2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Collaborative discourse can reveal ways students mechanically reason about engineering concepts. Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) is a new approach for visualizing and statistically quantifying students’ connections between concepts -- that is, their emerging epistemologies. ENA analyzes changes in connections (edges) among concepts (nodes) as students communicate their emerging knowledge multimodally in verbal and nonverbal (e.g., gesture-based) ways. This is important because prior studies of children show that gesture and speech often are out of conceptual alignment (i.e., discordant) early in learning. In contrast, traditional assessments provide a static snapshot of students’ knowledge exclusively expressed in verbal and symbolic forms. Thus, ENA and traditional assessment practices complement one another and may reveal a rich picture of student thinking and learning that can inform engineering education research.
Mechanical reasoning is necessary for conceptual development of engineering knowledge and practices. Within a theoretical framework of grounded and embodied cognition, this investigation applied ENA to students’ collaborative, multimodal discourse while reasoning about torsion, a central concept in engineering. We hypothesized (H1) that students who describe torsion concepts using course-specific speech from their Mechanics of Materials class will produce gestures that are conceptually discordant with concurrent speech, indicating their emerging reconceptualization of torsion concepts where speech and gesture have yet to come into alignment. We also hypothesized (H2) that students’ speech may describe general relationships (e.g., torque generating angular displacements), while accompanying gestures may reveal specificity of these relationships (e.g., depicting specific angular displacements).
As a prelude to a full study with multiple class sections, this pilot study recruited students (two dyads; N=4) from a summer Mechanics of Materials lab-based course. Initially, when isolated from their lab environment, dyads discussed conceptual questions regarding torsion; this provided an opportunity for collaborative argumentation and negotiation within individual dyads. Afterwards, individual dyads restated their solutions in their lab environment to an instructor prior to lab activities.
We report on empirical findings from several sources. Collaborative pre-lab interviews and reiterated responses with their instructor were video recorded, transcribed, and coded. Students’ speech and gestures were analyzed using sociocultural discourse analysis. Applying ENA, we analyzed differences between collaborative groups (i.e., between individual dyads) and differences between educational environments (i.e., absent of instructor and instructor present) for connections in students’ mechanical reasoning.
Results show changing connections among concepts revealed through gestures and speech, revealing ways students’ emerging conceptual understandings of torsion differed across educational environments and between dyads. In support of H1 and H2, we found occasions when students expressed different views of torsion in speech and gesture, suggesting knowledge in transition, and indicating both emerging understandings and misconceptions. This contrasts with information from traditional assessments. Therefore, incorporating students’ speech and gesture in assessment practices provides novel insights into students’ thinking and learning. These findings lead us to hypothesize that reliable differences in the networks of connections between modes of communication, revealed by ENA, may be observed in a larger sample. Assessment practices could benefit from including multimodal forms of expression that reveal the personal, embodied epistemologies of students.