Facilitating Small-Group Discussions: Effects of Teacher Discourse Moves Across Four Group Composition Formats in Fourth and Fifth Grade
Open Access
- Author:
- Croninger, Rachel Miriam Vriend
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- February 26, 2019
- Committee Members:
- P. Karen Murphy, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Classroom Discussions
High-level Comprehension
Teacher Moves
Group Composition - Abstract:
- Engaging in small-group, text-based discussions can promote students’ high-level comprehension and ability to think critically about, around, and with text and content. During productive discussions, students participate in extended episodes of talk as they exchange, critique, and evaluate each other’s ideas and reasoning. Although numerous studies on text-based discussion approaches have been conducted, the role of the teacher in facilitating the type of talk proven to promote high-level comprehension of text and content has not been investigated fully. As a facilitator, teachers utilize targeted actions (i.e., teacher moves) to guild students’ talk, but it is unclear how specific pedagogical decisions or contextual factors such as group composition influence the relationship between teachers’ facilitation practices and students’ productive talk. To extend our understanding of teachers’ role as a facilitating during small-group, text-based discussions, in the current study I examined the turn-by-turn effect of teachers’ targeted facilitation practices on students’ productive talk across four small group composition formats (i.e., homogenous above-average, homogeneous average, homogeneous below-average, or heterogeneous) in the context of an empirically-supported, teacher-facilitated discussion approach (i.e., Quality Talk). Fourth- and fifth-grade teachers (n = 4) and their students (n = 62) participated in a year-long implementation of Quality Talk for which students were randomly assigned to either a homogeneous or heterogeneous ability discussion group based on a measure of oral reading fluency at the beginning of the school year. Six researchers coded 108 discussion videos for instances of teachers’ facilitation practices (i.e., teacher moves) and students productive talk (i.e., elaborated explanations). Lag-sequential analysis revealed that group composition influences the relationship between teachers’ facilitation practices and students’ productive talk. Specifically, group composition influenced the strength of the relationship between individual teacher moves and students’ elaborated explanations as well as how teachers responded to students elaborated explanations during discussions. Results indicated that prompting gave way to elaborated explanations, regardless of group composition, but that prompting was essential for the homogenous below-average group. Furthermore, teachers were also more likely to mark students’ discourse or challenge students’ elaborated explanations in the homogeneous below-average groups than other group composition formats. Finally, results also indicated that students responded to each other differently across group compositions. The current study is significant in that it extends our understanding of the teacher’s role as a facilitator during small-group, text-based discussions by demonstrating that the turn-by-turn effect of teachers’ targeted facilitation moves during discussion can vary as a function of group composition. Moreover, the present study provides evidence that group composition may influence the extent to which students emulate each other’s discursive practices. The present study also has practical implications for teacher professional development aimed at supporting teachers’ implementing small-group discussions approaches in their classrooms.