  Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been
addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and
framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity
for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's
understanding of the nature of the activity affects what she notices, what
knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. Previous analyses have found
evidence of framing primarily in linguistic markers associated with speech
acts. In this paper, we show that there is useful evidence of framing in easily
observed features of students' behavior. We apply this observational
methodology to explore dynamics among behavior, framing, and the conceptual
substance of student reasoning in the context of collaborative active-learning
activities in an introductory university physics course.
