Students’ discussions about a PISA task – science education in different school environments

Abstract

In this article, we assume that discursive language aspects are highly intertwined with students’ knowledge building and learning in science. The article analyses students’ collaborative discussions about a PISA assignment in science. We investigate the relation between students’ use of everyday and scientific discourses and analyse the extent to which the students’ use of these discourses have an impact on how they explain the scientific content and solve the tasks. The results indicate that students who are able to move between an everyday discourse and a scientific discourse seem to benefit from this, while students who entirely use a colloquial language or relate the content to everyday experiences become disadvantaged. Further, important general success factors seem to be the students’ ability to successfully discuss, explain and evaluate the science content with respect to subject-specific words, definitions and relations.