PHYSICS PROBLEM SOLVING

(^) cooperative learning methods...should concentrate on what students actually do in these
groups" (Brown and Palinscar, 1989, p. 402, emphasis added).
If there is argument co-construction, then students in the group should participate
in a dialog about one idea, and then the next idea, and so on. They would not make
isolated statments. The dialogical nature of the group suggested looking at groups of
statements. For this study the episode is the unit of analysis. An episode is made up of
students' individual statements, but it contains a complete thought. And it turns out,
episodes are not a new idea in education research. Smith and Meux used episodes to
categorize student-teacher interactions in an analysis of classroom behavior (Smith and
Meux, 1970; Smith, Meux, Commbs, Nuthall, and Precians, 1967). In their scheme, an
episode is "defined as one or more exchanges which comprise a completed verbal
transaction between two or more speakers. A new episode is determined by a shift in
what the speakers are talking about, which may be a new aspect, or part of a topic or a
complete change of topic" (Sandefur and Bressler, 1971, p. 23). This definition of an
episode is essentially the same as the definition I am using for this research. However, I
defined the episode in my research before actually reading this prior research.