The use of a theoretical lens to make sense of classroom video data - Exploring abduction on film

Year 10 students explored natural selection through interacting with a set of purposebuilt NetLogo models, a type of multi-agent based computer-modeling software. Tripod mounted cameras, web cameras and screen casting were used to record students’ interactions with the software as well as their interactions with peers and teachers. This paper proposes the use of Magnani’s (2001, 2009) abduction framework, specifically his notions of sentential, visual and manipulative abduction, to analyse and make sense of this rich and complex data set. Specifically, it enables a detailed exploration of students’ reasoning with computational representations (NetLogo), something that has not been previously explored in detail with video data.