Quality of educational dialogue and association with students’ academic performance

Abstract

The study used a mixed-methods approach to examine the associations between the quality of educational dialogue and students’ academic performance and to analyse what kinds of dialogic teaching patterns of different levels of quality can be identified in classroom lessons. A total of 158 Grade 6 lessons were video-recorded, and the quality of the educational dialogue was assessed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) observational instrument. Multilevel modelling indicated that the quality of educational dialogue was positively associated with students’ academic performance (grades) in language arts and physics/chemistry. Qualitative analysis was subsequently used to examine the quality of the patterns of dialogic teaching in language arts and physics/chemistry lessons (n = 11). The analysis revealed that teacher-initiated patterns were predominant in both subjects and that physics/chemistry lessons were more typically characterised by high-quality educational dialogue than language arts lessons.