Unpacking Sensemaking

What is it about?

This study unpacks sense making and examines the conditions that facilitate it. People’s sense of what constitutes a good explanation is conceptualized as taking place along a multidimensional metric. We discuss three dimensions of this metric that are central to the evaluation of explanations of phenomena in the physical world: (1) Intuitive knowledge, (2) Mechanism, and (3) Framing. The study operationalizes each dimension in terms that can be empirically tracked in students’ talk, gestures and social interactions. The analysis demonstrates that the framework can explain conviction in an explanation, preference for one explanation over another, and the complex conditions that facilitate this change.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The study suggests that there is a huge difference in terms of understanding and sense of understanding between hearing an explanation and articulating it in one's own words. The operationalization of three dimensions in the metric for sense making about phenomena in the physical world provides a methodological tool that can be used to measure and assess the dynamics of students’ reasoning from their discourse as they think and reason. Thus, it can help educational researchers to document and explain conceptual change at the process level. This methodological tool can also be used for training teachers to listen and attend to their students’ thinking.