Promoting Academically Productive Student Dialogue

• In Event: The Role of Teacher Practice in Promoting Academically Productive Student Dialogue: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

My interest in academically productive dialogue grew out of the close study of reciprocal teaching dialogues (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). These were discussions that were organized around comprehension monitoring strategies designed to support groups of students in the activity of co-constructing the meanings of informational text. The discussions were mediated by the teacher with the goal of students internalizing the discourse for the purpose of improving their comprehension ability. In the conduct of this research, it became clear that there were important variations in the performance of students on the post-instruction measures (both proximal and distal) that could be accounted for by the qualities of the interactions they experienced. The dialogues in the most successful groups were marked by the following features: the focus of the dialogue was on knowledge building with the ideas in the text, rather than ritualized use of the strategies, and the teachers took up and built upon students’ contributions to the dialogues.

While these initial studies were informed by cognitive theory (particularly the construction-integration model of text comprehension; Kintsch & VanDijk, 1978) and sociocultural theory (emphasizing the co-construction of understanding and inter- to intra-personal psychological processing; Vygotsky, 1978), the next generation of studies was also informed by a sociocognitive perspective (Gee, 2001), proposing the value of making one’s thinking public and considering alternative perspectives. The context for this research was guided-inquiry science in which students, working in small groups, gathered data in pursuit of the explanation for a phenomenon (e.g., how does light interact with objects that have different characteristics?), made claims from their data, and provided the reasoning for their claims (see, for example, Hapgood, Magnusson, & Palincsar, 2004). Once again, the close study of multiple teachers brokering these complex dialogues revealed significant features that distinguished more and less productive interactions including: (a) establishing and maintaining the conversational norms of everyday discourse; (b) providing metascripts to ensure that students had clarity about the contributions they were expected to make to class-wide conversations; (c) revoicing, for the purpose of articulating presupposed information, emphasizing particular aspects of a student’s contribution, disambiguating terminology, aligning students with positions in an argument; (d) serving as “the collective memory” for the class and monitoring the ongoing conversation to pull on particular threads useful to advancing the conversation; (e) supporting skepticism and dissent; and (f) using discourse to advance investigation and investigation to advance discourse.

In current research, we are drawing on the findings summarized above in the design of educational technology (tablets and networked computing) that supports synchronous collaboration within a science curriculum. A driving question for our work is whether - and how - digital mobile technologies and apps enable students to engage in collaborative knowledge building in scientifically authentic ways. While the apps support students to collaborate in, for example, the use of interactive simulations and drawing and revising models, the instruction is always mediated by the teacher. Our focus in on the affordances and challenges of using technologies to promote academically productive dialogue.

Authors

• Annemarie S. Palincsar, University of Michigan

• Meredith Baker, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Miranda Fitzgerald, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Carrie-Anne Sherwood, University of Michigan