Example dialogue
Speaker	Dialogue	Act	Function
Susan	Interesting (examines plants). Experimentals and these two are controls (arranges plants). Okay, that is nice. Cool. Alright, what do you see? You said there is not much difference	Confirming	Social, Epistemological
Student 1	There is not much difference between the experimental and control groups but, like we have a lot more plants actually germinate in the mutant than in the wild-types
Susan	That seems to be kind of the recurring theme around here	Referring to other's data	Social, Epistemological
	So this is one way to do this right? Put the mutants over here, and in general your wild types do look different from those guys	Interpreting results	Conceptual, Social
	And visually I agree that, now you do this, experimental (separating experimental plants and control plants—that does not look very different from that. Just by looking at them. Then what are you measuring, I guess, is the question. To try to—	Confirming	Social, Epistemological
Student 1	So far we have been measuring bolt (i.e., stem) height, once they started sprouting the number of buds on average, and the number of flowers on average, per plant. And I guess we haven't seen any, very much fruit yet. So we have not sort of started measuring them yet. But so far—
Susan	They are not very prolific are they?	Interpreting results	Conceptual, Social
Student 1	Not yet
Susan	Huh, interesting. Well the cool thing is that you can sometimes measure stuff and see differences you don't see by eye, right? So, that is—I am not sure that is going to happen but—	Explaining an aspect of the nature of science	Epistemological
Student 1	It might
Susan	It does work out sometimes. It is very nice to do those kind of things that are not immediately obvious to us as human beings. So, for how long did you treat them?	Explaining an aspect of the nature of science	Epistemological
Student 2	It depended. We started out like, just like during the class treatments, but on accident we left them in there overnight and we saw that, that the Arabidopsis were really depleted and recently we left in them over weekend they were really (pause)
Student 1	They didn't look very good
Susan	Was there difference between the refrigerator and the cabinet?
Student 2	Umm, we have pictures. We can take a look
Susan	Because that sounds like an interesting experiment. Sometimes the best stuff comes out of serendipity right? That you happen to do something you did not intend to do and all of the sudden you see something cool. That is fine	Explaining an aspect of the nature of science	Epistemological
Stevea	What would you expect would happen in the plant in the cold? What would be different?
Student 2	Well, didn't we see that the refrigerator has more moisture in the soil?
Student 1	Yes, that's because less evaporated out or maybe because the plants were metabolizing more slowly
Susan	Yeah, but that could work towards, to the advantage of the plant, right? The ones put in cold might do better in the dark, over the weekend. Maybe. That is a hypothesis	Invoking a new idea	Conceptual, Social
	Arabidopsis kind of likes the cold, so, more than the heat. It is probably not perfectly happy growing at 4°, but it is at least tolerant, I know	Providing information Anthropomorphizing	Conceptual, Social, Pedagogical
	Talking about serendipity, we have actually taken seeds, and put them on filter papers, and put them in fridge with the idea that we were going to plant them; and then we completely forgot about them for months. And you go back and they germinated in the refrigerator. They're white, you know, but still, I was like, “I didn't expect that”	Explaining an aspect of the nature of science	Epistemological
aSteve is a project staff member