In this project we ask how teachers deal with students' statements, how they react to contributions in class discussions, and what effects this has on students' self-related cognitions (e.g., self-efficacy, ability self-concept, sense of competence) and their interest in class.
Observing classroom talk, one often gets the impression that it is a not really a dialogue: The teacher contributes most (in number and length of utterances), interactions usually follow the I-R-F/E pattern (initiation, response, follow-up/evaluation), and students‘ answers often only serve as cues rather than as a starting point for real conversations. Yet previous research has already been able to provide extensive evidence that greater cognitive activation of students through scaffolding and revoicing, as well as discursive treatment of student solutions, promotes student engagement in instruction and is also related to increased learning achievement.
Less well researched is the influence of classroom talk on students' self-related cognitions and interest. This is surprising, since these attitudes and cognitions can have an immense influence on students' learning behavior but also on their psychological well-being at school.
The few studies that have been conducted to date have largely found positive correlations between cognitive activation by classroom talk and students' self-concept or other motivational variables, but in some cases these correlations have not been found or have onnly been found for specific types of activation, such as revoicing. These former studies, however, rarely used direct observation of the instructional talk and based their analyses mostly on an assessment of the instructional quality of the lesson by the mostly adolescent students.
However, since self-related cognitions and interest should be fostered from elementary school age and direct observations of lessons can provide more realistic assessments of classroom talk strategies, in this research project we analyze videos of lessons from elementary school collected in the PLUS study (compare project Partis+). In addition, the questionnaire assessments of the students collected in the PLUS project will be evaluated with regard to their self-related cognitions and their interest in the lessons, and the influence of the identified classroom talk strategies on these variables will be analyzed.
In the further course of the project, we plan to further investigate the above-mentioned correlations through empirical studies that experimentally vary the above-mentioned instructional talk strategies.