1 COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND THE LEARNING OF PHYSICS PART II MEDIATED ACTION Valerie K Otero School of Education University of Colorado at Boulder Boulder CO USA Proceedings of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi Course CLVI Italian Physical Society E F Redish M Vicentini Eds Amsterdam IOS Press 446471 2004 1 Introduction Socio cultural theoretical perspectives have been used within the mathematics and science education research communities for over 20 years 1 2 3 4 5 These perspectives have helped educational researchers move beyond investigations of what is happening inside the head of the individual and into investigations of learning as it takes place in the broader classroom context One of the fundamental features of the sociocultural perspective is the notion that cognition is not only impacted by context but is also co constitutive of context The context is dynamically created by all of the elements within the classroom including the students and their conceptual development The term context is defined here as the student the student interacting with tools and the student interacting with others and with tools This dynamic definition of context is necessary if the researcher seeks to understand how participation leads to learning The participation metaphor is used to encompass theoretical perspectives of cognition where learning is viewed as the process of doing and participating in the norms and practices of the discipline 6 This can be contrasted with the acquisition metaphor where learning is typically viewed as a more rational process of conceptual growth and growth of reasoning 6 7 Perspectives that can be defined by the participation metaphor include socio cultural perspectives such as situated cognition 8 distributed cognition 9 feminist perspectives 10 and semiotic interaction theory 4 Much of the work within this tradition has partial foundation in the work of Lev Vygotsky Perspectives that can be defined by the acquisition metaphor include cognitive perspectives such as schema theory 11 12 conceptual change perspectives 13 14 epistemology studies 15 metacognition 16 and other phenomenological or epistemological resource perspectives 17 18 Much of the work within this tradition has some roots in the work of Jean Piaget In her article On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One 6 Anna Sfard argues that both metaphors for learning have limitations in the types of questions they allow researchers to ask and answer They also limit the types of answers researchers can generate Sfard argues that both the participation and the acquisition metaphors are necessary to fully understanding the learning process but that the metaphors as well as the research and theory they represent are incommensurate She concludes that acquisition and participation metaphors are like the wave particle 2 duality where each perspective is very useful and necessary but the two cannot be considered simultaneously Others argue that research guided by the participation and acquisition metaphors must be commensurate Cognitive psychologist Michael Cole 19 argued that the perspectives can be made to be consistent with one another and can work together to form a description of learning Mathematics educator Paul Cobb argued that the two perspectives actually complement one another In describing the work of Leont ev 20 said The teacher s role is to mediate between students personal meanings and culturally established mathematical meanings of wider society Cobb went on to point out that constructivist epistemologies such as the radical constructivism of Glasersfeld 21 implicitly assumes participation in cultural practices while sociocultural perspectives implicitly assume that the individual is actively constructing knowledge He argued that these two perspectives actually complement each other but simply emphasize different aspects of the learning process I argue that knowledge as acquisition and knowledge as participation must be considered simultaneously as interacting features that define the process of learning science Cognitive scientist Jeremy Roschelle 22 analyzed the collaborative interactions of two students working with a computer visualization tool in their study of kinematics In his analysis he argued that a perspective that focused only on the students development of scientific concepts would be too narrow to fully understand the process and context through which these concepts were developed He also argued that a perspective that focused only on the knowledge that emerged through the social interactions would be too narrow to resolve the fact that this knowledge was grounded in a particular case and was unstable He concluded that the students emergent understanding was composed of many interacting elements in an extended system that supports knowing doing and discussing Rochelle went on to define three different lenses that researchers in science education are currently taking 1 a focus on the students knowledge 2 a focus on conversation and 3 a focus on enculturation or the development of scientific behaviors He argued that none of the above on its own is sufficient to capture the truth about learning One reason is that elements of learning that are identified through an analysis that used a particular lens may be identified as something entirely different when another lens is used He therefore concluded that conceptual development interactions between students and classroom materials should be considered as a system of elements over which encoding is distributed Learning is complex In order to begin to capture and understand its complexities researchers must draw on theoretical perspectives that can help us weave together the many social cultural and individual cognitive aspects of the learning process I draw directly on the work of Lev Vygotsky 23 The purpose of this paper is to examine Vygotsky s perspective of mediated action and to show that it can provide a useful theoretical mechanism for researchers teachers and curriculum developers to develop a single diverse yet inclusive understanding of the learning process The theory of mediation can help physics education researchers understand and manage the contributions of the social and material classroom environment to learning In this paper I first outline the socio cultural theory of mediated action and then I apply this theoretical approach to classroom data I argue that the individual the individual