Charles and David,
I heard Marty Nystrand report the results of this study at a small
conference on classroom discourse last year held at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. I recall that open-ended (or authentic) questions were
coded if teachers asked nonliteral questions about the text (Why do you
think Hamlet was angry at his Uncle?) or about anything else (What did you
do on your Xmas vacation?) That is, any question that wasn't a known
answer question was coded similarly. Then they found that in high income
communities open-ended questions were positively correlated with
achievement gains and in low income communities they were negatively
correlated. That finding lead them to examine what was coded as open-ended
in both communities and found that the questions about the text were asked
in high income communities and the questions about one's vacation were
asked in low income communities. This set of findings made me wonder why
they had originally coded the two types of questions similarly. I still
wonder.
>X-Sender: nystrand who-is-at ssc.wisc.edu
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Sun, 04 Jan 1998 12:04:24 -0600
>To: "David R. Russell" <drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu>
>From: Martin Nystrand <NYSTRAND who-is-at ssc.wisc.edu>
>Subject: Re: review of Opening Dialogue
>Cc: gamoran who-is-at ssc.wisc.edu
>
>David -
>
>Another thought concerning Ellice's comments on Opening Dialogue:
>
>We did not code all nonliteral questions as authentic. English teachers
>especially are notorious for asking Why-questions with prescripted answers.
>Sometimes "Why do you think Hamlet was angry at his Uncle?" is an open-ended
>question; more often, we found, such a question is asked to probe some
>particular view of Hamlet. As observers, we were unable to gauge the
>authenticity of a question simply by the form of the question, though we
>could usually tell by the "genre" of the discussion. Hence, if the teacher
>had just asked her students to get out their study questions to review their
>answers, we learned to anticipate that such a question about Hamlet would
>probably be some sort of test question. When we were unsure about the
>authenticity of a question, we asked the teacher for more information after
>the class ended.
>
>Though we didn't actually contrast high- and low-income schools, I suspect
>"What did you do on your Xmas vacation?" questions are as frequent in high-
>as in low-income schools. What we did find was that there was a big
>difference between high- and low-track classes in this regard. And,
>surprising to us, there was a big difference between 8th- and 9th-grade
>classes. Low-track and ninth-grade classes had the most by far. What this
>suggested to us was that the high school teachers (vs. middle-school
>teachers) had learned that authentic questions get kids' attention, and
>that, because of this, some teachers asked such question to control
>behavior, not teach English.
>
>What our study showed about tracking is that classroom discourse
>significantly mediates academic achievement, to the benefit of the
>high-track students and the loss of the low-track students. It's an old
>story of how the rich get richer and the poor poorer in our schools. In
>short, classroom discourse is not just the medium for talk about stuff to be
>learned; rather, its character actually contributes to their learning.
>Based on the findings of our study, Opening Dialogue argues that classroom
>discourse plays such a mediating role because by asking the questions that
>they do and responding to students as they do, teachers assume particular
>epistemic roles, which in turn assign related (and reciprocal) roles to
>students. In the vast majority of classrooms we observed, the teacher
>assumes a testing role, which means that the students are in the role of
>(usually short-term) "rememberers." The epistemology in these classes
>favors sources of knowledge who are not students, and which existed prior to
>students. What counts as knowledge in these classes is a given. By
>contrast, when teachers take students and their ideas seriously-- which is
>the message that authentic questions (and uptake and high-level evaluation
>and vigorous discussion) send to students--the classroom epistemology is
>very different, favoring thinking and figuring things out on the spot--in
>class and face to face. Opening Dialogue is about understanding how the
>dynamics of classroom discourse affects student learning. The main argument
>is that this happens because of the close relationship of conversant roles
>and epistemology.
>
>Please feel free to forward this to Ellice (and anyone else).
>
>Marty
>
>Martin Nystrand
>Professor of English (608 263-3822)
>Director, Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA) (608 263-0563)
>Editor, Written Communication
>
David R. Russell
Associate Professor
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011 USA
(515) 294-4724
Fax (515) 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu