TEACHER DECISIONS AND DIDACTICAL INTENTIONALITY USING COMPUTER SIMULATIONS IN PHYSICAL SCIENCE CLASSROOMS

Any teacher adopts a lot of decisions inside classroom to manage students’ activity or engagement and the turn of events can change according those decisions. The decisions that teacher adopt in real time may vary according to his didactic intentionality, or simply with the turn of events, since classroom environment is dynamic and complex. Due to this complexity, the teacher can’t always pay attention to all the events that take place. Teachers need to develop professional knowledge that will allow them to be attentive and conscious to different aspects that can draw his attention and adopt the appropriate decisions in real time, enabling them to help their students in their learning process.

Thus, the main goal of research is to identify some structural components of a didactical decision on the context of using computer simulations (CS) in Physical science classroom and how they are related with teacher intentionality.

The research question is: what similarities and differences are in teacher didactical decisions (from the one or different teacher)? What big patterns it is possible identify?

This research deal with a qualitative and interpretative analyse, from two case studies involving two physical sciences teachers from secondary school in physical sciences classroom. Each teacher taught three lessons and students develop inquiry work organized into small groups. The teacher A uses the CS for replace experimental work and teacher B uses the CS as an introduction for the experimental work. The students, in both cases, need to accomplish a task in order to solve a problem.

Several type of data was collected from each lesson (e.g. audio recording, documents from teacher or students, print screens, photos, indication of silences and gestures, explicit teacher’s intentions and decisions, students’ notebook, teacher notebook) to produce a multimodal narratives (MN), a tool with a clear structure and focus to organize and systematize data. The MN analysed correspond to the lessons taught by the two teachers during the use of CS available on web.

Our model of data analyse is:
(a) teacher take a didactical decision based on
(b) information collected,
(c) value judgement and
(d) teacher focus of attention.

This approach is based on the model of recognition-primed decision making (Klein, 2008): is a process in which there is an initial phase where it is percept and recognized the situation to then implement the decision.

Results:
There are a lot of different didactical decisions including from the same teacher. However, the four components of the model of didactical decision are easily recognized in a micro-level of didactical decision process. The didactical decision in micro-level process only is effective (change the turn of events) when the focus is students’ behaviour or engagement. When the focus is students’ epistemic work or engagement, in most of times, the teacher need a pack of micro decisions, linked each other, to accomplishment their didactical intentionality. The main differences between teachers appear in the structure of those packs of didactical decisions. And these differences can be related with the style of teacher’s mediation or his didactical intentionality. We have evidences that if the pack of de micro decisions is longer, more aspects of the reasoning and students’ work the teacher incorporate on the process of didactical decision. To study these differences can help teachers to be more dialogic in classroom.