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Student Questioning in Student Talk: Understanding the process and its role in doing science
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This study is aimed at understanding the nature and dynamics of middle school students’ questioning process and its role in learning and doing science. For this we have looked at student discourse in classroom and out-of-classroom contexts. In classroom contexts, students were observed and recorded while being taught by their regular science teachers. In out-of-classroom contexts, students were observed and recorded while they worked in groups observing and investigating some physical stuff, with researchers acting as teachers. In the informal contexts, teachers’ control was minimised by letting students work on their own with very little teacher intervention - researchers giving least instructions, and sometimes with no prior instructions. Here the purpose was to record students’ spontaneous talk and questioning. Using conversation analysis methods, we transcribed and analysed teacher-student and student-student discourse to understand the process of questioning in the discourse. As we followed an emergent research design, our methods of recording, data collection, transcription and analysis evolved with the progress of our study.
We found that in comparison to classroom contexts, students talked and asked much more in the informal contexts. We also found that most of the student questioning in the informal contexts was authentic with students asking a large number of investigable questions. We found that in classroom discourse, dominated and driven by teacher or textbook questioning, students hardly had agency to meaningfully participate and engage in the discourse. In contrast we found that in the informal contexts students had agency in matters like, turn-taking, allocation of turns, use of language, and exploring the stuff. In these contexts, student-student relations and their roles were dynamic and fluid, which kept changing and evolving during the discourse.
Furthermore, we found that student questioning in informal contexts evolved and progressed due to various kinds of conflicts and disagreements between students and between students and stuff, which classroom discourse generally suppressed. In the informal contexts students spontaneously engaged in various aspects of scientific inquiry to investigate their own questions. We discuss how and why the students engaged in a process in which questioning, observing, arguing, investigating and other aspects were integrated and interdependent. We also describe how doing science in these contexts could help students reflect about the nature of science. Furthermore, we describe how bringing certain elements of such a discourse in classrooms can help give student questioning a central role in doing science in classrooms.
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... This is to a great extent due to a paucity of lab facilities and resources. Even when experiments are done, they are generally separate from the lessons and students have little opportunity to make connections between lab experiments and the classroom lessons (Singh, 2020). Vijaysimha (2013) highlights the tendency of teachers to maintain a distinction between everyday knowledge and formal science knowledge in school by focusing on the textbook. ...
... Within three months of lockdown, reports began to appear in the media about job losses suffered by private school teachers, pre-primary/ early childhood education (ECE) teachers, primary school teachers and contractual teachers. In a survey from as early as May 2020, 27 per cent of teachers across government and private sectors expressed concerns over job security (Singh et al., 2020). The reported job losses state-wise vary between 40,000 and 60,000 up to a few hundred thousand. ...
The ‘State of the Education Report for India 2021: No Teacher, No Class ’ was launched by UNESCO New Delhi on the occasion of World Teacher’s Day, 5 October 2021, with over 400 attendees, including representatives from the government, civil society, academia, partners and youth.
Published annually, this third edition of the State of Education Report of India, focused on the theme of teachers, teaching and teacher education, underscores that the work of teaching is complex. It attempts to provide an understanding of key aspects of the teaching profession, provides a profile of nearly 9.7 million teaching workforce, as well as the challenges of their intricate teaching routine and their professional development.
This publication is the annual flagship report of UNESCO New Delhi and it is based on extensive research.
The substance of the Report has been developed by an expert team of researchers in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, under the guidance of the UNESCO New Delhi Office.
Source: UNESCO https://en.unesco.org/news/no-teacher-no-class-state-education-report-india-2021
... This is to a great extent due to a paucity of lab facilities and resources. Even when experiments are done, they are generally separate from the lessons and students have little opportunity to make connections between lab experiments and the classroom lessons (Singh, 2020). Vijaysimha (2013) highlights the tendency of teachers to maintain a distinction between everyday knowledge and formal science knowledge in school by focusing on the textbook. ...
... Within three months of lockdown, reports began to appear in the media about job losses suffered by private school teachers, pre-primary/ early childhood education (ECE) teachers, primary school teachers and contractual teachers. In a survey from as early as May 2020, 27 per cent of teachers across government and private sectors expressed concerns over job security (Singh et al., 2020). The reported job losses state-wise vary between 40,000 and 60,000 up to a few hundred thousand. ...
This is the third state of education report for india brought out by UNESCO Delhi regional office. The focus of the report is teachers, teaching and teacher education in India.
... Though there is widespread recognition of the importance of student questions in education and learning, several reports and studies from classrooms have found that students ask far fewer questions than teachers, with teachers unaware of this being the case (Singh, 2019). Even the nature of teacher questioning is such that it restricts student engagement to that of a passive respondent. ...
The article talks about the nature and process of teacher and student questioning in classrooms. Generally classrooms are dominated by teacher/textbook questioning with lack of student questioning. To understand the reasons why is it so, we need to understand why and how teacher and student questioning occurs in classrooms and whether and how teacher questioning restricts or encourages student questioning. This article dwells into these issues and argues on ways by which student questioning can be encouraged in classrooms.
In order to understand the learning and teaching on the farm, we have to look at its relation to formal education. Although we did not directly observe the schools in or near Rudravali, we make some inferences based on our observations of schools in Mumbai and in villages in other areas. We summarise our impressions of the pedagogy and curricula that we have seen. We analyse some material related to agriculture in the textbooks that the family used. Family members discuss their understanding of plant biology and some of the topics that appear in the textbooks.
This forum paper is a reflection about the paper written by Valérie Frède and illustrates how it influences my work as a Ph.D. student in education. It focuses mainly on the relationship to knowledge and the clash between student culture and Western science culture in classroom. In this forum paper, I will briefly explain why these two ideas seems important to me, and then use the example of climate education to illustrate why it is important to inform a socioconstructivist and transformative way of teaching in science classroom. It also contributes to assert the responsibility we have, as teachers or researchers, to value youth initial conceptions about consensual concepts like night-and-day cycle or more interdisciplinary or complex issue like climate change.
This study is an effort to understand the process of questioning and answering in discourse among students. More specifically we are investigating the dynamics of the question-response process when students are involved in a spontaneous discourse. We claim that questioning/answering is part of a dialectical process in which conflicts arise due to interdependencies between students, as well as between students and the outer world. Questioning drives authentic discussion and the discussion drives the questioning. This process is what we see as one of the defining aspects of the process of doing science.
To understand students’ argumentation abilities, there have been practices that focus on counting and analyzing argumentation schemes such as claim, evidence, warrant, backing, and rebuttal. This analytic approach does not address the dynamics of epistemic criteria of children’s reasoning and decision-making in dialogical situations. The common approach also does not address the practice of argumentation in lower elementary grades (K–3) because these children do not master the structure of argumentation and, therefore, are considered not ready for processing argumentative discourse. There is thus little research focusing on lower elementary school students’ argumentation in school science. This study, drawing on the societal-historical approach by L. S. Vygotsky, explored children’s argumentation as social relations by investigating the genesis of evidence-related practices (especially burden of proof) in second- and third-grade children. The findings show (a) students’ capacity for connecting claim and evidence/responding to the burden of proof and critical move varies and (b) that teachers play a significant role to emphasize the importance of evidence but experience difficulties removing children’s favored ideas during the turn taking of argumentative dialogue. The findings on the nature of dialogical reasoning and teacher’s role provide further insights about discussions on pedagogical approaches to children’s reasoning and argumentation.
