Reciprocal interactions between teachers’ instructional moves and students’ social reasoning during collaborative small group discussions

Abstract

This study examined the moment-by-moment reciprocal relationships between teachers’ instructional moves and students’ social reasoning during collaborative small-group discussions. Social reasoning refers to students’ justification of knowledge and understanding of complex issues from the social world. Participants included 131 fifth-grade students and their teachers from two public schools. Students and teachers engaged in six weekly collaborative small group discussions. Students’ social reasoning and teachers’ instructional moves were coded from 24 discussions that occurred in the middle of the intervention. Statistical discourse analysis revealed that teachers’ high-level prompting, specific praise, and management moves immediately triggered students’ social reasoning, while specific praise and high-level prompting triggered social reasoning in later turns. Conversely, students’ social reasoning was less likely to be followed by teachers’ high-level prompting but was more likely to be followed by teachers’ use of specific praise. The findings extend our understanding of teacher-student interactions during the collaborative small-group discussion as a dynamic process driven by various pragmatic purposes.