Recent science education reforms highlight the importance for teachers to implement effective instructional practices that promote student learning of science and engineering content and their practices. Effective classroom discourse has been shown to support the learning of science, but work is needed to examine teachers’ enactment of reform-based curricula by focusing on the content, complexity, structure, and orchestration of classroom discussions. In the present study, we explored teacher-student talk with respect to science in a middle school curriculum focused on genetics and genetic engineering.

The following research questions guided our study: 1) What are the similarities and differences in classroom discourse that occurred within a reform-based curriculum unit enacted by three teachers? 2) How do the differences lead to variations in student science learning? Through qualitative and quantitative approaches, we found that there were clear differences in three teachers’ use of questioning strategies and presentation of new knowledge that affected the level of student involvement in classroom discourse and the richness and details of student contributions to the conversations. We also found that the verbal explanations of science content differed amongst the three teachers through their use of analogies, depth of science content and their ability to connect physical and conceptual models. An analysis of variance model showed significant differences between each class, which suggests explanation depth and dialogic discourse contribute to higher post-test scores. Collectively, the findings in this study demonstrate that while teachers designed a reform-based curriculum unit and committed to consistently teach the curriculum materials, their use of different dialogic strategies, discussion patterns, and interactions with students differed and thus impacted student learning.

Bio | Dr. Guzey is an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction and Dept. of Biological Sciences at Purdue University. She received her PhD. in Science Education from the University of Minnesota in 2010. Prior to coming to Purdue, Dr. Guzey worked as a Research Associate at the U of MN’s STEM Education Center. Dr. Guzey’s main research interest is integrated STEM education and it focuses on three areas: development of integrated STEM curricular materials, teachers’ use of integrated STEM approaches, and influences of integrated STEM approaches on student learning and interest.