Renders Interiores

When students act, they need to understand what is expected of them in an assessment task—to frame it. This understanding is in formation as they work together on shared objects. Individuals and groups form a disposition toward the task that is made of experiences, abilities and a reaction to the circumstances of the task, made up of “hard to pin down” elements such as “motivations, affect, sensitivities, values, and the like” (Perkins, Jay, & Tishman, 1993, p. 18). Students are not blank canvases, but bring experiences, abilities and predilections to their courses, and they work within a system into which they are socialised, but a system they adapt to their needs and circumstances (for example, Al-Mahmood, 2011; Marton & Säljö, 1976).

2.4.1 Dispositions

Students bring personal resources, dispositions, to any assessment task. Perkins et al. (1993, p. 17) outline a ‘triadic’ conceptualisation of disposition, combining the three elements of inclination, sensitivity to occasion, and abilities. General ’inclinations’ are tendencies towards types of action, and could arise from, for example, habit, affect, values and intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. ‘Sensitivity to occasion’ refers to recognition of a situation and relevant related responses, which may come from experience of similar conditions or environmental and designed cues. The third element of disposition is ability to act as intended, that is, appropriately apply knowledge and skills to the recognised situation. This is mnemonically expressed as the ’detect-elect-connect’ model (Perkins & Salomon, 2012). This model was applied in reflecting on a special journal issue on transfer of learning, in which Perkins and Salomon (2012) note the importance of motivations and

dispositions to cognition ‘in the wild’ beyond structured task scaffolding. In the absence of direction and compliance requirements, students are left to themselves to detect the type of situation

(sensitivity), elect to act upon it (inclination) and connect abilities—knowledge and skills—to the task (Perkins & Salomon, 2012). Students can have difficulty in identifying what is required; in an

experimental study, students were observed to bring existing knowledge to bear when directed towards a specific issue, but were less able to detect the situation if undirected (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000). Perkins et al. (2000) see sensitivity to situation or context as the lynchpin or ‘bottleneck’ trait, contributing more to productive knowledge work than general

inclination. Scaffolding may be required to ensure students are aware of what approaches to knowledge creation are relevant in ill-structured tasks.

Iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation in agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) align with inclination, sensitivity and abilities in disposition. Iteration or change of habit and practical

evaluation of current context link to sensitivity to situation. The dimension of projectivity in agency, the casting of activity in the light of future use, accounts for change and improvement in abilities. Inclination is influenced by experience, confidence in abilities and perceptions of value.

Perkins et al. (1993) propose seven general dispositions associated with productive thinking, each described in terms of inclination, sensitivity and abilities:

“1. To be broad and adventurous. 2. Toward sustained intellectual curiosity. 3. To clarify and seek understanding. 4. To be planful and strategic. 5. To be intellectually careful. 6. To seek and evaluate reasons. 7. To be metacognitive.” (p. 6)

For example, number five is associated with: an inclination for being precise, orderly, organised and thorough; sensitivity to “the possibility of error” and an always-present “potential for inaccuracy and inconsistency”; and abilities to “apply intellectual standards” and “construct order out of disarray” (Perkins et al., 1993, p. 8).

Hammer and Elby (2002) characterise students’ personal epistemology as “manifold resources, seen as activated within particular contexts” (p. 181). They also note that students already possess a range of productive personal resources and that “much of effective teaching is helping students find

these resources and use them” (Hammer & Elby, 2002, p. 183, emphasis added). Students’ resources

need to be coordinated, extended or activated (Hammer, Elby, Scherr, & Redish, 2005) to navigate a complex environment and, among other goals, answer an assessment task. The frame in which students arrange their understanding of what it is that is being asked of them can be influenced by appropriate task design but, more importantly, by assisting students to reflect upon their

approaches and deliberately consider the resources they are using (Hammer et al., 2005). This complements the detect-elect-connect model of disposition by suggesting a process by which students learn to recognise and respond to situations. Initially learners have to intentionally or tacitly activate a new range of resources for each new problem, but with repeated exposure to different contexts they develop a stable “set” that can be used “as a cognitive unit” (Hammer et al., 2005, p. 99) across relevant situations. Dispositions and associated framing may limit or extend potential epistemic agency.

2.4.2 Framing

Framing in this research study is how a group understands ‘What is going on here? (Goffman, 1974; Scherr & Hammer, 2009), how students make sense of what is being asked of them and how they should respond. Framing occurs at a macro level—the purpose and context of a project—and micro level—local or immediate action. Framing indicates how students are epistemically situating the task and the work they are doing on it, placing it in the context of experience and possibly relating it to future relevance.

Experience and one’s self-perceived role will guide framing. For example, illustrating how different roles produce varying frames, Lee, Šabanovic and Stolterman (2014) analysed how expert designers and non-expert users framed robots: each group focused on different aspects of the technology, the designers on mechatronics and the users on features of the interface. Similarly, the framing of an assessment task can differ between teacher and student (Muukkonen et al., 2010).

An assessment task at university is of course subject to many situating and background influences, including societal concepts of study, evaluation, the roles of student and teacher (Al-Mahmood, 2011), the institution, the program of study, how the task is located within the course and its design.

For example, on the timing of a course within the program of study, research into clinical problem- based learning groups found that younger first-year undergraduates tended to equate good social relationships with good working relationships within team projects (Skinner, Braunack-Mayer, & Winning, 2012). If the social connection was felt to be inadequate, students found it difficult to work together. Adding to the complexities of interpersonal relations is the general unpopularity of group work (Burdett, 2003; Isaac, 2012). Factors such as these will influence how students frame a group task.

In addition to forming an overall summing-up of a task, students perform moment-by-moment framing, inferable through their actions, words and gestures. In an example of such localised

framing, Scherr and Hammer (2009) studied students completing physics worksheets together, using gesture, body position and attention to denote framings. These framings included switches between “completing the worksheet” and “discussing the ideas” (Scherr & Hammer, 2009, p. 157). As

outlined by Bing (2008), also in research in physics problem-solving, framing is rarely explicit, but implied by the words, tone and gesture of the student. Bibi (2015) also followed framing through language, tone and non-verbal indicators, tracing the consequences to moves in framing as

“resistance” to the change, “persistence” in continuing with an existing frame, or “transition” into a new frame (p. 81).

The framing of the task is something of an epistemic compass, guiding students towards a particular level of knowledge creation. In contrast to “bounded” framing in which learning tasks are viewed as discrete hurdles to clear, an expansive frame connects task activity to other settings, leading students to “transfer in” knowledge from previous experience and “transfer out” knowledge from the current task for future use (Engle, Lam, Meyer, & Nix, 2012). One approach to analysing agency and framing is to compare how far students adhere to a provided ‘script’ against how much they play with the possibilities and focus on the shared problem or task (Engeström et al., 2015). A designer cannot specify exactly how students will frame a task, but can aim at establishing a “learning culture of opportunity” (Perkins & Salomon, 2012, p. 257) in which students are encouraged to adopt an expansive frame in open-ended tasks.

In analysis of cases, I use the concepts of disposition and framing in asking, “What influences how activity infrastructure is assembled and used?’ and as components in suggestions for design for epistemic agency.

To summarise:

Disposition: students’ ability to ‘detect-elect-connect,’ or exhibit sensitivity to occasion, inclination

to act, and connection to abilities or personal resources for productive use.

Framing: how students understand what is going on in a task, both overall and in local activity.

Disposition is key in how a task is framed and therefore in subsequent knowledge creation and transfer of knowledge to other contexts.