The wait time concept has become a significant dimension in the research on teaching. When teachers ask students ques tions, they typically wait less than one second for a student response. Further, after a student stops speaking, teachers react or respond with another question in less than one second. The concepts of wait time 1 (pausing after asking a question) and wait time 2 (pausing after a student response) are discussed in this article by Rowe. She reviews the literature on wait time and describes the efficacy of different training procedures used to enhance the quality of teacher questioning techniques and teacher responses to students. The appropriateness of using wait time with special needs students, particularly handicapped children, is also discussed.

This article argues that subtle discrimination is now the principalscaffoldingfor segregation in the United

In Part I it was shown that by varying the duration of pauses in two locations the length of student statements increased, the number of alternative explanations offered multiplied, and the overall probability of receiving a reply increased. It was noted, as well, that in natural situations where there was a high incidence of teacher sanctioning behavior, regardless of whether it was predominantly positively toned, the verbal performance of students engaged in inquiry appeared to be negatively influenced even when there were reasonable wait‐times. That is, even in those rare naturally occurring cases where pauses were longer than the mean of one second, and in experiments where pauses and rewards were independently manipulated if sanctioning behaviors were intense, the positive influence on inquiry of the longer pauses appeared to be somewhat mitigated. It became necessary, then, to study reward patterns in the context of inquiry in order to discover whether, in general, overt verbal rewards which we found occurring with tremendous frequency in natural settings, helped or hindered the progress of student inquiry.

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