Author(s):
This talk reports on a project exploring cognitive engagement in active learning, highlighting how insights from applied linguistics can enhance the analysis of video data from students’ conversations during group work. While an increasing number of STEM education researchers work with audio or video recordings of classroom or laboratory interactions, the approaches to transcription that are used are often not specified beyond indicating that speech was transcribed “verbatim.” Even when a transcript accurately captures all of the words that were spoken by the participants, it may omit details that are relevant to the researcher’s analysis. If the transcript then becomes the primary focus for coding and analysis, these omissions can lead to a very different picture of what is happening in the interaction. This presentation describes the development of a codebook that combined approaches to transcription from applied linguistics with coding based on the original videos of students engaging in active learning activities. The codebook operationalizes the ICAP framework (Chi & Wylie, 2014; Chi et al., 2018) to code the cognitive engagement of individual students by capturing aspects of the conversation that are often overlooked in a conventional “verbatim” transcript, such as response timing, gaze, gesture, and intonation. The talk highlights the ways in which interactional details beyond the words used by the participants provide critical insights into students’ engagement. During the audience discussion portion of the talk, the presenter will have “before” and “after” versions of transcripts available to demonstrate how such details shaped the project team’s analysis.
