How Teachers Determine What Students Know : Collaborative Interpretation of Students' Computer-mediated Collaborative Problem-solving Interactions

Although teachers need to draw on knowledge of students’ knowledge in order to engage in a wide range of educational activities — such as curriculum planning, explanation and even some types of adaptive tutoring — relatively little research has been carried out on what types of student knowledge teachers attempt to acquire, and how they acquire it. We propose a theoretical model of teachers' cognitive-interactional activities within an experimental reflective teaching situation. This situation employs a new research method that we call "collaborative interpretation", during which teachers study and discuss a computer generated interaction trace of a dyad's computer-mediated problem-solving with a view to engaging the dyad in a pedagogical interaction. Our model of the teacher’s activity is based on viewing it as a complex explanation process, involving reconstruction of the students’ activity, identification and evaluation of what is to be explained, and collaborative elaboration of aspects of the explanation process itself. This research is a first step towards achieving our long-term research goal, of designing innovative computer supported collaborative training techniques for physics teachers that provide different dynamic presentations of students' collaborative problem-solving in order to facilitate teachers' understanding.