Dialogic approaches based on active student participation, open, respectful discussion, exploring and critiquing different perspectives are increasingly found to support student learning. However, the specific productive forms of teacher-student interaction have rarely been studied systematically. A recent large-scale project explored the…

Collaborative problem solving, when students work in pairs or small groups on a curriculum-related task, has become an increasingly common feature of classroom education. This paper reports a study of a topic which has received relatively little attention: how teachers can most usefully intervene when students are working in a group, but have…

While educational theorists have long debated the pedagogical value of granting students the authority to construct certain of their own understandings in collaboration with their peers, a lack of empirical markers of student "interpretive authority" has constrained comparative study of the pedagogical tradeoffs at stake. Yet the thoughtful…

Classroom discourse is structured by socially accepted ways in which knowledge is presented and by established procedures for carrying out educational activities. However, the underlying linguistic and social ground rules are usually implicit, for students as well as for teachers. The implicitness of these ground rules has been attributed to…

Argues that there are potential benefits in incorporating computer-based text analyses into methods for researching talk and educational activity in classrooms. Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of some existing approaches to the study of talk and collaborative activity and suggests ways that computer-based analysis of transcribed talk can…

Examines data from the collaborative discourse of both preservice teachers and elementary students engaged in small group work to get a clearer understanding of the conditions of effective discourse. Particular focus is on the relationship between discourse and peer group directed inquiry. (Author/VWL)