Making Sense of Sensemaking: Understanding How Instructional Strategies Support Middle School Students’ Engagement in the Sensemaking Process

Abstract

Studying student sensemaking has become an important lens through which to understand high-quality instruction. When students engage in the sensemaking process, they use observations and their prior knowledge to identify gaps or inconsistencies in their understanding, and then they collectively develop and test explanations to resolve this gap (Odden & Russ, 2018, 2019). In this dissertation, I addressed two understudied areas about the sensemaking process: how teachers’ instructional strategies support different steps in the sensemaking process and how the sensemaking process guides students to integrate disciplinary knowledge, everyday experiences, and their observations during integrated STEM activities. Specifically, I sought to understand how instructional strategies, e.g., teachers’ discourse moves and carefully designed instructional tasks, supported students’ engagement in the sensemaking process during data investigations, a type of integrated STEM activity. This dissertation is organized as three separate manuscripts. In my first study, I empirically investigated how the discourse moves of experienced middle school mathematics and science teachers initiated, sustained, and stopped different steps of the sensemaking process. I found teachers initiated the sensemaking process by highlighting something puzzling for students or by asking students to imagine a different scenario. The dynamic process of sensemaking, however, was not linear in the classroom discourse, but rather teachers and students entered, exited, and then returned to it. My findings from this study suggest that supporting the process of student sensemaking is a complex teaching practice and one fruitful area of research would be to study how to support teachers and students to transition through the steps of the sensemaking process. In my second manuscript, a conceptual paper, I argued that there are potential problems with using current frameworks for designing integrated STEM activities, and that a sensemaking lens is necessary for designing, teaching, and studying integrated STEM activities. I described my new conceptual framework for integrated STEM, the Sensemaking Integrated STEM framework. It focuses on student thinking by specifically addressing how students generate knowledge resources during integrated STEM activities across instructional time and how students connect their knowledge resources as they make sense of integrated STEM problems. My third manuscript is a design-based research study in which I used my new Sensemaking Integrated STEM framework to design a sixth-grade weather data investigation. I then empirically investigated how students responded to the instructional activities I designed to support students’ sensemaking about variability in their local weather. I found students responded to the designed opportunities for sensemaking by brainstorming ideas and building upon other students’ contributions. Looking at students’ sensemaking explanations across the investigation, students integrated variability in temperature data with their ideas of weather phenomena and their everyday experiences. These findings suggest that the Sensemaking Integrative STEM framework is a productive lens for designing science data investigations to support students to connect their observations of variability in data with the phenomena that produced it. The findings from across these three manuscripts provide insights into how teachers’ discourse moves and the instructional tasks teachers use can support students’ engagement in the sensemaking process. They show how the process of student sensemaking, with its discrete and observable steps, provides a lens through which to study effective instructional strategies.