This study highlighted the characteristics and patterns of preservice teachers' informal formative assessment conversations woven into mathematics classrooms. Participants were four preservice teachers from an elementary mathematics methods course whose videotaped lessons were analyzed using an analytic framework based on Initiation, Response and…

This paper reports on a conversation analytic study into the pass-on turns that teachers produce to return the floor to the class following one student's contribution, in the context of whole-class discussions around texts in 4th grade history and geography lessons. These pass-on turns are remarkable, as the teachers take the turn in order to…

In conversation analysis, questions are explicated in sequential terms. They constrain relevant types and forms of response in the next turn, and the specifics of response construction provide resources that inform how questions and their actions and constraints are understood. This article aims to contribute to our cross-linguistic understandings…

Chronologically presented courses that span centuries often catalyze unwitting buy-in to unexamined narratives of progress. While useful for helping students make connections between the human past, present, and future, Great Books honors curricula like the one used at the University of Maine have a few inherent problems that require careful…

This paper deals with a novel method for improving the traditional "verification" laboratory in science education. Drawing on the idea of integrated instructional units, we describe an instructional sequence which we call the Babushka concept. This concept consists of three integrated instructional units: a start-up lecture, a laboratory…

This study examined teachers' questions and children's responses during a play-based activity implemented in small groups within preschool classrooms. The first aim of this study was to describe teachers' questions in terms of four levels of abstraction (i.e., a continuum of literal to inferential questions) and children's responses to these…

Background: A sequential analysis of classroom discourse is needed to investigate the conditions under which the triadic initiation-response-feedback (IRF) pattern may host different teaching orientations. Aim: The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to describe the characteristics of classroom discourse and, second, to identify and explore…

We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was…

This study examined the effects of conversational language (e.g., asking questions, inviting replies, acknowledgments, referencing others by name, closing signatures, "I agree, but", greetings, etc.) on the frequency and types of responses posted in reply to given types of messages (e.g., argument, evidence, critique, explanation), and…

Discusses how to design a thematic children's literature unit with trade books. Highlights include theme versus topic; benefits of thematic units, including analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating; opportunities for higher level thinking; sequencing the titles; determining key discussion questions; and culminating the unit. (LRW)