Students enter learning situations (informal and formal alike) with a wealth of knowledge, skill and expertise with which to engage in new learning experiences. However, in dialogic science discussions, many students do not call on these resources to engaging in discussion, and some students rarely participate. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid model of agency as a lens to examine the enablers and barriers to students' engagement in dialogic science discussions. We operationalize this model in the analysis of students' participation patterns in whole class discussions and their narratives about experiences in these discussions. The findings show that all students enact agency in discussion, but differences lie in the extent to which students perceive that they can enact agency. We find that social structures that help to create and perpetuate differences in students' sense that they can enact their agency. We discuss the implications of these findings on what teachers can do to support equitable participation in talk in the service of equitable opportunities for learning.
This paper investigates the use of conversational agents to scaffold online collaborative learning discussions through an approach called academically productive talk (APT). In contrast to past work on dynamic support for collaborative learning, which has involved using agents to elevate the conceptual depth of collaborative discussion by leading students in groups through directed lines of reasoning, this APT-based approach lets students follow their own lines of reasoning and promotes productive practices such as explanation of reasoning and refinement of ideas. Two forms of support are contrasted, namely, Revoicing support and Feedback support. The study provides evidence that Revoicing support resulted in significantly more intensive reasoning exchange between students in the chat and significantly more learning during the chat than when that form of support was absent. Another form of support, namely, Feedback support increased expression of reasoning while marginally decreasing the intensity of the interaction between students and did not affect learning.
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