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Additional guidelines and resources for interviews

Eliciting students' prior knowledge and making sense of their ideas are important components of effective teaching.  In these interviews, your aim is to do just that - to understand what one of your peers thinks about a scientific question you pose.  There is no need for students to get to the "right answer" in these interviews.  Rather, you should concern yourself with understanding your peer's ideas and how those ideas fit together for them.  The interview assignment will include the following:

1. A complete transcript of the audiotaped interview with line numbers (for both your first and second interview)
2. (For Both Interviews) Your written analysis of the interview, ~4 pages single-spaced and including the following information:
1. Background: Provide a bit of information about your interviewee(s) and the scientific question/topic you posed.
2. Student Ideas: The bulk of your analysis should focus on the content of your interviewees' thoughts about the question/topic - as always, providing evidence (from the transcript) for the claims you make.  What conceptual resources or models do they use to make sense of the scientific phenomena?  How do they reason about the question/topic?  (Do they use analogies?  Make connections between the question/topic and personal experiences?  Consider limiting cases?)  What do you find productive in their ideas, and toward what end?  You may also want to reflect on other kinds of discourse cues (e.g., long pauses, questioning intonation) if they provide information about your interviewee's thought processes.
3. Your Role: Consider how your contributions may have influenced the direction of the interview.  How did your questioning strategies elucidate or constrain your understanding of your peers' ideas?  (Feel free to refer to relevant course readings as you find them useful.)
4. Reflection: In a paragraph, reflect on your experience during the interview process.  How did you feel?  What came easily, and what might you want to work on?

Some tips:

• In selecting a question/topic, it is helpful to choose something open-ended for which you can think of multiple plausible responses.  It is up to you whether you choose something with which you are familiar - I've seen it go well either way!
• A 10-minute long interview provides plenty of fodder for careful analysis.
• For the first interview, I would suggest interviewing a peer one-on-one.
• In writing up your analysis, it may be more natural to go back and forth between what your interviewee(s) said and what you said.  This is fine, as long as your focus is primarily on your interviewee.