After going through the readings this week, I must admit that I was more confused than I have been in the last few weeks. Not in terms of content, as I believe all of the articles gave great insight into practices that will help me be a more efficacious and thoughtful educator, but rather the educational frameworks that the researchers are drawing from in their research. Primarily, the DeLisi paper really had me struggling to identify whether or not they were actually cognitive or sociocultural. DeLisi and her co-investigators communicated that the study was focusing on students’ utilization and formulation of SEPs in the context of science fairs, which originally made it easy for me to determine that they were focusing on situative learning. This easy determination was upheaved though, when I read that the majority of the data that they analyzed was from interviewing participants, educators, and administrators out of the science fair context. They did mention that some of their data came from science fair observations, but it didn’t seem like this data was utilized as much to fuel their final conclusion that it is important for students to engage in critiquing practices, arguementation form evidence, and evaluation and communication of information within the science fair context (pg. 5`17). Overall it seemed that the their data was mostly out of context and focusing on participants’ cognition rather than observing their actions/learining in the context that they were studying.
Similarly, the Huang article seemed to be pretty easy to identify as a cognitive research study, as their focus on was on students’ individual development rather than their functioning within a classroom community. Although Huang was focused on topics that are typically viewed as social, such as team-work and collaboration, her methods of data collection only measured students’ self-perceptions of how they function in the context of groupwork. That decontexutualization fundamentally make this research cognitive, as students’ learning and actions aren’t being observed in the context that they are produced. The Isaacson paper can be described in a similar way to the Huang article though, as the data being collected was in the form of surveys. Once again, students self-reported how their competencies and interest in STEM had changed as a result of implementing new educational tech, which isn’t a direct observation of how they function and think in the laboratory context. Overall, at the onset of the week I had assumed that the majority of the articles would be sociocultural, but now I can see how data collection and the data itself can really change the underlying framework a study draws from.