examines:
1) when SNA is used in argumentation instruction, how do teachers refer to SNA to track patterns and changes in classroom interactions?
2) how do teachers use SNA to reflect upon their roles and positions? and
3) when teachers discuss their experiences with SNA with other teachers, do these experiences help teachers critically reflect upon their teaching practices to promote scientific argumentation?

Twenty-seven teachers participated in this study. The main data sources were teachers’ interpretations of SNAs as well as teacher interviews. Teachers reported that, using SNA, they were able to discover which students were more isolated and which took central roles. One teacher noticed that different cliques, smaller sets of networks inside a bigger set, were being generated after she decreased her time to direct instruction time and assigned different cognitive roles to her students. The presentation of her case served as a model, which caused other teachers to decide to use similar methods for teaching argumentation. As a result, data analysis indicated that teachers were not only able to visualize and characterize changes in classroom interaction over time as they interpreted SNAs, but also that they were able to reflect and shift their instructional methods for fostering argumentation. In addition, shared experiences using SNAs seemed to cause teachers to engage more in reflection and discussion of their teaching practices with other teachers. Therefore, using SNA can help teachers to identify, reflect and develop instructional means for fostering argumentation by extending understanding about classroom interactions and becoming more open to discussing their teaching practices.

Keywords:

SNA, scientific argumentation, teacher education.