The use of Quality Talk to increase critical analytical speaking and writing of students in three secondary schools

Abstract

This study was carried out in three secondary schools of varying socioeconomic levels within the usual framework of tasks completed by students while studying towards a national assessment. The study examined the change in the nature of the interactions between students in group conversations, in the context of a film unit and a geography unit using Quality Talk. Quality Talk is an interventional approach promoting text comprehension via a critical‐reflective thinking approach. The study also sought to determine whether there was a positive intervention effect from the use of Quality Talk, on the students' ability to write from a critical analytical (CA) stance. Differences in the pre‐ and post‐treatment writing achievement of seven intervention and one comparison class were assessed. Analysis revealed a large intervention effect within the intervention classes with marked improvements in students' abilities to talk and write with a CA stance (d = 0.92). The change in behaviour for the students in the intervention classes appeared to be associated with their increased use of authentic questions, uptake questions and high‐level questions, which appeared to foster higher levels of dialogic spells, supporting the development of higher levels of CA talk and writing.

Quality Talk and dialogic teaching—an examination of a professional development programme on secondary teachers’ facilitation of student talk

“…In summary it appears that, following the intervention, a surprising finding was that the teachers did not increase their use of the questions as recommended by the Quality Talk framework, and yet the intervention fostered extended dialogic spells among students. What was more important than teachers’ questions was teachers teaching the students how to listen intently to each other so that they could ask uptake and high‐level questions to each other (Davies & Meissel, ). This study concurred with previous studies that taking students seriously within a climate of mutual respect was more important than teacher questions to foster complex discussion between students (Kachur & Prendergast, ; Chrisoph & Nystrand, ; Boyd & Rubin, ).…”

“…This is supported by teacher responses in the post‐intervention interviews (discussed below) and also by a related study involving the same participants, but which focused on the students. In that study, we documented significant increases from pre‐ to post‐test in the questions students asked of each other [ F (2,272) > 3, p < 0.05, d = 0.92] (Davies & Meissel, ). So, although the total number of teacher questions guiding the small‐group discussions decreased, the number of student‐to‐student high‐quality questions increased, thus indicating a transfer of learning control to the students—one of the goals of the Quality Talk approach.…”

“…It should be noted that the current study is part of a larger research project examining the use of the Quality Talk approach in secondary schools. However, previous work has focused on the students, finding significant increases in the number of questions students asked of each other (Davies & Meissel, ), whereas the current study focuses on teacher practice. In the current study, we investigated the types of questions teachers asked during group discussions across the school year and, through interviews, examined the beliefs they held about group discussions for student learning before and after engaging in professional development.…”

“…However, subsequent work has found that the use of teacher questions-specifically, authentic, uptake and high-level thinking questions-can increase the number and length of episodes of dialogic spells (e.g. Nystrand et al, 2003;Davies & Meissel, 2016).…”

Problemløsing ved samarbeid i PISA 2015: En diskusjon av rammeverket og norske elevers resultater

“…Det finnes en rekke forskningsbaserte programmer for å trene elever i produktive gruppedialoger. Eksempler på slike er «Thinking Together» (Mercer & Wegerif, 1999), «Accountable Talk» (Michaels, O'Connor & Resnick, 2008), «Quality Talk» (Davies & Meissel, 2015) and «Collaborative Reasoning» (Resnick, Astehan & Schantz, 2015). Disse programmene er basert på modeller som er utviklet over et lengre tidsrom, både med kvalitative og kvantitative studier.…”