How do students listen to others in classroom discussions? Differences across classrooms and subjects

Abstract

The present study aimed to clarify characteristics of how students in different classrooms listen in classroom discussions that are on different subjects. Observations were made and immediate recall tasks completed in 2 fifth-grade classrooms during reading and social studies lessons. In addition, those students' homeroom teachers evaluated their own students' listening ability. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that (a) the students who were identified by their homeroom teacher as "good listeners" could capture others' utterances in their own words while actively focusing on the content, its connections, and who spoke, whether or not they themselves spoke; (b) the way that the students monitored the sources of utterances and focused on the flow of discussions differed between the two subjects, which had different task structures; and (c) the differences described in (b) were different in the 2 classrooms. These results suggest that differences that are associated with the classroom, the subject, and the task structure affect how students listen to classroom discussions.