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WCER Working Paper No. 2009-1

Instituting Change in Classroom Discourse Structure: Human and Computer-Based Motif Analysis
Mitchell J. Nathan , Suyeon Kim and Timothy S. Grant
February 2009, 18 p.

ABSTRACT:

We compared the structure of discussions in a middle school mathematics classroom before (Year 1) and after (Year 2) teacher participation in professional development activities aimed at enhancing students’ participation and the co-construction of mathematical ideas. Changes in the role of teacher and student were accompanied by identifiable changes in discourse structure. In particular, while traditional initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) patterns continued throughout, the de-centering of the teacher’s authority led to a reduction in IRE occurrences and increases in student-directed initiation-demonstration-evaluation (IDE) patterns. Analyses conducted by human coders were corroborated by computer-based motif analyses that identified flexible patterns using probabilistic, data-mining methods, while also predicting some novel discourse structures.

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Keywords: Classroom Discourse; Mathematics Education; Scaffolding; Computer-Assisted Discourse Analysis