Knowing What You Tell, Telling What You Know: Uncertainty and Asymmetries of Meaning in Interpreting Graphical Data
by roth, wolff-michael; middleton, david
Research on knowing and learning in science commonly presupposes that knowledge, expertise, power, identity, and so on are stable features determining the outcome of interactions between individuals. In addition such individuals are conceptualized as differing in terms of the amount or types of the things in these categories. However, in a variety of disciplines including social psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the starting point for theoretical and empirical work is different: What really matters to social interaction is not the content of mind but how participants in social interaction deploy a variety of resources to constitute such things as memory, knowledge, expertise, and so on. This study was designed to investigate the local organization of interaction between research assistants, who had been hired to conduct a series of interviews (using a think-aloud protocol) about graphs, and scientists (N = 37) to better understand the person-situation interface in studies of scientific and mathematical knowing. Drawing on analytic methods from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, our analyses show how knowledgeability with respect to graphs and natural phenomena, assessment, giving and receiving of instruction, accountability, insight, and uncertainty are continuously shifting as interview participants draw on a variety of resources as means for managing the task at hand. In the process, uncertainty itself is managed by drawing on uncertainty.
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9000-y
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
View article on SpringerLink
I found this paper by Roth and Middleton to be thought provoking for a selfish reason. I am involved with a multidisciplinary research group that is working together to design, develop and evaluate multimedia chemistry simulations. These simulations are being developed for use by students who have little prior knowledge of the chemistry concepts or understandings that are the focus of the simulations. One of the strategies used to evaluate the cognitive load of different versions of the simulations is a think aloud protocol. I have always been critical of this method because my experience has been similar to that criticized by Roth and Middleton that think alouds have been used, usually not very effectively, to examine underlying knowledge and beliefs of students as they use language to articulate their understandings. What a relief to read Roth and Middleton as they examine the asymmetries of meaning that emerge when think aloud protocols are thought of as organized social interactions that are highly context sensitive. We are asking students to use think aloud protocols as they use a specific simulation. Obviously, we will not have the asymmetries or the pitch matching described by Roth and Middleton as they examined the interactions between a professor interviewee and a graduate student intervieweer but their analysis helps me to think about these interactions in a more productive way than being openly dismissive of the possibilites of think aloud protocols!