Students in a group worked a “practice” problem one week, and then worked a problem
for a grade the following week. Students were then reassigned to new groups for another two-
week period. During each of the two quarters, there were four graded problems, offering eight
data collection opportunities. Only six of these problems were used in this study.
The data collection and analysis consisted of these procedures:
Videotaping 14 groups solving six physics problems (“raw” data).
Transcribing the videotapes.
Editing the transcripts with annotations to written solutions and the videotapes.
Identifying the Toulmin statements of Claims, Grounds, Warrants, and Backings.
Identifying new statement categories based on the cooperative group roles and the
problem-solving strategy.
Characterizing each group qualitatively and their written solutions quantitatively.
This “processed” material comprised the “data” in this research. In order to answer the research
questions, another analysis tool was invented, the flowchart.
In order to determine the patterns of argument construction, I flowcharted all of a group’s
episodes that focused on the physics description. The flowchart of each episode contains a set of
symbols, one for each statement type. Each symbol contains the transcript statement number,
statement type, and speaker. Then I characterized a group in terms of a “prototypical pattern”.
That is, on the average, what does this group do? When attempting to determine a “prototypical
pattern” for a group, the focus was on their use of Claims, and their support for Claims with
Grounds, Warrants and Backings. I discovered there were multiple claims in the prototypes. I
found that episodes had multiple, additional claims that seemed to change the essence of the
initial claim and elaborated the original claim. Based on how they were used, I named them the
Alternate Claim and the Modified Claim.