Explaining as participation: A multi-level analysis of learning environments designed to support scientific argumentation

This dissertation was designed to confront the confluent methodological challenges posed by scholars thinking about human development and cognition from a socio-genetic perspective known as Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as well by sociologists applying Institutional Theory (IT) to study social interaction in formal organizations. The three papers included in this dissertation are linked by a common focus on the multiple contextual conditions that supported and/or constrained opportunities for college---age participants in a science and engineering summer apprenticeship program sponsored by the Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) to engage in scientific argumentation. The rationale for focusing on scientific argumentation as a valued practice among professional scientists and engineers, a vehicle for advancing other research skills and as a means for learners to generate new understanding is discussed in relation to connectionist models of human development that emphasize the relationships between social processes and cognition. While each paper foregrounds a different unit of analysis, including the CfAO as an organization, curricular components of the summer program, and episodes of face-to-face interaction, each level of analysis is seen as necessary for understanding the results of the others. Findings include (1) The role of CfAO educational activities, conceived as "boundary objects" (Star & Griesemer, 1989), in orchestrating organizational responses to institutional norms and invoking "expansive" (Engestrom, 2000) cycles of organizational change (2) The ways in which different program components organized opportunities for interns participating in the CfAO summer apprenticeship program to engage in what Berland & Reiser (2009) describe as scientific argumentation (3) Networks of interpersonal and material conditions that constrained/promoted opportunities for interns to engage in scientific argumentation and more specifically, to make "explaining moves" during face-to-face interaction. The results of all three analyses are discussed in relation to "cultural apprenticeship" (Lave & Wenger, Lave, Rogoff) models of human development and cognition and have important implications for the design of science and engineering research apprenticeship programs in higher education.