Educational dialogue in the classroom : scaffolding, knowledge building and associations with academic performance

Abstract

The present thesis focuses on patterns of educational dialogue, their quality with respect to forms of teacher scaffolding and shared knowledge building, and the association between the quality of educational dialogue and students’ academic performance. The specific questions of interest are as follows: (1) to examine how teachers scaffold students in learning situations through dialogic teaching, (2) to identify patterns of shared knowledge building in educational dialogues, and (3) to investigate how the quality of educational dialogue is associated with academic performance. The data were drawn from the audio- and video-recorded lessons of the First Steps longitudinal study, which were collected from preschool (n = 16), Grade 1 and 2 (n = 70), and Grade 6 (n = 158) classrooms. Subsamples of transcribed lessons were employed in the qualitative analysis. The classroom observations were rated by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), and these scores and students’ grades in academic subjects were utilised in the quantitative analyses. First, two teacher-initiated and two student-initiated patterns of dialogic teaching were identified, in which the quality varied from moderate to high. The findings indicated that the quality of educational dialogue varies depending on teachers’ scaffolding strategies and on the extent of student initiation and participation in discussions during the early school years. Second, the sharing of three types of knowledge was identified in Grade 6 classrooms: facts, views, and experiences. The sharing of these three types of knowledge was identified as forming six knowledge-building patterns in educational dialogue. Finally, the quality of educational dialogue was found to be positively associated with students’ performance, measured by grades in academic subjects, in language arts and physics/chemistry in Grade 6. The qualitative analysis showed further that patterns of dialogic teaching characterised the quality of the language arts and physics/chemistry lessons. Overall, the results add to our understanding of the variation in the quality of educational dialogue and its associations with students’ academic performance.