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Fifth-grade students from two urban school districts completed an integrated unit on wolves. Classes received either direct instruction (DI) or collaborative group work (CG). Analysis of reasoning in classroom talk indicated that CG students more often used connective and contrastive words and the performative verb phrases I think and I know than DI students. Analysis of written arguments about a controversial question raised by the unit indicated that, compared to DI students, CG students included more logical connectives, contrastives, and performative verbs, produced fewer unelaborated arguments, more frequently asked rhetorical questions, and more often considered both sides of the policy issue. The study provides fresh insight into how instructional frameworks can affect how students view themselves as writers in relation to a prospective audience.

Collaborative argumentation can enhance students’ reasoning, content learning, and interest, but these benefits are contingent upon high levels of student engagement. This study examined the influence of teacher framing strategies that provided autonomy support and structure on students’ engagement during Collaborative Reasoning discussions through the lens of self-determination theory. Transcripts and video recordings of 52 discussions in six fourth-grade classrooms were analyzed for (a) teacher framing strategies used to communicate structure and autonomy support for the upcoming discussion, (b) teacher scaffolding strategies used to enhance thinking and interaction during the discussion, and (c) students’ cognitive-behavioral and social-emotional engagement during the discussion. The findings identified certain teacher framing and teacher scaffolding strategies that had a significant influence on student engagement. Notably, one teacher framing strategy, collaborative rule-setting, predicted higher cognitive-behavioral and social-emotional engagement after controlling for the effects of teacher scaffolding during the discussions. The evidence suggests that providing task structure in autonomy-supportive ways can enhance student engagement during collaborative argumentation.

The goal of this study was to evaluate instructional influences on the storytelling of English Language Learners (ELLs). Participants were 210 fifth-grade Spanish-speaking ELLs (mean age = 10.8) from schools serving low-income neighborhoods in the Midwest of the United States. They received a six-week socio-scientific unit involving collaborative group work or direct instruction, or were in control classes that continued regular instruction. In an essay to evaluate mastery of the instructional unit, students from collaborative groups produced significantly longer chains of reasoning (more chains with 5–8 links) than direct instruction students (more chains with 3 or 4 links), while control students were unable to display any extended reasoning. Following the unit, students individually told a story prompted by a wordless picture book to evaluate their oral English proficiency. The stories were coded for several features of basic language production, story completeness, and multi-link causal reasoning. The results indicated that students who received the socio-scientific unit told stories with more complicated syntax than the control students, while no difference in complexity of syntax was observed between students from the two instructional conditions. Stories told by students who had participated in collaborative groups contained significantly more elaboration of essential story elements than the stories produced by direct instruction students or control students. Students who had interacted in collaborative groups also generated significantly longer chains of reasoning (many 5–7 link chains) connecting story events than students in the other two conditions (mostly 1 or 2 link chains). The results suggest collaborative group work may be an effective instructional approach to foster ELLs' communicative competence and causal reasoning.

Instructional influences on productive use of academic vocabulary were investigated among 460 mostly African American and Latina/o fifth graders from 36 classrooms in eight public schools serving low-income families. Students received a 6-week unit on wolf management involving collaborative group work (CG) or direct instruction (DI). The big question that students tried to answer during the unit was whether a community should be permitted to destroy a pack of wolves. In an individual oral interview about an analogue to the wolf question, whether whaling should be allowed, both CG and DI students used more general and domain-specific academic vocabulary from the Wolf Unit than uninstructed control students. CG students used more general academic vocabulary in the whale interview than DI students, and this was mediated by the CG students' greater use of general academic vocabulary in classroom dialogue during the Wolf Unit. These results suggest that CG is an effective instructional approach to promote acqu...

This research examined the influence of contrasting instructional approaches on children’s decision-making competence. A total of 764 fifth graders, mostly African Americans and Hispanic Americans, from 36 classrooms in eight public schools serving children from low-income families completed a six-week unit on wolf management, using either direct instruction or collaborative groups, or were waited-listed controls. Analysis of children’s essays on a topic unrelated to wolves revealed that students who participated in collaborative groups but not students who received direct instruction acquired decision-making strategies and transferred them to the novel task. Students in collaborative group work classrooms wrote essays that were significantly better than essays of students from direct instruction classrooms in each of the three aspects of decision making that were evaluated—considering more than one side of a dilemma, comprehensiveness of reasons, and weighing the importance of reasons. In contrast, direct instruction students performed no better than uninstructed control students.

A study involving 106 fourth graders and two teachers from a school in Beijing investigated the impact of a peer-led, open-format discussion approach, called collaborative reasoning (CR), on students’ reading comprehension and teacher’s professional learning. Mixed results of effects of CR on children’s reading comprehension were found. After participating in eight discussions over an eight-week period, the CR group performed significantly better than the control group on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study constructed-response items requiring integrating and evaluating information, but no better on multiple-choice items calling for information retrieval and simple inferences. No CR group’s advantage was found on the National Assessment of Educational Progress items. Compared to the baseline discussions prior to the intervention, CR increased the volume, complexity, and fluency of student talk, decreased teacher talk and teacher control of topic. Both CR teachers successfully altered the traditional recitation discourse pattern and adapted to an open-format discussion. CR teachers’ weekly reflections and interviews showed that teachers experienced four developmental stages from being lost to applying CR in subsequent reading instruction practice.

This study examined the influence of teachers’ instructional moves on students’ relational thinking during small-group collaborative discussions. One hundred and twenty 4th grade students and 6 teachers participated in a series of 10 discussions, generating a video-recorded corpus containing 32,511 turns for speaking. A microanalysis of a subset of the corpus showed that teacher prompts for relational thinking, rather than lower level prompts or prompts for evaluation, had an immediate effect on student relational thinking, triggering further relational thinking from students over several speaking turns. Students were unlikely to emulate a teacher’s relational thinking strategy but highly likely to emulate another student’s. Behavioral management but not cognitive management increased the likelihood of relational thinking. Specific praise for cognitive or social strategies enhanced relational thinking, and the bidirectional association between praise and relational thinking suggested a transactional model of teacher–student interaction. The results underscore the importance of teacher influences in peer collaboration, even when the absolute rate of teacher talk is low.

This microgenetic study strived to understand instantaneous peer influences on the moment-by-moment and session-by-session development of relational thinking within and across dialogic small-group discussions using an approach called Collaborative Reasoning. An analysis encompassing 32,511 turns for speaking during 176 discussions indicated that peer support and refutation influenced the development of relational thinking within (micro-level) and across (macro-level) discussions, and was mediated by friendship and peer status. Support was mainly mediated by friends and children with high status. Observing reciprocated friends' supportive talk encouraged students to generate confirmational relational thinking in the next turn for speaking. Refutation was mainly mediated by children with high status. Quiet students generated less refutation. The study documents the proximal effects of peer status and friendship on the social and cognitive dynamics of collaborative discussions.

Fourth- and fifth-grade students’ motivation and engagement during classroom discussions were investigated in 2 studies. Study 1 examined students’ moment-by-moment engagement during collaborative peer-managed small-group discussions in comparison to conventional teacher-managed whole-class discussions. Study 2 evaluated the long term effects of discussions on self-reported motivation. Both studies showed that collaborative discussions produced greater interest and engagement than conventional discussions. Student self-ratings of engagement as well as adult ratings of engagement during a 6-min episode of one discussion had relatively high correlations with student self-reported interest and engagement several months later. Girls reported greater interest and engagement than boys in both conventional and collaborative discussions and were rated as more engaged by both themselves and adults; however, boys showed a greater boost in interest from collaborative discussions. Talkative children reported greater interest and engagement than less talkative children. Low-ability children put a higher value on discussion than high-ability children.

A study involving 75 Spanish-speaking fifth graders from a school in the Chicago area investigated whether a peer-led, open-format discussion approach, known as Collaborative Reasoning, would accelerate the students’ English language development. Results showed that, after participating in eight discussions over a four-week period, the CR group performed significantly better than the control group on measures of listening and reading comprehension. The CR group produced more coherent narratives in a storytelling task. The reflective essays written by the CR group were longer; contained more diverse vocabulary; and contained a significantly greater number of satisfactory reasons, counterarguments, and uses of text evidence. CR discussions also enhanced students’ interest and engagement in discussions, perceived benefits from discussions, and attitudes toward learning English.

Metadiscourse has been conceptualized as a means to organize discourse, convey interpersonal and evaluative meanings, as well as engage the reader or listener. Importantly, metadiscourse has been theorized to uncover thought mediation during the essay-composing process. This study compares the metadiscourse in the reflective essays of 180 fifth graders, who either participated in small-group discussions using an approach called Collaborative Reasoning (CR), or who did not. Comparative analysis involving six major categories and forty subcategories of metadiscourse revealed, among other findings, that CR-exposed writers better signaled illocutionary force of reasoning, made greater use of engagement imperatives/directives and common-good rather than self-centered attitude marking. CR writers organized their ideas in a more argument-befitting logical-temporal non-list-like structure. Control students made greater use of emphatics, more often introduced hypothetical scenarios, and more frequently linked propositions together with simple additive conjunctions. The findings suggest that CR students have greater concern for how readers will take their arguments and greater appropriation of argument-enhancing formal elements, thus revealing cross-modal transfer from oral to written discourse.

This microgenetic study examined social influences on children’s development of analogical reasoning during peer-led small-group discussions of stories about controversial issues. A total of 277 analogies were identified among 7,215 child turns for speaking during 54 discussions from 18 discussion groups in 6 fourth-grade classrooms (N = 120; age M = 10.0, SD = 0.6). Use of analogy was found to spread among the children in discussion groups and occur at an accelerating rate, primarily because of the increasing use of novel analogies. Relational analogies with shared surface features triggered purely relational analogies during the next 2 speaking turns, showing a trend of relational shift. These results provide distinctive new evidence for the importance of social interaction in an aspect of cognitive development.

The influence of one teacher’s scaffolding moves on children’s performance in free-flowing child-led small-group discussions was investigated. Three moves were examined: prompting for and praising the use of evidence, asking for clarification, and challenging. Lag sequential analysis was applied to a corpus of over 5,300 speaking turns during 30 discussions to identify recurrent turn-by-turn patterns of teacher-child and child-child talk initiated by the teacher’s moves. A complex system of influence among discussion participants was documented in which the teacher’s moves had delayed effects as well as immediate effects, indirect as well as direct effects, and reciprocal instead of unidirectional effects. Some children appropriated scaffolding moves of the teacher and began to spontaneously employ the moves in later discussions.

In this paper, we address the need to develop an empirically-based understanding of the use of dialogue in teaching by discussing theory and research related to a pedagogical approach called collaborative reasoning (CR). CR is an instructional method designed to engage elementary school children in group discussions about controversial issues raised in their readings. CR is grounded in social learning and schema-theoretic views of cognition, which are integrated to form a new model, called argument schema theory (AST). According to AST, students acquire generalizable knowledge of argumentation, or an argument schema, through participating in dialogic discussions with their peers. The article reviews empirical evidence from a variety of studies designed to evaluate the educational potential of dialogic interactions. The studies investigated group processes during CR discussions, individual student outcomes following participation in discussions, and the connections between the features of social interaction and individual student performance. We conclude that, despite its complexity, classroom dialogue can serve as a useful mechanism for promoting the development of individual argumentation.

This article examines the discourse of 10 groups of children during text-based online discussions. Analysis of the discourse in the discussions showed that 8 different rhetorical moves, or argument stratagems, were used by most groups of children, whereas 3 other stratagems were used by 1 group. The use of argument stratagems snowballed; that is, once an argument stratagem emerged in a discussion, it tended to spread to other children in the Web group, and the likelihood that it would occur again remained high over the course of the discussion. Most stratagems began to spread when initiated by other children but not when introduced by the adult moderator. Children were eager to participate and displayed a high rate of participation in discussions with Webmates from distant classrooms. These findings suggest that collaborative online discussions may provide an effective instructional medium for promoting children's learning of reasoning strategies and thinking skills. We wish to acknowledge the contributio...

This article presents a framework to help teachers facilitate small group discussions about stories children read. Collaborative reasoning discussions are intended to create a forum for children to listen to one another think out loud as they learn to engage in reasoned argumentation. Children use personal experiences and evidence from the stories to support their conclusions and consider each other's points of view. Excerpts from an ongoing study of 12 fourth-grade classrooms in rural, urban, and suburban settings are used to illustrate four characteristics of cognitive reasoning: (1) children's response to text; (2) children's use of text to consider multiple possibilities; (3) children's use of tools for persuading others; and (4) children's control of topic and turn-taking.

This article examines the effects of participation in oral argumentation on the development of individual reasoning as expressed in persuasive essays. Engagement in oral argumentation is the essential feature of a classroom discussion method called collaborative reasoning. A premise of this method is that reasoning is fundamentally dialogical and, hence, the development of reasoning is best nurtured in supportive dialogical settings such as group discussion. Students from 3 classrooms participated in collaborative reasoning discussions for a period of 5 weeks. Then, these students and students from 3 comparable classrooms who had not engaged in collaborative reasoning wrote persuasive essays. The essays of collaborative reasoning students contained a significantly greater number of relevant arguments, counter-arguments, rebuttals, formal argument devices, and uses of text information.

Social influences on the reasoning and rhetorical strategies of 104 fourth graders were examined during 48 small-group discussions. A total of 14,942 lines of discussion transcript were sifted to determine patterns of occurrence of 13 argument stratagems serving several rhetorical functions. The major finding was that the use of argument stratagems snowballs. That is, once a useful stratagem has been used by a child during a discussion, it tends to spread to other children and occur with increasing frequency. After the first appearance of a stratagem, the probability that it will appear again usually rises and remains high. In general, there are fewer and fewer lines of discussion between successive appearances of a stratagem. The snowball phenomenon was more pronounced during discussions with open participation than during discussions with teacher-controlled participation.

This microgenetic study examined social influences on children's development of analogical reasoning during peer-led small-group discussions of stories about controversial issues. A total of 277 analogies were identified among 7,215 child turns for speaking during 54 discussions from 18 discussion groups in 6 fourth-grade classrooms (N = 120; age M=10.0, SD=0.6). Use of analogy was found to spread among the children in discussion groups and occur at an accelerating rate, primarily because of the increasing use of novel analogies. Relational analogies with shared surface features triggered purely relational analogies during the next 2 speaking turns, showing a trend of relational shift. These results provide distinctive new evidence for the importance of social interaction in an aspect of cognitive development.

Emergent leadership was examined in 12 discussion groups in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. Children's leadership moves were coded from transcripts of 10 free-flowing, open-format discussions of each of the 12 groups. The transcripts encompassed 26,000 turns for speaking, including 22,000 child turns of which 1,700 were judged to serve one of five leadership functions: Turn Management, Argument Development, Planning and Organizing, Topic Control, and Acknowledgment. Comparison of the number and kind of leadership moves made by the children showed that 1 primary child leader emerged in 6 out of the 12 groups and that, in all but 1 of the remaining groups, leadership was shared among several children. Even in groups with a dominant leader, leadership functions were widely distributed among group members. A three-level generalized hierarchical linear model, with multiple discussions nested within students and students nested within groups, showed that the frequency of leadership moves increased with the ...