  With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students
to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students'
activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In
particular, understanding when students do not engage productively with
unexpected data may provide insights into how to better support students in
more open-ended labs. We examine video and audio data from groups within a lab
session where students were expected to find data inconsistent with the
predictions of two models. In prior work, we examined the actions of the four
groups that productively grapple with this designed problem. Here, we analyze
the engagement of the three groups that do not. We conducted three phases of
analysis: 1) documenting large scale behaviors and time spent in on-topic
discussion, 2) analyzing interactions with the teaching assistant, and 3)
identifying students' framing--their expectations for what is taking
place--when they were discussing their data. Our Phase 1 and 2 analysis show
only minor differences between the groups that engaged with the problem and
those that did not. Our Phase 3 analysis demonstrated that the groups that did
not engage with the problem framed the lab activity as about confirming a known
result or as a series of hoops to jump through to fulfill assignment
requirements. Implications for instruction include supporting teaching
assistants to attend to students' framing and agency within laboratory
classrooms.
