Cognitive activation in L1 Literature classes: A content-specific framework for the description of teaching quality

Abstract

In recent years, the scientific determination of teaching quality has become a central topic and productive field within empirical classroom research. With respect to L1 literature education, there is no framework within which attempts can be made to consistently interpret domain-specific criteria of teaching quality. Against this background, this paper follows two main questions: What does teaching quality in L1 litera-ture classrooms mean? How can teaching quality be operationalised? This paper argues that the construct of cognitive activation offers a suitable approach to integrate existing specifications of teaching quality in L1 literature classrooms and to identify and define characteristics of a content-specific view. The key result presented in this paper is a highly inferential coding system that operationalises cognitive activation for L1 literature classes. The operationalisation regards tasks in process to be indicators for cognitive activa-tion. The theoretical conceptualisation is based on empirical data from a pilot study for the research pro-ject KoALa (Cognitive Activation through Tasks in Literature Classes). In this pilot study, six literature les-sons were videotaped, involving analysis of the same short story with six different teachers and classes (107 students, grade 8, German "Gymnasium").