Managing Disagreement in Intellectual Conversations: Coordinating Interpersonal and Conceptual Concerns in the Collaborative Construction of Mathematical Explanations

This paper reports research into how mathematical explanations are constructed during conversation based on videotapes of pairs of student math teachers collaboratively writing explanations in geometry. In particular, we analyzed how disagreements about parts of their explanations were managed in these conversations. In contrast to research on disagreement in everyday conversation, explanation disagreements were more likely to overlap with preceding turns and to be stated baldly without prefaces, token agreements or qualifications. However, the observed frequencies of different kinds of disagreements were not consistent with a model favoring explicit substantive disgreement either. Instead, it is proposed that both the interpersonal concerns that would motivate a preference for agreement and the conceptual concerns for a quality explanation that would motivate a preference for substantive disagreement are being managed by participants. Disagreements are co-constructed, and conversants are seen to jointly employ complex devices for introducing and managing disagreement across turns that can satisfy both kinds of concerns with much less conflict betweeen them than might have been expected

Combining Analyses of Cognitive Processes, Meanings, and Social Participation: Understanding Symbolic Representations

We propose three analytic representations of collaborative problem solving. Activity nests, a generalization of goal-subgoal trees, represent functional decompositions of task activity into components, using nesting to indicate operations that satisfy task functions. Semiotic networks, an extension of semantic networks, represent meanings as refers-to relations between symbolic expressions and other signifiers, and relations in situations and situation types, along with general relations between these meanings. Contribution Vagrants, an adaptation of contribution trees (Clark & Schaefer, 1989), represent how turn sequences collectively achieve task components. W e developed these representations to analyze how pairs of middle-school students constructed tables to represent quantitative properties of a simple physical device that models linear functions. Variations between activity nests of dififerent pairs support an explanation of activity in terms of attimement to constraints and to affordances and abilities, rather than following procedures. The semiotic networks support a hypothesis that task components are completed through accomplishing alignments of refers-to relations.which is a generalization of goal satisfaction. Similarities between the contribution diagrams support a general pattern that we call the turn structure of collaborative operations, in which task information is recognized and task operations are initiated, performed, and accepted. Interaction is organized into this structure in order to support mutually aligned intentions, understandings, actions, and agreements

Not Channels But Composite Signals: Speech Gesture, Diagrams and Object Demonstrations Are Integrated in Multimodal Explanations

This paper provides empirical evidence that multimodal signals are produced and understood as integrated units of communication called composite signals, rather than being independently interpretable "channels" of communication. I propose that using composite signals relies on two communicative norms, co-expressivity and consistency: - co-expressivity: each element of a composite signal refers to the same underlying referent • consistency: elements of the same composite do not contradict each other. This paper will show that these norms are consistent with data comprising a set of explanations of how locks work in which participants spoke while gesturing, drawing diagrams, and manipulating a sample lock. Co-expressivity is supported by the fact that co-expressive speech segments can be found in nearby speech for communicative nonverbal behaviors but not for non-communicative nonverbal behaviors. Consistency is evidenced in inferences that maintain number and modality consistency in cases of apparent contradiction

Raffinement progressif des hypothèses dans les recherches utilisant un support vidéo

Dans les recherches sur l’apprentissage (sciences de l’apprentissage), l’investigation scientifique traite souvent la formation d’hypothèses et leur évaluation dans une sorte de processus dialectique. Nous pensons que pour mieux comprendre cette investigation il est important, au contraire, de se concentrer sur leur interaction, au lieu de les séparer comme cela a été le cas dans le passé dans certains travaux (par exemple la distinction que fait Popper (1959) entre le contexte de la découver..