Compared with teachers of "conventional" science courses, teachers who attended a summer workshop and then taught Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) materials tended to increase the amount of indirect verbal influence used at the beginning of the school year, becoming more direct later, and asking more high-level questions (hypothesizing…

Discusses the number of observations necessary to obtain a trustworthy sample of classroom transactions by reanalyzing existing data. Eleven to twenty observations appear necessary for teachers' questions which require students to hypothesize. The reliability of a single observation was zero for four other questioning types. (CC)

Interaction process analysis was used to study the verbal behavior patterns of 10 junior high science teachers. For each teacher, the highest and lowest ability intact classes with whom the teacher worked were studied. Findings revealed that teachers were significantly more indirect and asked more divergent and evaluative questions of the higher…