Academic Talk During Cooperative, Inquiry-Based Science in Year 6 Classrooms

• In Event: What Is the Value of Classroom Talk?

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of the research reported here is to identify the effects of different types of scientific representations on the development of students’ scientific discourse and conceptual understandings during cooperative inquiry learning.

Theoretical framework
While my initial studies on how students learnt were informed by social interdependence theory (Deutsch, 1949), I also realized that I needed to understand how students construct meaning from their experiences, and, how they use language as a tool for reasoning and problem-solving (Author, 2006; Author, 2009). Language, however, only occurs in classrooms where teachers actively seek to promote student discourse by engaging them in meaningful teacher-student and student-student interactions or ways of interacting that are referred to as dialogic talk (Alexander, 2008).

Understanding how teachers can be encouraged to engage in dialogic talk and how students, in turn, appropriate these way of communicating in their interactions with each other has been a focus of these studies. Specifically, I have been interested in investigating whether teachers can be introduced to dialogic talk as a way of teaching and the effect this approach has on how students interact and learn and what happens in classrooms where these styles of communicating are not adopted.

Methods
The context for my current research is investigating how students work together in small groups on inquiry-based science tasks taken from the national science curriculum. In these studies (Author, 2014; Author, 2015; Author, 2017), all teachers participated in professional learning workshops where the focus was on teaching students how to use and interpret representations, ways to engage in dialogic talk (Alexander, 2008; Author, 2007), and how to construct cooperative group experiences.

Data
Video data were collected in-situ from both teachers and students and coded for the use of different representations and social and scientific language.

Results
The dialogues that were effective in stimulating communication between teachers and students included teachers: (a) asking thought-provoking questions to help students probe and investigate information (b) providing elaborated feedback. The dialogues that were effective at stimulating discussion between students included: (a) asking questions to clarify information, elicit reasons, or promote thinking (b) using social language to affirm, support, or make suggestions to the group (c) using scientific language to communicate ideas, provide explanations, and contribute knowledgably to the discussion. Common to all three studies was the teacher modeling the discourse to assist students in learning the language of science as well as how inquiries are conducted and reported. In response, students learnt to provide more coherent and explicit accounts of their investigations with their peers.

Significance
The studies highlight the key role teachers play in constructing learning situations where students not only learn the language of science and how inquiries are conducted but also how to provide more explicit and coherent accounts of their investigations. These are ways of talking that have been shown to precede the development of more sophisticated cognitive and conceptual schemata.

Author

• Robyn Margaret Gillies, The University of Queensland