Transfer of Emergent Leadership From Children's Collaborative Reasoning Discussions to Math Problem-Solving Activities

Less is more: Teachers’ influence during peer collaboration.

“…Thus, the present study is the first one in the series to simultaneously analyze teacher influences and peer influences on relational thinking. The present study extends other studies using this corpus (Jadallah et al, 2011;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014 and the research of other investigators (Mercer, 2008) by exploring the joint effects of teacher-student and student-student interaction on growth in relational thinking. We sought to determine the proximal influence of teachers' scaffolding moves on students' relational thinking; that is, student thinking displayed during the next few turns for speaking in a discussion.…”

“…While this study showed the snow ball phenomenon as a new kind of student thinking, it did not explore the influence of teacher scaffolding moves. The other two studies using this corpus (Lin et al, 2014, and the present study) explored the benefits of CR on relational thinking.…”

“…In a concurrent study involving 36 discussions from the same corpus as the present study, Lin et al (2014) reported an individual growth curve model of changes in students' relational thinking across 10 CR discussions over a 5-week period. Relational think ing was operationalized as use of an explicit linguistic marker for relational thinking, such as BECAUSE.…”

“…The current study is one of several new studies that seek to answer these questions using the same extensive corpus of 180 CR discussions running to over 31,000 turns of speaking. Given the richness of our data set, over the past years our research team has conducted four microgenetic studies (Jadallah et al, 2011;Lin et al, 2012Lin et al, , 2014 and the current study). Each of the studies has targeted different aspects of these questions.…”

“…High-status children generated more relational thinking and provided more support and refutation to their peers. However, Lin et al (2014) did not take teacher influences into consideration.…”