Students' framings and their participation in scientific argumentation

Abstract

Researchers studying student argumentation have begun to focus attention on students' sense of purpose-what they see themselves as trying to accomplish. This brings the field into contact with an established body of research on framing, which studies how people form a sense of what is it that's going on here? (Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). That literature depicts framing as a dynamic process that is sensitive to context, occurring within and among individuals through subtle, meta-level messages. We give a brief review of research on framing, including epistemological framing (Redish, E.F. (2004). A theoretical framework for physics education research: Modeling student thinking. In E. F. Redish & Vicentini (Eds.), Proceedings of the Enrico Fermi Summer School Course, CLVI (pp. 1-63). Bologna, Italy: Italian Physical Society.), and discuss its significance for researchers and educators interested in studying and fostering scientific argumentation in the classroom.