Promoting Student Understanding Through Teacher Questioning: A Discourse Analysis of Inquiry-Based Fifth-Grade Science Classrooms

• In Event: Poster Session 6
  In Poster Session: STEM Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which fifth grade science teachers’ use of either authoritative or dialogic questions was generally associated with variable student response quality. The functions of teacher questions and feedback and the varying cognitive and structural characteristics of student responses were analyzed. The results of this study closely mirror other scholars’ findings that the fixed nature of authoritative questioning can dramatically limit students’ opportunities to demonstrate higher-order scientific understanding, while dialogic questions, by contrast, may grant students the discursive space to demonstrate a greater breadth and depth of both canonical and self-generated knowledge. However, certain sequences occupying the “middle ground” between maximal authoritativeness and dialogicity also revealed patterns of meaningful, if isolated instances of higher–order thinking.

Author

• Christopher D. Van Booven, New York University