Examining the Impact of Instructional Conversation on Students' Writing Through Topic Model Analysis

• In Event: 15.059 - Fairmont Royal York Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.059-3 - Learning Style, Personalization, STEM, and Instruction

Abstract

Instructional conversation (IC) is a small-group, conversation-based pedagogy designed to provide structured opportunities for students to deeply analyze complex problems. IC helps facilitate independent reading and writing by activating reading comprehension and reflection through collaborative discussions. A statistical topic model analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, was used to analyze the latent structure of 3rd and 5th grade students’ answers to short and long answer constructed response questions. Preliminary findings indicate students in IC classrooms were more likely to address multiple perspectives, address most or all parts of the prompt and display more complex reasoning abilities. Students who did not receive IC were more likely to restate the prompt, use redundant language, and not display deeper levels of thought and reasoning ability.

Authors

• Elaine Vu Duong, University of Georgia - Athens

• Paula Jean Mellom, University of Georgia

• Jodi Weber, University of Georgia

• Rebecca K. Hixon, University of Georgia

• Allan S. Cohen, University of Georgia