Exploring Science Teacher Questions’ Influence on the Students’ Talk Productivity: A Classroom Discourse Analysis Approach

Abstract

It is still less known how teachers organize classroom dialog to foster intellectual contributions to classroom talks. The current study developed a coding scheme to clarify science teacher questions and identify how different questions affect students’ talk productivity. The participants were 28 fifth-grade students and a science teacher who conducted argument-based implementations. The verbatim transcriptions were analyzed through a systematic observation approach. The teacher elaborated on the students’ background reasoning in a metacognitive learning setting. In addition, the teacher assigned the students as co-evaluators of the credibility of the presented ideas. The teacher invited the students to re-consider their ideas’ explanatory power by displaying discrepant questions. Moreover, the students had to propose justified claims once they were requested to support their propositions with ample and proper data. The teacher used his questions to guide the students to handle basic process skills and make inferences regarding natural phenomena under consideration. The legitimating, discrepant, and justified talk questions fostered the students’ talk productivity than the eliciting, metatalk, process skills, and inference questions. Recommendations are offered around the teacher noticing term regarding the relationship between questions asked in science classrooms and students’ talk productivity.