Follow up to Gordon Wells on IRE patterns

Martin Nystrand (nystrand who-is-at ssc.wisc.edu)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 12:36:02 -0600

In our ninth-grade study of 11,000+ questions in 54 English classes, fully a
third involved evaluation in the following pattern: teacher asked a test
question (a question with a prespecified answer), a student answered, the
question elicited a report, and there was no uptake (incorporation of
previous answer into a subsequent question). In fact, this pattern was so
common that we defined such questions as "normal" teacher questions (in our
program, we treated it as the default for features of teacher questions).

One particular kind of follow up we did study was what we called "high-level
evaluation." Teachers often follow up student responses by elaborating
important implications they see. Teachers sometimes turn some of these
elaborations into didactic or instructive elucidations=97 little set=
pieces=97of
points in a prescripted lesson plan=97essentially coverage of important=
points
students should not miss. Others are more serious explorations of lines of
inquiry opened up by students. When the latter occured, we coded teacher
evaluation as high-level: the teacher noted the importance of a student's
response in shaping a new understanding, and the course of interactions
changed some because of what the student had said. That is, we treated
evaluation as high level when a student contributed something new to the
discussion that modified the topic in some way, and was so acknowledged by
the teacher. Specifically, high-level evaluation consists of two parts:

1. The teacher's certification of the response and
2. The teacher's incorporation of the response into the discourse of the
class usually in the form of either an elaboration (or commentary) or a
follow-up question.

For level of evaluation to be high in our coding, the evaluation had to be
more than "Good," "Good idea," or a mere repeat of the student's answer.
The teacher had to push the student's contribution further, validating it in
such a way that it affected the subsequent course of the discussion. When a
teacher's evaluation is high level, the student really "gets the floor."
Hence, high-level evaluation, like authentic questions, directly affects the
dialogicality of teacher-student interaction.

On average, only 1% of the classes we observed in our ninth-grade study
involved high-level evaluation. This compared with 3% in eighth-grade
English classes.

Martin Nystrand
Professor, Department of English (608 263-3820)
Editor, Written Communication (608 263-4512)
Director, Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA)
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
685 Education Sciences
1025 West Johnson Street
Madison WI 53706
608 263-0563 voice
608 263-6448 fax