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Questions in Time:Investigating the Structureand Dynamics of UnfoldingClassroom DiscourseMartin Nystrand , Lawrence L. Wu , Adam Gamoran ,Susie Zeiser & Daniel A. LongPublished online: 08 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Martin Nystrand , Lawrence L. Wu , Adam Gamoran , Susie Zeiser& Daniel A. Long (2003) Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamicsof Unfolding Classroom Discourse, Discourse Processes, 35:2, 135-198, DOI: 10.1207/S15326950DP3502_3

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Questions in Time: Investigating theStructure and Dynamics of Unfolding

Classroom Discourse

Martin NystrandDepartment of English

The University of Wisconsin–MadisonNational Research Center on English Learning and Achievement

Lawrence L. Wu and Adam GamoranDepartment of Sociology


Susie ZeiserNational Research Center on English Learning and Achievement

Daniel A. LongDepartment of Sociology


In the 1st-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate discourse processes quanti-tatively, this study recasts understanding of discourse in terms of the (a) antecedentsand (b) consequences of discourse participant “moves” as they (c) affect the inertia ofthe discourse and accordingly structure unfolding discourse processes. The methodis used to compute the probabilities of the effects of particular discourse moves onsubsequent discourse patterns and to measure and systematically contrast static

DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 35(2), 135–198Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Martin Nystrand, The National Re-search Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA), Wisconsin Center for Education Re-search, 1025 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: [email protected]

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(macrosocial) and dynamic (microsocial) conditions prompting and sustainingdialogic discourse. Theoretically, the authors draw on Russian scholar MikhailBakhtin’s epistemological distinctions between monologic and dialogic discourse toidentify pedagogically rich sequences of teacher–student interaction as dialogicspells and discussion, which the authors’ previous work has shown to contribute toachievement. Empirically, the authors examine data collected in hundreds of obser-vations of more than 200 8th- and 9th-grade English and social studies classrooms in25 Midwestern middle and high schools, including detailed coding of more than33,000 teachers and student questions. Results show that authentic teacher questions,uptake, and student questions function as dialogic bids with student questions show-ing an especially large effect. Discourse event history analysis is a powerful tool forinvestigating the structure of unfolding discourse.

Since Saussure (1959/1915), a central problem for discourse theory has beengrappling with the heterogeneity of discourse as it unfolds in time. Saussuresought to sidestep the whole problem by bracketing la parole and focusing on lalangue, a construct geared, in a seminal move often cited as the foundation of mod-ern linguistics, to extricating language from seemingly intractable problems oftime and context. Yet linguistics’ focus on la langue has famously done nothing forstudies of la parole except to perpetuate Saussure’s characterization of it as hetero-geneous and unsystematic—impossible as a serious problem for any scientificanalysis seeking valid propositions and hypotheses about discourse in some gen-eral, nomothetic sense.

Many initiatives have addressed this issue. Especially noteworthy, of course,have been ethnomethodology and conversation analysis documenting language ininteraction co-constructed “on the fly” by the conversants and appropriately under-stood by the conversants only in the context of its emergence (Goodwin, 1979, 1981;Heritage & Roth, 1995; Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, Schlegloff, & Jefferson, 1974;Schegloff, 1984). Leaving behind efforts to investigate discourse by explicating anunderlying structure of the sort that sentence grammarians uncover, sociolinguistsand ethnomethodologists, including Cicourel (1973) and Garfinkel (1967), pro-posed concepts like the et cetera principle, reciprocity of phenomenal perspectives,indexicality, and reflexivity to conceptualize situated discourse in everyday interac-tion (cf. Nystrand, Greene, & Wiemelt, 1993, p. 320). Discourse—language intime—is more adequately understood as structured by the conversants, particularlyas they each reciprocally factor the intentions of the other into their interactions. AsSchutz (1962) put it, it is “assumed that the sector of the world taken for granted byme is also taken for granted by you, [and] even more, that it is taken for granted by‘Us’” (1967, p. 12). Or, as Brazil (1985), writing about discourse phonology in con-versation, argued, “The most general characterization of the [proclaiming–refer-ring]systemisnot, in fact, in textual termsbut insocial terms. Inmaking the referringchoice, the speaker invokes the togetherness aspect of the conversational relation-ship, speaking as it were for the ‘we’ who are the participants” (pp. 67–68).

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From this perspective, discourse begins as an initial calibration of conversants’intentions and expectations vis-à-vis the topic and genre of their interaction, andthe conversants’ensuing interaction is largely structured by their evolving perspec-tives on the topic and the discourse itself. Therefore, when one person begins aconversation by asking, “You know that x I’m always talking about?” the purposeof this question is not to quiz the speaker’s conversant but rather and merely to es-tablish a common topic and starting point for the conversation. For Rommetveit(1974), the result of this initial calibration of conversants is a temporarily sharedsocial reality (or TSSR), and the discourse itself is to be understood, he argued, as aprogressive modification and/or expansion of this social reality. Each modificationand/or expansion, typically accomplished through the introduction andcontextualization of new information, defines a subsequent TSSR (roughly speak-ing, there are about as many TSSRs in a discourse as there are introductions andcontextualizations of new information).

Whereas such a conceptualization perhaps represents the state of the art in dis-course analysis and has done much to account for countless case studies, their na-ture as case studies makes it difficult to use their methods to investigate the generalcharacter and dynamics of discourse, such as how discourse in particular contextstends to start and end, or the effects of defined contextual factors such as demogra-phy, power relations between conversants, institutional settings, and so on as theygenerally impact discourse processes, not just individual cases.

In this article, we report the first-ever discourse event-history analysis to dealwith these issues. Event-history analysis is a quantitative methodology used to in-vestigate shifts in events or the status of individuals. It has been used, as we explainlater, in sociology to assess the consequences of precipitating events in marriageand divorce, job mobility, teenage pregnancy, and infant mortality; and in politicalscience to assess changes in city government, political timing, and the political ef-fects of economic crises. Its power, demonstrated in our study, resides in its capa-bility to systematically analyze large datasets of interactions—many cases—withattention not only to macro variables, for example, culture and demography thatGee (1999) related to “Big-D” discourses, but also micro variables, for example,particular discourse moves Gee calls “little-d” discourse, as these dynamicallyshape discourse. Discourse event-history analysis enables the systematic and si-multaneous assessment of the relative impacts of both macro and micro factors.Discourse event-history analysis deals with the heterogeneity and time dimensionsof discourse head on, recasting understanding of discourse in terms of the (a) ante-cedents and (b) consequences of discourse participant “moves” as they (c) affectthe inertia of the discourse and accordingly structure unfolding discourse pro-cesses. In the study reported in this article, we use the method to systematicallycontrast the effects of particular discourse moves on subsequent discourse pat-terns. Whereas case studies can describe the nuanced sequences of events in indi-vidual encounters, discourse event-history analysis, as a method of quantitative

QUESTIONS IN TIME 137

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discourse analysis, complements such studies by providing a more generalized un-derstanding of how genres of discourse unfold, as well as assessing the salient fac-tors, both macro and micro, at work in shaping them.

In our study, working from a Bakhtinian account of classroom discourse, weemployed these methods to study whole classroom discourse in eighth- andninth-grade English and social studies instruction while assessing the effects of hy-pothesized variables on unfolding discourse in these classes. Our previous re-search (Gamoran & Nystrand, 1991; Nystrand, 1997) documented the prevalenceof monologic recitation in such instruction with infrequent but noteworthy epi-sodes of dialogic interactions and open discussion, which, we showed, wereclosely associated with improvements in student learning. The study reported heresought to understand how such dialogic interactions come about; we sought tomodel and explain the shifts during lessons from monologic to dialogic discoursepatterns, investigating the effects of not only fixed characteristics such as socio-economic status, tracking, and racial and ethnic backgrounds of individual classes,but also dynamic variables such as types of teacher–student interaction enactedthrough teacher questions and follow up responses to student answers as theyshaped subsequent discourse of the classroom. Data consisted of 33,904 questioninteractions in 872 observations of more than 200 eighth- and ninth-grade Englishand social studies classes in a wide variety of schools in the Midwest.

Our article unfolds in three parts. First, we elaborate theoretical conceptions ofmonologicanddialogic instruction.Thenwepresentmethodologicaldetails related,first, to thecollectionandpreparationofdataand theoperationalizationof recitation,discussion, and dialogic spells as modes of classroom discourse, and then to theevent-history analysis of these data. Finally, we present results concerning the struc-ture of classroom discourse as it is affected by both static macrosocial variables tran-scending the classroom, as well as dynamic variables involved in unfolding class-room discourse. Our results offer insights into the effects on unfolding classroomdiscourse of race, ethnicity, and demographics; grade, tracking, and subject differ-ences; and characteristics of teachers, including years of experience and gender. Wereport the surprisingly important role of student questions, as well as conditions pro-moting both dialogic spells and open discussion. We conclude by reflecting on thegeneralpotentialofdiscourseevent-historyanalysisasamethodofdiscourseanalysis.

MONOLOGIC AND DIALOGIC CLASSROOMDISCOURSE

A large body of empirical work over the last century has documented the predomi-nance of recitation as the principal mode of whole classroom discourse in Ameri-can elementary and secondary classrooms, including studies by Stevens (1912);Colvin (1919); Miller (1922); Thayer (1928); Corey (1940); Bellack (1966); Duffy

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(1981); Durkin (1978–1979); Hoetker (1967); Hoetker and Ahlbrand (1969);Goodlad (1984); Mehan (1979); Sarason (1983); and Tharp and Gallimore (1988).Recently, Nystrand and Gamoran found that the vast proportion of questions in alarge, diverse sample of eighth- and ninth-grade English classrooms are indeedasked by the teacher in recitation, with whole-class discussion (open exchange ofideas) averaging less than 50 s per lesson in the eighth grade and less than 15 s inthe ninth grade (Nystrand, 1997; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991a). The dominant pro-file of whole classroom discourse in these classes involved highly codified testquestions, which developed little more than procedural (IRE) reciprocity; more-over, coherence from topic to topic was typically weak or absent (IRE refers toMehan’s [1979] categories of turntaking in classroom discourse: teacher initiation[question], student response, and teacher evaluation). In all classes, the most com-mon purpose of classroom discourse was to recall and display assigned informa-tion, to report on what was already known.

Despite the preponderance of recitation, Nystrand and Gamoran’s empirical re-sults, controlled for a range of background and initial performance measures, un-covered a strong and statistically significant association between student achieve-ment and the extent to which classroom discourse moved away from recitation togenres of classroom discourse that recruited and highlighted student ideas andvoices, as indicated by (a) proportion of authentic teacher questions, rather thanthe usual known-answer test questions; (b) extent of uptake, for example, followup questions; and especially (c) time devoted to discussion. Discussion had a par-ticularly large effect, especially striking because there was so little of it.

Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s (e.g., 1984) epistemological distinctions be-tween monologic and dialogic discourse are useful in conceptualizing the contin-uum of classroom discourse ranging from tightly controlled recitation (in whichstudents demonstrate their recall of assigned information) to open discussion fea-turing an unprescripted exchange of student ideas in the absence of test questions.From this perspective, classroom discourse is monologic to the extent that the mainspeaker, typically the teacher, operates from a predetermined script; as Bakhtin(1984) put it, “monologism … pretends to possess a ready-made truth [italics intranslation]” (p. 110). By contrast, classroom discourse is dialogic to the extentthat the participants expand or modify the contributions of the others as one voice“refracts” another. Bakhtin (1984) deplored the typical asymmetrical organizationof what he called pedagogical dialogue as a nonproductive monologism:

In an environment of … monologism, the genuine interaction of consciousness is im-possible, and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. In essence idealism knowsonly a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousness: someone whoknows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error;that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can only be apedagogical dialogue. (p. 81)


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For Bakhtin, this was a pathological form of discourse akin to a communicationdisorder. In its most radical form, monologic discourse, which he also referred toas “official discourse,” resists communication: Everyone is compelled to speak thesame language, and outer speech is all, seeking to drain the first person pronoun ofall its particularity (Holquist, 1990, p. 52). “Monologism, at its extreme,” Bakhtin(1984) wrote,

denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and re-sponsibilities. … Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does notexpect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. … Monologue pretendsto be the ultimate word. (pp. 292–293; italics in original)

Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic means of seeking truth with official monologism,which, he argued, pretends to possess a ready-made truth. From this perspective,the recitation taking place in typical school settings seeks to elicit official answersoriginating in texts and transmitted only one way—from teachers to students, to bereceived and recalled intact by students. The resulting monologic discourse, an ac-tivity Prawat (1995) called “head-fitting,” is one in which the relationship ofteacher and student is restricted to that of evaluator and novice, organized for thetransmission of information. This relation forms the basis of a discourse environ-ment in which students have little chance of becoming conversants of conse-quence, recognized as contributing, producing, or participating actively in the con-struction of knowledge.

For Bakhtin, the pedagogical dialogue of recitation inverts the natural logic ofinquiry in the sense that the utterances and interrogatives of normal discourse notonly respond to previous utterances but also anticipate response (Bakhtin, 1986).Learning situated in the give and take of dialogic discourse is thus premised not onthe recitation of recalled information, but rather on a dynamic transformation ofunderstandings through interaction. In an ideal dialogic learning environment, es-pecially in open discussion as opposed to tightly cast recitation, teachers treat stu-dents as potential sources of knowledge and opinion, and in so doing complicateexpert–novice hierarchies. By contrast, recitation within typical classrooms isoverwhelmingly monologic precisely because the teachers routinely violate thisstructure. Discourse in the typical classroom does not proceed with teachers re-sponding in dialogic fashion to previous answers or to student remarks. To the con-trary, recitation is typically shaped by those points of information the teacherwants to cover. Consequently, teachers change topics at will, and teacher “uptake”of student questions is often perfunctory (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991b). Whenthis happens, the “language of schooling” (Kutz, 1997) undertakes

the acquisition of new discourses and expanding frames of references … ironically,not through continuing and evolving discourse, not through kicking ideas around anddiscussing in depth, or repeated familiarization with them through continuing, sus-

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tained, or coherent discussions about subtleties of and alternatives to these ideas …but through the memorization of decontextualized information bites whose fixed andunevolving meaning resides within that information. (p. 201)

A particularly powerful insight, due to Mukarovsky, an important theorist in thePragueLinguisticCircle, concerns thedynamic relationbetweenmonologueanddi-alogue. Makorovsky holds that monologic and dialogic discourse are in “a dynamicpolarity in which sometimes dialogue, sometimes monologue, gains the upper handaccording to the time and milieu” (1977, p. 85). Lotman (1988, 1990) claims that alllanguage can be treated both dialogically and univocally. When utterances aretreatedunivocally, as in recitation, focus ison the“accurate transmissionof informa-tion”; when they are treated dialogically, as in open discussion, they are used asthinking devices. From this perspective, whereas monologic discourse is useful forestablishing topics and conveying information, it is dialogic discourse that opens thefloor to discussion and the negotiation of ideas and new understandings.

Much instruction involves both modes of discourse, often to good effect. Manyteachers, for example, skillfully set discussion up by first reviewing basic materialas a way of establishing the topic for discussion, and once this is accomplishedthey move on to a more probing and interpretive level, in which student ideas andviews are elicited and encouraged. In such classrooms, dialogic discourse is a stra-tegic device that teachers can use to foster student engagement and construct aclassroom environment conducive to learning. Just how predominant patterns oftest-question recitation give way to open discussion conspicuously absent of suchquestions is the central problem of our study.

In this article, we bridge the gap between the parsimony of quantitative analysesand the complexities of classroom interaction with a detailed empirical analysis ofthe dynamics of classroom discourse in a wide range of classrooms and instruc-tional episodes. Statistically, we use event history methods that permit us to exam-ine several issues about how discourse in classroom instructional settings unfoldsover time: What aspects of classroom interaction might shape the dynamics ofclassroom discourse? Why might certain classes, but not others, shift from mono-logic to dialogic patterns of discourse? What is the relationship between the socialorganization of the classroom, for example, tracking, and the emergence ofdialogic discourse? How do teachers act to open up dialogic patterns of interac-tion? Exactly what teacher and student “moves” allow classroom discourse to stepup from monologic to dialogic levels of engagements?

DATA

Research investigating the dynamics of classroom discourse requires fine-graineddata, not only on the nature and type of classroom discourse—the specific interac-tions between students and teachers—but also on how these interactions unfold


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over time. To test our ideas, we draw on unique data that are highly detailed on thenumber, types, and sequencing of questions posed by teachers and students withina diverse sample of eighth- and ninth-grade classrooms as gathered by Nystrandand Gamoran relating student achievement in literature and social studies to an ex-tensive list of instructional and classroom discourse variables. At the same timethat our analyses examine dynamic aspects of classroom discourse, they also movebeyond small-scale studies by examining a large and diverse sample of schools andclassrooms to identify both the antecedents and the consequences of classroomdiscourse unfolding in time.

School Characteristics

Data were collected in 16 Midwestern junior high and middle schools in eightMidwestern communities, including rural, urban, and suburban sites, in both pub-lic and parochial schools. Six of these communities were public school districts;the other two were Catholic high schools with students from a number of urban andsuburban K–8 feeder schools. We control for these fixed characteristics in ourevent history analyses. Table 1 provides a breakdown of the community and schooltypes that participated in our study.

Class Characteristics

We also took account of fixed characteristics of classes. Some of these were aggre-gated from student reports: race, ethnicity, gender, a fall writing test, and SES (anunweighted linear composite based on parents’ education, occupation, and homeresources). Others were features of the classes themselves: grade level (eighth orninth), subject (English or social studies), size, and track level. We also controlledfor two self-reported teacher characteristics: gender and years of experience.

Classroom Observation Data

In these classes, we collected class observation data from the eighth-grade classesduring 1987–1988, and the ninth-grade classes during 1988–1989. Unlike

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TABLE 1Characteristics of School Sample

Number of Schools

School District Type Total Middle Schools (Grade 8) High School (Grade 9)

Parochial 8 6 2Public 17 10 7Small town/rural 6 3 3

Suburban 3 2 1Urban 8 5 3

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ninth-grade classes, which were all called English, eighth-grade classes were vari-ously called language arts, English, reading, communications, literature, and soforth. To deal with this issue, we selected the eighth-grade classes that focusedmost on reading. We selected approximately four English classes and four socialstudies classes in each school; in the smaller schools, we observed all the Englishand social studies classes, but in the larger schools, we selected classes that repre-sented the different ability groups as defined by the school (honors or accelerated,regular or average, basic or remedial). This sampling plan yielded 58 eighth-gradeEnglish classes and 57 eighth-grade social studies classes. The next year wemoved to the high schools for which the junior high and middle schools served asfeeders, selecting about six classes per high school to maintain the same number ofclasses, again representing the different ability groups as defined by the schools,resulting in 54 ninth-grade English classes and 49 ninth-grade social studiesclasses (one school did not offer social studies classes for ninth-graders). About1,500 students participated each year; of all eligible students, about 10% were lostthrough absence or refusal. About one third of all students participated in bothyears of the study. Table 2 summarizes these data.

A trained observer visited each class four times, twice during fall semester andtwice during spring semester, with observations scheduled at the mutual conve-nience of teachers and observers. These visits yielded 872 class observations. Usingthe Classroom Language Assessment System, CLASS 2.0 (Nystrand, 1988), withaudiotape backup, we listed all questions posed by teachers or students during in-structional episodes (defined as any coherent classroom activity centering around aparticular purpose or topic) occurring within the class observations. In our research,a new episode starts when the teacher addresses a new purpose or topic. Sometimesepisodes will consist of two or more activities. For example, in addressing a particu-lar objective, the teacher may initiate a question-and-answer session, which is theninterruptedbyperiodic, brief lectures, andculminateswithahomeworkassignment.We treated such episode parts as segments, defined as any coherent part of an episodethat differs from other activities constituting an episode.

We counted as questions all queries for information, including mainly intona-tion questions and some tag questions, but we did not count either (a) procedural


TABLE 2Scope of Study

Characteristics Grade 8 Grade 9 Totals

Number of English language arts classes 58 54 112Number of social studies classes 57 49 106Number of times each class observed 4 4 8Number of observations 460 412 872Number of coded questions 12,375 21,529 33,904

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questions (e.g., “How many pages do we need to read?” “Does that answer yourquestion?” “Do you have any questions?”), (b) rhetorical questions, or (c) dis-course-management questions or repair initiations (e.g., “What?” “Excuse me?”“Did we talk about that?” “Where are we [in the text]?”), which manage classroomdiscourse, or questions like ”Do you remember our discussion from yesterday?”which initiate discourse topics). Altogether, we listed and coded 35,887 questionsfrom 1,152 instructional episodes across the 872 class observations. Missing datareduced the number of questions to 33,904 for analysis. Our observations alsoidentified when discussion periods occurred during each lesson. As a result, thesedata provide an unusually rich source of information, not only on teacher and stu-dent characteristics for a particular classroom, but on the types, sorts, and se-quences of questions occurring within instructional episodes during specific class-room observations. Tables 4 and 5, which juxtapose CLASS lists of questions withtranscripts from two lessons, give examples of the kinds of data we collected; wediscuss these examples in the following.

Question Event Data

The data provide a highly detailed source of information on the sequence and flow ofdiscourse within the classrooms we observed, as captured by the types and sorts ofquestions and their attendant interactions occurring within instructional episodes.We exploit this element of these data in our event history analyses by examining fiveindicators (authenticity, uptake, level of evaluation, cognitive level, and questionsource) foreachof the33,904questions inouranalysis sample.Thesevariableswereused in our previous work relating quality of classroom discourse and studentachievement in English and social studies instruction (Nystrand, 1997).

In our studies, we code not questions per se but rather the interactions surround-ing the questions. That is to say, our coding treats questions as sites of interaction.As Heritage and Roth (1995) and Schegloff (1984) contended, the character of anyunit of discourse and related interaction is a function of the participants’ under-standing, meaning that, unlike the natural sciences, whose focus, Schutz (1962)contended, is on first-order constructs, the proper focus of the social sciences (in-cluding psychology, sociology, linguistics, and discourse analysis) is second-orderconstructs—constructs of the participants’constructs and understandings. Follow-ing this principle, we coded participants’ understandings of their interactions asmanifest by their discourse moves. To judge the authenticity of a question, for ex-ample, we took cues not only from how students responded to the questions, butalso how the teacher evaluated or followed up the students’ responses. As with au-thenticity, we coded cognitive level according to the level of cognitive functioningthe question elicited, not the question by itself. In all cases, we coded not listedquestions but rather the character of social interaction elicited and valorized by thequestions themselves.

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Authentic questions. We define an authentic question as one for which theasker has not prespecified an answer. Examples include requests for information aswell as open-ended questions with indeterminate answers. As such, an authenticquestion allows a range of responses unlike more frequently occurring recitationquestions, in which a teacher asks a question with a prescripted answer in mind.This distinction is important for our work because authentic questions posed by theteacher signal to students that the teacher is interested in what they think and know,as opposed to whether they can engage in mere recitation by repeating materialgiven in texts or other sources. Moreover, by allowing an indeterminate number ofacceptable answers, authentic questions open the floor to students’ ideas. As such,they invite students to contribute something new to the class interaction, which inturn holds the potential for altering the trajectory of discourse in the classroom. Bycontrast, a test question allows only one possible right answer, a characteristic thatLotman (1988) termed univocal. As a result, test questions concentrate control ofclassroom discourse in one actor—the teacher—and thus allow students no voiceor influence over the flow of classroom discourse.

Judging the authenticity of a question ultimately depends on the context of thequestion; it cannot be determined alone by the text of the question. “What were thecauses of the Civil War?” is most likely a test question when part of a review lessonin a high school social studies class, but it could very well be an authentic questionin a graduate seminar. The nature of a given instructional episode, that is, the genreof classroom discourse, is the most reliable indicator of authenticity. Hence, whenteachers begin a lesson by saying, “Okay, class, let’s check the answers to yourstudy questions,” the questions are invariably test questions (though follow-up dis-cussions of students’ answers can sometimes be authentic). By contrast, whenteachers ask about students’ personal experiences as lead-ins, for example, toopen-ended discussions of a poem or short story, these questions are almost alwaysauthentic. In classroom interactions, the authenticity of a given question is oftenrevealed by how the teacher evaluates or follows up student answers and re-sponses. Whenever the authenticity of a question was unclear or ambiguous to us,we consulted the teacher.

Uptake. We defined uptake as occurring when one conversant, for example, ateacher, asks someone else, for example, a student, about something the other per-son said previously (Collins, 1982). In an example of uptake, taken from aninth-grade lesson on The Odyssey, the teacher asks, “What do they have to do toPolyphemus?” A student replies, “Blind him.” The teacher then follows up, asking,“How come the plan is for blinding Cyclops?” This last question is an instance ofuptake, since the teacher follows up on the student’s response on “blinding him.”

Uptake is often marked by the use of pronouns, for example, “How did itwork?” “What caused it?” “What city grew out of this?” In each of these questions,the italicized pronoun refers to a previous answer; linguists call such references


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deictic references. Conceptually, uptake is important because it recognizes and en-velops the importance of the student contribution. Following up on student re-sponses makes the response the momentary topic of discourse. As such, uptakemay play an important role in facilitating the negotiation of understandings, asconversants listen and respond to each other. Moreover, by building on the voicesof others and by establishing intertextual links among speakers, uptake acts to pro-mote coherence within the discourse.

To qualify as uptake, a question must incorporate a previous answer, not a pre-vious question; hence, we did not code as uptake teachers making reference toquestions or remarks they had previously made or to filmstrips, videos, or texts thathad previously been discussed. Nor did we code repeated questions as uptake. Thesecond question in this sequence incorporates the framework of the first question,but since it does not incorporate a student’s answer, it does not involve uptake.

In a study of 12th-graders’ discussing and writing about literature, Knoeller(1993) referred to this process as interpersonal voicing, when a speaker frames,expands, or borrows the voice of others in the immediate classroom. Other re-searchers have treated uptake more liberally. Greenleaf and Freedman (1993), forexample, treated the teacher’s revision of student responses (perhaps beyond rec-ognition) in furthering the “lesson” as uptake. We are aware that our specific no-tions of uptake could be subject to coding error if explicit referencing to the pastspeaker were used systematically as a common tool or “technique” to involve stu-dents, since “ritual validation nullifies itself” (van Lier, 1997).

Level of evaluation. Typically, teachers’evaluations of student responses area perfunctory “Right” or “Wrong,” a “Good” or an “Okay,” sometimes merely a nod,sometimes nothing. Sometimes, however, teachers respond more substantially. Forexample, a teacher might evaluate a student answer by saying, “Good point,” andthen ask a follow-up question. If in doing this, teachers certify these contributionsand modifications and work students’ answers into the fabric of an unfolding ex-change,and theseanswersmodify the topicoraffect thecourseofdiscussion insomeway,wecall suchevaluationshigh-level evaluation. Inotherwords,whena teacher’sevaluation is high-level, the student really “gets the floor.” Specifically, weoperationalized high-level evaluation using two criteria: (a) the teacher’s certifica-tion of the response (“Good,” “Interesting,” etc.) and (b) the teacher’s incorporationof the response usually in the form of either an elaboration (or commentary, e.g.,“That’s important because …”) or a follow-up question (e.g., “Can you say moreabout that?”or“Whydoyousay that?”).That is, for levelofevaluation tobecodedashigh, the evaluation had to be more than “Good,” “Good idea,” or a mere repeat of astudent’s answer. In all instances of high-level evaluation, the teacher validated thestudent’s answer so that it affected the subsequent course of the discussion.

We did not consider as high-level a teacher’s introduction of new information inresponse to a student answer unless the teacher incorporated a previous student

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answer; the criterion was the importance of the student as a source of new informa-tion. Also, we applied high-level evaluation only to the evaluation of student re-sponses, not to teachers’ answers to student questions.

Cognitive level. Questions that elicit generalization, analysis, or specula-tion open up the cognitive field beyond a mere reporting or replication of an-other’s voice, incorporating the possibility of the speaker’s added perspectiveand particularity. We therefore coded the level of cognitive functioning that eachquestion sought to elicit, judging it high to the extent that the question could“not be answered through the routine application of prior knowledge”(Newmann, 1988; see also Polanyi’s [1958] distinction between routine perfor-mances and heuristic acts). Like authenticity, the cognitive level of questionscannot be judged altogether from words alone. For example, if the teacher ex-pected students to answer questions by reciting information found in textbooks,we coded questions as reports regardless of their linguistic structure. Hence,though a why-question will normally elicit an analysis, it will elicit a report ifthe teacher’s focus is the recitation of a textbook’s analysis rather than the class’sreflection or a student’s understanding; then “Why?” really means, “Accordingto your text, why did it happen this way? Do you remember?” In such a case theteacher is seeking only recitation. Factors affecting the cognitive level of anyquestion include the following:

• Knowledgeability of the person answering of the question. The very samequestion that elicits an analysis from a person who has to figure things outmay well elicit a report from another, more knowledgeable individual whoalready knows and simply needs to explain. For example, “Why did Odys-seus and his men plan deliberately to blind Polyphemus?” may well elicit ananalysis from students (assuming, of course, that they have to figure out theanswer and not merely recite their textbook on the point), but will most likelyelicit a report if a student asks a teacher who already knows the answer. Whenwe were unclear, we asked about it after class.

• Experience, ability, and prior knowledge of the person answering the ques-tion, including student or teacher. If student answers seemed to require rou-tine cognitive operation, we coded questions as eliciting reports. We definedprior knowledge as “prior to the previous night’s homework.” If a teacherasked students about the previous night’s reading, we coded the source of in-formation as the text whereas, if the teacher asked about something learnedpreviously to that, even from a text, we coded the source of information asprior knowledge. We made no distinction between prior knowledge and per-sonal knowledge.

• Nature of the instructional activity. When an episode was devoted to review,our normal expectation for responses was a report, even if questions had the


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linguistic form of higher level questions (e.g., “What’s the difference be-tween a symbol and an image?” as a study question).

• Source of information required by the question, including prior experience,textbooks, and previous teacher lectures.

Level of cognition elicited by questions was measured with a 5-point linear scalecalibratedfor levelofabstractionandderivedfromApplebee(1981),Britton,Burgess,Martin, McLeod, and Rosen (1975), and Moffett (1968). Levels were as follows:

Lower1 Record of an ongoing event: What’s happening? We coded questions as re-

cords if they elicited descriptions of what students were observing, feeling,or thinking at the time of the question. Examples include “Any questionson that?” and “What [or why] are you thinking about that?”

2 Recitation and report of old information: What happened?

Higher3 Generalization: What happens? Generalizations display inductive reason-

ing, building up ideas rather than breaking them down. They address ques-tions such as, What happens? What do I make of what happens? They tiethings together and they are not restatements of information. If the questionrequired students to think and not just report something already known orpreviously thought by someone else, then we scored cognitive level higherthan 2. To determine how high involved judging whether the student an-swering the questions was building up a generalization, in which case wescored it a 3, or breaking down an argument, in which case we coded it asan analysis and rated its cognitive level as 4.

4 Analysis: Why does it happen? Analyses display deductive reasoning,breaking concepts, ideas, and arguments down rather than building upideas. To be scored as analyses, questions had to require more than restate-ments of known information.

5 Speculation: What might happen?

Questions were judged to be lower order (i.e., eliciting records or reports) ifthey elicited old information or higher order (i.e., eliciting generalizations, analy-ses, or speculations) if they elicited new information and could not be answeredthrough the routine application of prior knowledge.

Superficially a question such as “Do you think that’s important?” might seem toelicit a record (i.e., referring to what the student is thinking at the time of the ques-tion), but the question more typically elicits a higher cognitive operation such as ananalysis of what is important. Hence, for such preformulated questions (cf. French& MacClure, 1981), we distinguished the preformulators (“Do you think …?”)

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from their nuclear utterances (the remainder of the question: “Is that important?”),coding only the latter.

Teacher–student source. This variable indicates whether the question wasasked by the teacher or by a student.

Reliabilities. All codings were double checked and challenged by at least oneother person besides the coder; we consulted tapes whenever we had questions,and a project assistant verified all transcribed questions and challenged codings bylistening to these tapes. A small sample of 12 observations involving over 600questions was observed by two observers to determine coding reliability: Reliabil-ity was computed both at the question level (percent agreement for all questionspooled) and at the observation level (average correlation between raters for the 12observations).

In our subsample of 12 observations, raters agreed perfectly on authenticity for78% of 619 questions; the Pearson correlation at the observational level was .938.Raters agreed on uptake perfectly for 81.7% of the 619-question subsample used tocheck for reliability; at the observational level, the interrater correlation was .973.Raters agreed on cognitive level perfectly for 79.0% of the 619-questionsubsample used to check for reliability; at the observational level, interrater corre-lation was .965.

METHODS

We present two methods sections. The first concerns the operationalization ofdialogic spells; the second concerns event-history analysis.

Operationalizing Dialogic Spells

A key issue in our study was how to operationalize a dialogic spell, including whenduring an instructional episode there is a shift from monologic to dialogic dis-course, and also when a dialogic spell ends. Our analytic strategy was to proceed inseveral steps. Our initial efforts were exploratory, with two members of our re-search team with experience as English language arts teachers reviewing the origi-nal audio taped sessions of lessons from selected ninth-grade classes. This workled to tentative identification of active (“minds on” [Langer, 1995]) and passivezones of interaction, which were judged by the level and quality of student engage-ment. The most obvious such discourse was open-ended discussion in which stu-dents freely exchanged ideas and views in conversational modes. In addition todiscussion, we focused on positive zones of interaction that often grew out of reci-


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tation and sometimes evolved into discussion. These phases of classroom talk werecharacterized by the following:

1. The interest and enthusiasm of the students appeared to peak.2. The discourse was built on past discourse as conversants often referred to

earlier discourse of other speakers.3. Students asked questions.4. Teachers suspended test questions.5. Teacher questions were answered without repeated prodding or without

being assigned to specific students by name.

Although all these characteristics contributed to our impression of increased stu-dent investment in the classroom discourse, the most important and consistent in-dex seemed to be the prominence of student questions. When students began to askquestions about what they were studying, the tide of discourse, as it were, oftenseemed to change into something more symmetrical than the usual classroom in-teraction dominated by teacher questions. Applebee, Burroughs, and Stevens(2000) report a similar finding from a 12th-grade literature class they studied:“Students noted that discussions were most often initiated by students. One studentestimated that a student question initiated discussion ’about 60% of the time’” (p.416). We were impressed that the emergence of student questions, especially whenoccurring in clusters, not only seemed to signal student engagement but also theteacher’s loosening of the usual monologic reins of classroom discourse.

Our preliminary investigation categorized three distinct modes of whole class-room discourse:

1. Recitation, characterized by IRE patterns and teacher test questions.2. Discussion, characterized by the open-ended conversational exchanges of

ideas largely absent of questions.3. Dialogic spell, a mode of discourse, somewhere between recitation and

discussion, characterized by engaged student questions and an absence ofteacher test questions, specified according to the following model:

Model of Classroom Discourse

I. Default structure of whole classroom discourse.• It is the teacher who initiates and manages whole classroom discourse;

the most common, default pattern of classroom discourse is monologic.• Whole classroom discourse manifests inertia and tends to continue direc-

tion and character until someone, usually the teacher, acts to change it.• To transform monologic classroom discourse into dialogic, the teacher

either does something or allows something; both moves are defined asdialogic bids.

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II. Elements of dialogic bids.• Responding to and taking up ideas and observations that students intro-

duce, for example, through uptake and authentic questions.• Withholding evaluation in such a way as to encourage discussion and

conversational interaction.III. Dialogic spell model.

• Dialogic bids increase the probability for a subsequent dialogic spell.• A dialogic spell begins with a student question and is followed subse-

quently though not necessarily immediately, by at least two more; adialogic spell may include teacher questions as well as student ques-tions.

• A dialogic spell is terminated by sustained monologic series of three ormore teacher test questions.

IV. Monologic bids.• Asking teacher test questions. Any teacher test question is a monologic

bid marking the potential start of a monologic spell in much the way thatdialogic bids, including authentic questions, uptake, and student ques-tions, increase the probability of a dialogic spell.

• Interrupting instructional conversations with low-level evaluation, thatis, evaluating a student response (as right or wrong, for example) and, byso doing, signal a shift back to recitation.

• Ignoring student comments and questions.

To test and probe this model using the sequences of questions in our data, weproceeded to assign weights to all questions using a 14-point linear scale basedon the five coded variables ranging from 0 for radically monologic test questionsto 14 for radically dialogic questions (see Dialogic Value Scale, Table 3). Ques-tions were weighted for source (teacher vs. student), authenticity, uptake(whether the question references someone else’s previous utterance), high-levelevaluation, and cognitive level. Based on our review of the audiotapes, our scaleprivileges student questions; thus, all else being equal, student questions are as-signed one additional scale value relative to teacher questions. We then pro-ceeded to weight all 33,904 questions in our data set of 1,151 instructional epi-sodes according to this scheme.

Plotting Questions in Time

To examine changes in the dialogic value of questions as they unfolded over timein each instructional episode, we plotted their values on our dialogic scale over thecourse of each instructional episode. Studying these plots suggested clusters ofquestions forming dialogic and monologic spells, and assisted us in identificationof shifts from one state to the other.


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TABLE 3Dialogic Values Scale

Student Questions Teacher Questions

Value Code Authentic1 UptakeEvaluation

Level2Cognitive

Level2 Value Code Authentic1 UptakeEvaluation

Level2Cognitive

Level2

–1 ^ N/A N/A N N/A –1 ^ N/A N/A N N/A0 0 N N L L 0 0 N N L L0 0 N N H L 0 0 N N H L0 0 N N L H 0 0 N N L H0 0 N N H H 0 0 N N H H2 A N Y L L 1 a N Y L L2 A N Y H L 1 a N Y H L2 A N Y L H 1 a N Y L H2 A N Y H H 1 a N Y H H4 B QA N L L 3 b QA N L L4 B QA N H L 3 b QA N H L4 B QA N L H 3 b QA N L H4 B QA N H H 3 b QA N H H6 C QA Y L L 5 c QA Y L L6 C QA Y H L 5 c QA Y H L6 C QA Y L H 5 c QA Y L H6 C QA Y H H 5 c QA Y H H8 D A N L L 7 d A N L L8 D A N H L 7 d A N H L8 D A N L H 7 d A N L H8 D A N H H 7 d A N H H10 E A Y L L 9 e A Y L L12 F A Y L H 11 f A Y H L12 F A Y H L 11 f A Y L H14 G A Y H H 13 g A Y H H

1N = nonauthentic, QA = quasi-authentic, A = authentic. 2For both level of evaluation and cognitive level, L = low, H = high. Neither was given any valueunless question was authentic with uptake; then they were equally weighted. N = no response.

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TABLE 4Transcript and Coded Questions From Recitation on Magna Carta (27 Questions in All, 1 From a Student)

Transcript With Lines Numbered Questions as Coded and Numbered Consecutively by Class

1 Teacher: I’ll tell you what’s going to happen today. Shhhh. Thank2 you. You are having a test Monday. I want to spend half an3 hour today on ummm … reviewing and bringing the things4 together. Then we’re going to have the last fifteen5 minutes. I think you’ll find and you work hard on this.6 I’m going to model some way for you to bring all the7 information that we have … you have listened and you have8 copied and you have learned the last week and a half. And9 we are going to— put your feet down— and I’m going to10 categorize it and put it in groups. The rest of it you will11 have to do over the weekend yourself. Now, I know I said12 yesterday I’m not going through this packet. But before I13 start on that, would you get out your packets I asked you to14 read, and we will fast go through the right answers so you15 can study from that. … It is about England—the16 democracy, how it started in England. I did not correct17 this when I gave it back to you. Individually. What I’d18 like you to do, is if I give you the right answers, I’ll19 read the questions, give you the right answers. Check if20 you have it right. If you do not, it’s up to you to learn21 from it. So you read through the thing again, and you find22 out what the answer is. You have to do that as a practice23 for Monday. Umm, now you have to tell. Okay, let’s do the24 one on p. 192. In this one was umm … (???) by the past in25 England and the beginning of democracy, Magna Carta. Uhh,26 192. It was (???). Uhh, yeah, would you like to do the

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154 Table 4 (Continued)


27 first question? Or do you have a question?28 Student: I want to do the first question.29 Teacher: Okay, in the A it says “Finding the main idea.” What this30 reading is about is that the Magna Carta furthered democracy31 in England. (???). There’s only a few years I want you to 1 What year was the Magna Carta signed? Normal

question: Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits areport from text, low level evaluation. DIALOGICVALUE = 0

32 remember. Now you remember what (???) or what year Magna33 Carta was signed? (Q1)34 Student: I think it was 1022. Okay. (several students talking). Be35 quiet! (another student humming). Was it 1066? (Q2)36 Teacher: No! (More humming from male student). When you (write it) 2 What year was the Magna Carta signed? Normal


37 you said? (2) 1215! It is much (???) this time we are38 talking about! That England was the first kind of area that39 they started to diminish the power of the king. Okay, and40 it also tell about the Queen! That the Magna Carta limited41 the power of the (…). (8) And many disputes arose42 between kings and nobles in England. Many had a war between43 the parliament and a war between the parliament and the44 king. And four times the king of England tried absolute 3 Disputes b/w kings and nobles—what is absolute

power? Normal question: Teacher test question, nouptake, elicits a report from text, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

45 power. Somebody tell me; what is absolute power? (Q3)46 Student: I don’t know.47 Teacher: Okay, yeah.48 Student: Total power.49 Teacher: Hmmm?? Total power. Okay. Total power. Okay. Number50 one. Read the question.51 Student: Unlimited power of kings was brought to to England’s by?

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52 (Q4) That’d be William the Conqueror. 4 Unlimited power of kings was brought to Englandby? Normal question: Teacher test question, no uptake,elicits a report from text, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

53 Teacher: William the Conqueror is right. Okay. You want to go umm54 go again? Number 2 (Q5), yeah. Read the question and then55 answer.56 Student: Umm … (student reading quietly) absolute rule?57 Teacher: Ummm no! Okay? (Q6)58 Student: umm they shared power with …. 5 The Saxon kings of England were … (multiple

choice)? Normal question: Teacher test question, nouptake, elicits a report from text, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

59 Teacher: They shared power with the nobles. Why don’t you label60 that? The (???) when that first came in they really shared61 the power with the nobles. And number four….62 Student: Three63 Teacher: Or number three … Kathie? (Q7)64 Student: William the Conqueror made the nobles give him the land65 (quiet) 6 The Saxon kings of England were … (multiple

choice)? Normal question: Teacher test question, nouptake, elicits a report from text, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

66 Teacher: William the Conqueror made the nobles give him the land.67 Okay, four ….(Q8)68 Student: (student reading question) Which of the following are true69 about the Middle Ages? (indecipherable.)70 Teacher: No.71 Student: Umm. (Indecipherable). 7 #3—William the Conqueror …? Normal question:

Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits a report fromtext, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

72 Teacher: That is not true. Okay? All the following are true about73 the Middle Ages. The power of some nobles was almost as74 great as that of their king. That’s true. The common75 people had no power. That’s true. There was a great deal76 of democracy under feudalism. No. Alright, I am not going 8 The following are true about the Middle Ages?

Normal question: Teacher test question, no uptake,elicits a report from text, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

77 to take the time with umm the details okay? Let’s go to umm78 the following (3) p. 198 let’s do B, part B. We have the79 right answers there.80 Student: We did that last week. You gave that to us …81 Teacher: Did I give you that …82 Students: No, no (disagreement). No we didn’t.

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83 Student: B, C, C, D84 Teacher: Okay, read it for us.85 Student: A search warrant may be issued by a judge only (Q9) … B 9 A search warrant may be issued by a judge if …?


86 if there is a reason to believe the search will turn up87 something illegal.88 Teacher: Okay! A search warrant— now we’re coming into the Bill of89 Rights of England— A search warrant may be issue by a judge90 only if there is a reason to believe the search will turn up91 something illegal. Does this sound familiar?92 Student: Yes. Like a search warrant here.93 Teacher: Where do you think we get some of these ideas from?94 Student: Magna Carta.95 Teacher: And we are going to get into more and more of that. How do96 we get our Bill of Rights? And how do we set up our97 Constitution? It was so modeled after England. Okay, let’s98 go from here. Number 2.99 Student: The rights of English people do not include the right …100 Teacher: The rights of English people do not include what? (Q10) 10 Rights of English people do not include what?


….101 Student: The right to work.102 Teacher: To work. Okay. There’s no written law that everybody has103 the right to work. You have a right to free speech, you104 have a right for lawyer, and you have a right to a quick105 trial. Does that sound familiar?106 Students: Yes.

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107 Teacher: Okay, C uhh 3. 11 Since late 1600s House of Lords had …? Normalquestion: Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits areport from text, low level evaluation. DIALOGICVALUE = 0

108 Students: Since the late 1600s the House of Lords of England had109 (indecipherable) (Q11)110 Teacher: Okay. House of Lords. What are the … What is the other111 house? (Q12)112 Student: House of Commons. 12 What is the other house? Normal question: Teacher

test question, no uptake, elicits a report from text, lowlevel evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

113 Teacher: Okay, so what does it say? That the House of Commons or the114 House of Lords has more power today? (Q13)115 Students: Commons.116 Teacher: House of Commons! Okay. Has more power than the House of117 Lords. Where does the prime minister come from? (Q14) 13 Who has more power? Normal question: Teacher test

question, no uptake, elicits a report from text, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

118 Students: (???)119 Teacher: Okay, he is the leader of … of the dominant party. (2)120 Alright, I’m not going to do … I would like to finish the121 complete the sentence … that’s where we stopped yesterday.122 Student: What was number 4? 14 Where does prime minister come from? Normal


123 Teacher: Umm… it’s D.124 Student: I’ll do that.125 Teacher: Okay, give me the first one. The Magna Carta? (Q15) Loud126 and clear. (4).127 Student: The Magna Carta made the … (4) 15 The magna carta …? Normal question: Teacher test


128 Teacher: Help him out!129 Student: Monarch …130 Teacher: Monarch ask the Great Council for its consent for any new131 what?132 Students: Taxes.133 Teacher: Taxes. What it said— Magna Carta said… you, monarch134 you … okay … cannot go out and tell the people to give you135 taxes. You have to come and ask us in the parliament and136 that we are in turn to tell you if we will give you taxes.

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137 Student: How did they get the bravery to tell the king that he can’t 16 How did they get the bravery to tell king hecouldn’t do that? Authentic student question, uptake,elicits a report requiring prior knowledge, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE =12

138 do that? (Q16)139 Teacher: Okay. Good question. Good question!! Whatever happened140 that people could get enough guts? (Q17) Okay. To get141 together. I’m putting in that. They have to get together.142 It has to be more than one. Okay? Yeah.143 Student: The reason they did is because the umm the judicial system144 (???) they had a fair trial? 17 How did they get brave? Normal question: Teacher


145 Teacher: Okay, that’s a little later than she said that umm the Great146 Council … yeah, the Great Council was the one that147 supported the king, and wanted to fight them. But when148 there are enough people that do not like the law …149 Student: But … (indecipherable)150 Teacher: Okay, the king can say that if he has enough people to151 protect him. Support him. But he (???). At that time they152 didn’t. There were more noble men and more people … uhh153 uhhh … more of the uhh … uhh … in a feudalist system more154 people that want it the other way around. (???). And this155 is the area we will answer next. What is happening when most 18 What is happening when most people in your

country don’t like what ruler does? Normalquestion: Teacher test question, no uptake, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

156 people in your country do not like what the monarch or157 the ruler does? (Q18)158 Student: They revolt.159 Teacher: Anyone?160 Student: They revolt.161 Teacher: They revolt! (3) Okay, now you kids (???) have you ever 19 Have you ever revolted? Authentic teacher question,

uptake, elicits a report requiring prior knowledge, lowlevel evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 11

162 revolted? (Q19)163 Student: Yeah.164 Student: No.Dow

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165 Student: People can strike … like that one …166 Teacher: What is the big strike we have had in … in Milwaukee (Q20) 20 What did we have in Milwaukee? Normal question:

Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits a reportrequiring prior knowledge, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

167 Student: (Petrochemical)?168 Teacher: Okay, how long has it been going on?169 Student: A long time.170 Teacher: A long time? Umm … I don’t know if we have a winner yet,171 do we?172 Student: I don’t know.173 Teacher: Still locked in uhhh … still are meeting … Umm do the 21 Who has more power in the plant? Authentic teacher

question, uptake, elicits analysis, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 13

174 people that work for the plant have more power than the175 person that owns the plant? (Q21)176 Student: Yes177 Student: The people who own the plant.178 Teacher: The owner of the plant…179 Students: (several responding at once)180 Teacher: OK, it happened to the teachers (???). They went on a181 strike. Okay? They hired new teachers. It happened to the182 uhh control workers in airlines, didn’t it? They went on183 strike? And they just rehired new ones. So there’s power184 on both sides and (???) has more than the other. (People) 22 The bill of rights—what did it offer? Normal


185 have more people, and they take chances. This is really how186 the (war) starts. Okay? Okay, let’s go through here

187 because I have so many things I want to do today. I still188 want to give you some time to (look at the notes). Umm.189 The bill of rights— it talks about the Bill of Rights.190 Okay? Number two. (Q22)191 Student: The Bill of Rights guarantees people the right to have a192 lawyer.

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193 Teacher: That sound familiar? 23 If you can’t afford a lawyer here in US, whathappens? Normal question: Teacher test question, nouptake, elicits a report requiring prior knowledge, lowlevel evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

194 Students: Umm-hmm. Yeah.195 Teacher: Okay, if you can’t afford a lawyer in the United States what196 do you do? (Q23)197 Student: You’ll be uhh—-198 Student: —appointed one.199 Student: Appointed.200 Teacher: You get an appointed one. Okay. Alright, number three.201 Where did I leave off?202 Student: After many years the merchants were allowed to sit as203 members of the House of Commons.204 Teacher: Okay, after many years the merchants were allowed to sit as 24 Differences with king led to what? Normal question:

Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits a report fromtext, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

205 members of the House of Commons. Alright, four.206 Student: Differences with the king led parliament to (set up) a207 republic in 1649? (Q24)208 Teacher: That’s right. What is a republic? (Q25)209 Student: Umm … (2) 25 What is a republic? Normal question: Teacher test


210 Teacher: What is the difference between a … tell me what is the211 difference between a republic and a monarchy? (Q26)212 Student: Umm … (4) In a republic you’re (2) umm (8) …213 Teacher: Anyone?214 Student: Something where the government is ruled by people who are 26 What is difference b/w republic and a monarchy?


215 elected by other people? A republic is elected by the216 people?217 Teacher: Yah (3) It is not a king in other words. Okay. So what218 happened do you think in 1649? (Q27) 27 What happened in 1649? Normal question: Teacher


219 Student: They… threw out the …220 Teacher: They (kind of) threw out the king!221 Student: Yeah.

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To explain our analytic strategy, we now consider two contrasting examples. Ineach case, we begin with (a) a transcript of class interaction (these transcripts are forillustrative purposes in this article; we did not routinely transcribe the lessons we ob-served). Displayed to the right of the transcript, we display (b) the resulting list ofcoded questions we collected from the observation comprising our event-historydata (all our observations involving lessons with questions generated such lists); inthis list, readers will find the codings for each question, along with its dialogic value.And finally, we display (c) question plots (“Qplots”), which sequentially track thedialogic values for all questions asked during the instructional episode.

An example of a monologic spell. Our first example is a monologic se-quence from our data set with no dialogic spells, consisting only of recitation testquestions about the Magna Carta: the year it was signed, the names of the twohouses of parliament, and so on. The entire lesson was devoted to teacher test ques-tions and the transmission and recitation of known information. In Table 4, we jux-tapose a transcript of the lesson with the numbered list of questions as coded byCLASS. The question codings provided the basis for our event-history analysis.

Figure 1 sequentially plots the dialogic values of the questions in Table 4 overthe course of the lesson as captured and coded by CLASS. By computing the meandialogic value of the question sequence, defined as the dialogic density of the in-structional episode, we find a near absence of dialogic value (density = 0.83), dra-matically depicting the plodding character of a lesson without a dialogic pulsegeared entirely to review of previously learned information.


FIGURE 1 Question plot for recitation about Magna Carta: lesson organized as a monologicspell. Questions are noted with codes (here E, e, and f) based on the Dialogic Value Scale laidout in Table 4; student question noted in upper case.

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162 TABLE 5Questions From Highly Interactive Lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird With a Dialogic Shift (33 questions in All, 7 From Students)

Transcript With Line Numbers Questions as Coded and Numbered Consecutively by Class

1 Teacher: How does Bob Ewell get killed? (Q1) 1 How does Bob Ewell get killed? Normal question:Teacher test question, no uptake, elicits a report fromtext, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

2 Student: Boo Radley.3 Teacher: How did you figure out that Boo killed him? (Q2)4 Student: Well, yeah. But I guess that I thought that the knife … 2 How did you figure out that Boo killed him? Teacher

test question, uptake, elicits analysis, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 1

5 I really didn’t understand this (part). I thought it was6 Boo at the beginning, but then I was not sure.7 Teacher: There are two knives involved. There’s a switchblade and8 a kitchen knife. Boo has the kitchen knife, right? (Q3) 3 Boo has the kitchen knife, right? Why wouldn’t it

make sense? Authentic teacher question, uptake, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE =11

9 Wouldn’t that make sense?10 Students: Yeah. (Multiple overlapping short comments).11 Teacher: I think …12 Student: It said that he doesn’t want to reveal it to the (???)13 because (???) it would ruin you know Boo’s life …14 Student: Right.15 Student: …even if he totally (did it) ….16 Teacher: Shhhhh!17 Student: Well he’s …18 Student: …he’d get all this attention and he couldn’t19 obviously …20 Student: No. But he does say that (that was) the time (???).21 Student: No, he wouldn’t be able to again if they all found out22 that he did it.23 Teacher: Why not? (Q4) 4 Why not? Authentic teacher question, uptake, elicits

analysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE =11

24 Student: Well, he’s going to have to go to trial, and uhh … all25 this stuff and everyone will know about that he has26 (???).

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163

27 Student: I think it’s worth it. No, it don’t mean (necessarily)28 obstruction of justice, just because they don’t want (to29 die) in front of a house.30 Teacher: So you think that Heck Tate was wrong in covering up?(Q5) 5 So you think Heck Tate is wrong? Authentic teacher


31 Student: Yeah! Well, Heck Tate said that anyway, it’s gonna be32 self-defense anyway, however it comes up on the trial33 because you can really argue it that way so you just have34 to go through the whole trial and then it would be up to35 the jury and stuff just to get to some answer that you36 already know about.37 Teacher: Somebody reconstruct this scene. The kids are walking38 home in the pitch black. Scout has a ham outfit on.39 Student: Her what? [uncoded procedural question]40 Teacher: She has a …41 Student: Ham.42 Teacher: …her ham outfit on.43 Student: Ham?44 Teacher: Ham, right. Yeah, it’s a pageant and she’s dressed like45 a ham.46 Students: (laughing)47 Student: Oh my God! That’s some really (???).48 Students: (Laughing)49 Teacher: And she can’t see much, because her view is really50 limited by the ham costume. And it is pitch black, and51 she can …52 Student: (laughing)53 Teacher: … feel that they are under the oak tree. And what 6 What do they hear? Normal question: Teacher test


54 does … what do they hear? (Q6)55 Students: (multiple overlapping brief answers)56 Teacher: They hear (???) cat swishing, they hear somebody kind of

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57 dragging his feet. Somebody’s following them. Scout58 thinks immediately it’s Cec … Cecil Jacobs playing a59 trick on them again. What happens next after she calls 7 What happens next after she calls Cecil a …

[uncoded repaired question]60 out Cecil Jacobs has a new (???) on? (Q7) Can you61 reconstruct in your mind … this is confusing because ham62 is … Ham! (laughter) Scout is stuck there in her ham63 costume …64 Students: (Laughter)65 Teacher: Can anybody (???) morning. What do you think happens 8 What happens under that big old oak tree? Normal


66 under that big old oak tree? (Q8)67 Student: Well umm like Jem stops to kind of like look in the68 (???). Scout thinks that Jem’s (friends) hit her, but69 he’s really not and then … suddenly shows up in (???)70 and umm then she yells and starts to like run. Then she71 tries to but she falls. And … because she’s (in this)72 big ham, and it’s kind of hard to run.73 Teacher: Uhh-huh.74 Student: And umm she falls, but she tries to run away. And then75 umm—76 Student: (Laughter).77 Student: Yeah. And umm … and she’s hear this like … shout (from78 the tree) Jem and (???) stuff about (???). And then Jem79 comes down to her (???) Jem (is totally again) and then 9 [She hears a crunch] which is what? Teacher test

question, no uptake, elicits a report from text, highlevel evaluation: That’s a good reconstruction ….DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

80 she hears a crunch and … (Q9)81 Teacher: Which is what?82 Student: …(Jem’s hand) …

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165

83 Teacher: Then what? (Q10) 10 Then what? Normal question: Teacher test question,no uptake, elicits a report from text, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

84 Student: And then there’s … there’s nothing. And then suddenly85 she’s being grabbed (that someone’s ready to) umm sneak86 up and run out of there, something like that. And he’s87 pulled away from her umm, and … and … umm … and then88 really nothing. And then she tries to … find where the89 girl is. But she’s (???) with Jem. (2)90 Teacher: You might, when you watch the movie next week, you might91 want to watch carefully how they reconstruct …92 Student: We’re watching the movie? [uncoded procedural question]93 Student: Yes! Sweet!94 Student: Awesome.95 Students: (overlapping chatting) (4)96 Teacher: That’s a good reconstruction Arlene. It’s very97 confusing. It’s on page 276 and it’s really confusing to98 figure out because we’re … uhh … Scout has (at least)99 an obstructed view.100 Student: She’s (???) …101 Teacher: Yes! She’s frightened about it, but she’s not sure102 what’s going on. Actually, I think I have the wrong …103 yeah, it’s 264. Our company shuffled and dragged his104 feet. That’s (???) reconstruction for you. You did a105 nice job. We can assume that Boo has heard what’s going 11 We can assume that Boo heard what was going on

and then did what? Teacher test question, no uptake,elicits analysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGICVALUE = 0

106 on and then did what? (Q11)107 Student: Grabbed the butcher knife …108 Teacher: Yeah!! Good old Boo! Heard what was going on, grabbed109 the butcher knife, ran out, and stabbed Bob Ewell. (2)110 Why would he stab him, do you suppose? (Q12) Doesn’t that 12 Why would he stab him? Teacher test question, no

uptake, elicits analysis, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

111 seem sort of …112 Student: He was trying to kill …

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113 Teacher: How do you know he has a knife? (Q13) 13 How do you know he has a knife? Teacher testquestion, no uptake, elicits analysis, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

114 Student: Because her ham costume has a long (arm) …115 Students: (Laughing)116 Teacher: If she hadn’t been in that ham costume she would have117 been killed. And that costume saved her.118 Student: Why? (Q14) Was she … 14 Why? [Why does the ham costume save her?]

Authentic student question, uptake, elicits analysis.DIALOGIC VALUE = 12

119 Teacher: Because he was … he hadn’t put his (???) in the ham120 costume it could have been in … in Scout.121 Student: Ohhhhh!122 Teacher: Kim, you had your hand up.123 Student: Okay, I didn’t understand one thing. Umm, wait (2). 15 I didn’t understand one thing … “What does this

say about the relationship of the children?” … Idon’t understand what this means [S. referring toquestion from the study guide] Authentic studentquestion, uptake, elicits analysis. DIALOGIC VALUE= 12

124 Why … What does this say about the relationship of the125 children? (Q15) I don’t understand.126 Teacher: Which … which question are you on?127 Student: It’s like, it’s umm (5) I don’t know it’s 1, 2, 3, 4128 lines down.129 Teacher: Are you on chapters 28 to 31? Okay, everybody, let’s130 take a look at your study guide. And, we’ll get a …131 we’ll get a freebie out of Kim here. “On the way to the132 pageant how does ham describe … how does Scout describe 16 Who does Atticus think killed Bob Ewell? Normal

question: Teacher test question, no uptake, elicitsreport from text, low level evaluation. DIALOGICVALUE = 0

133 the mockingbird, that’s the first one. Who does Atticus134 think killed ….” Who does Atticus think uhh killed Bob135 Ewell? (Q16) Get your notebook out, Andy. You can …136 you can get some free notes out of this.137 Scout: Jem. He thinks Jem.138 Teacher: Jem. Yeah. When Jem was attacked (from) self-defense, 17 Trixie, why are you looking so incredulous?

Authentic teacher question, uptake, elicits analysis, lowlevel evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 11

139 he stabbed Bob Ewell. Trixie, why are you looking140 incredulous? (Q17)Dow

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167

141 Student: I think that’s pretty weird. I (don’t know if umm) …142 Teacher: But why does Atticus think that Jem would kill … (Q18) 18 Why does Atticus think that Jem killed him?


143 Student: Because …144 Student: He doesn’t know that Boo Radley was even there. He145 thinks that Boo Radley is some type of (sniper) guy who146 was (in) (???).147 Teacher: Atticus doesn’t know who Boo Radley is? (Q19) 19 You think Atticus doesn’t know who Boo Radley is?

Normal question: Teacher test question, uptake, elicitsa report from text, low level evaluation. DIALOGICVALUE = 0

148 Student: No, he knows who he is. He just doesn’t think that he149 like goes outside.150 Student: But how does he know about the relationship between Boo151 Radley and the kids? (Q20)152 Teacher: Yeah, that’s true.153 Students: (brief overlapping comments). 20 But how does he know about the relationship

between Boo Radley and the kids? Authentic studentquestion, uptake, elicits analysis. DIALOGIC VALUE= 12

154 Teacher: Shhhh!155 Student: (???) Boo Radley [very quiet] nervous … he’s helping156 (because he’s unconscious) …157 Teacher: Who? Jem is unconscious because of the terrible break in158 his arm and so Boo has to carry him home. And Atticus159 thinks that Boo is (taking Jem home) ….160 Student: Boo carries—161 Student: And then, wait, the next section was he wanted to hush up162 who … (???)163 Teacher: —Why doesn’t he want … Why doesn’t Atticus want him …164165 Student: Atticus.166 Teacher: Why doesn’t Atticus want to hush up (Q21) … see Heck Tate is167 saying, “Well, Ewell fell on his knife! There was nobody 21 Why doesn’t Atticus want to hush up? Teacher test

question, no uptake, elicits analysis, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

168 that killed him.” And perhaps … that’s where Atticus169 says, “But Jem did it in self-defense and I don’t want to170 cover up for that. I don’t want it hushed up. I don’t171 want people to think that Atticus Finch’s son

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172 was protected by the sheriff. So he doesn’t want it hushed 22 So he wants to protect Jem’s reputation: Does thatmake sense to everybody? Authentic teacher question,uptake, elicits analysis, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 11

173 up.174 Student: Jem (???) out of curiosity (???) [mumbled comment].175 Teacher: So he wants to protect Jem’s reputation. Does that …176 does that make sense to everybody? (3) (Q22)177 Teacher: Now, what does that say about Atticus’ relationship with 23 What does that say about Atticus’ relationship with

his children? Teacher test question, uptake, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 1

178 his children? (Q23)179 Student: That like if he said something different in town than he180 said at home then his children wouldn’t trust him anymore181 [mumbled]182 Teacher: He (won’t) be different at home than he is (out of town). 24 (does) the sheriff knows that Boo Radley did it?

Authentic student question, uptake, elicits analysis.DIALOGIC VALUE = 12

183 He won’t be less honest? Okay.184 Student: [very low mumbled comment] (out of town) …185 Teacher: Well how about if I said something about (is that) …186 Student: (Does) the sheriff knows that Boo Radley did it? (Q24) 25 Do we know that the sheriff knows? Teacher test


187 Teacher: (2) Well, do we know the sheriff knows? (Q25)188 Student: That Boo (???)189 Teacher: How do you know that the sheriff knows? (Q26)190 Student: And how do they know for sure that Heck Tate knows? Yes. 26 How do you know that the sheriff knows? Teacher

test question, uptake, elicits analysis, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 1

191 He says, umm, when Atticus says (???) his men covered192 up … Heck Tate says we’re not talking about Jem and193 then he says that [mumbled] he’s sort of implying (that194 it’s impossible) (???) and then he talks about Boo Radley195 [mumbled].196 Teacher: Let’s go back to that passage. It’s on 278, 279. And I197 think Keera’s right that this is where we know that Heck198 Tate knows what happened. Got your book Ryan? [uncoded199 procedural question]Dow

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169

200 Student: (???)201 Student: We haven’t—202 Teacher: 278–279.203 Student: We haven’t, we’ve never answered the question about how204 it changed the relationship …205 Student: Yeah!206 Teacher: Hold on a minute. Now, what does this say about his207 relationship with his children? (Q27) 27 What does this say about his relationship with his

children? Teacher test question, uptake, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 1

208 Student: (???)209 Teacher: Is that the … it doesn’t say anything about changing.210 It says, What does this say about his relationship with211 his children? But you’re right, we haven’t it answered212 yet, but Holly asked about Heck Tate so let’s do (that)213 and then we’ll come back. (1) Umm … (3) On the very214 bottom of 278 it says, “I never heard tell it’s against215 the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime216 from being committed, which is exactly what he did. But217 maybe you’ll say it’s my duty to tell the town all about218 it, not hush it up. But you know what’d happen then?219 All the ladies in Macomb including my wife would be220 knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes.”221 Student: Where’s the (???).222 Teacher: Oh, I’m sorry … “To my way of thinking, Mr. Finch,223 taking the one man who has done you and this town a great224 service and dragging him with his shy ways into the225 limelight, to me that’s a sin. It’s a sin and I’m not226 about to have it on my head. If it was any other man,227 it’d be different. But not this man, Mr. Finch.” What228 do you think [name]? Does that seem to indicate that he 28 Does that seem to indicate that Heck Tate knows?

Teacher test question, uptake, elicits analysis, low levelevaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 1

229 may know … (Q28)230 Student: Yeah

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231 Teacher: And he says it would be a sin to drag him into the232 limelight, and then Atticus says to Scout, “Do you233 understand why you can’t (ever) tell that you were his234 (???).” And she says, “Well, it’d sort of be like235 shooting a mockingbird.” (2). Remember that (Bancroft)236 saying it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird?237 Student: Wait, who says that now? (Q29) 29 Who says that now? Authentic student question,

uptake, elicits a report from text. DIALOGIC VALUE= 10

238 Teacher: Scout says that. “Atticus disengaged himself at looked239 at me”. I’m on 279. “What do you mean?” And Scout says,240 “Well, it’d be sort of like shooting a mockingbird.” 30 So what is he referring to? Authentic student

question, uptake, elicits a report from text. DIALOGICVALUE = 10

241 That’s …242 Student: Well what is he referring to? (Q30)243 Teacher: Scouts referring to anybody in town knowing that Boo had244 killed Bob Ewell.245 Student: Ohhh.246 Student: Oh, okay.247 Teacher: Now, we still have not rankled with this one enough yet.248 Atticus won’t be dishonest. How … How does that explain249 his re— … his relationship with his children? Maureen,250 you started that off, and we never really to the point on251 that. Something (to that) …252 Student: Umm (laughs).253 Teacher: Here’s the question. Who does Atticus think might have254 killed Bob Ewell? Jem. Why doesn’t he want it hushed 31 How does the fact that Atticus won’t be dishonest

say something about his relationship with hischildren? Teacher test question, no uptake, elicitsanalysis, low level evaluation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 0

255 up? Because he doesn’t want to be dishonest. What does256 this say about his relationship with his children? (Q31)257 Student: That (???) …

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171

258 Teacher: Why do you say that, Kim? (Q32) 32 Why do you say that? Authentic teacher question,uptake, elicits analysis, low level evaluation.DIALOGIC VALUE = 11

259 Student: Because umm … because I mean his son … people would260 just … like … (???) would say, well, you know, just261 that, publicize it or whatever, and just, you know,262 really (close it off) and say, “My kid (???).” But263 Atticus wants everybody to know that his kid has done …264 He doesn’t want, you know, his reputation to be ruined.265 Student: Now what’s going to happen with Miss Stephanie and her 33 What’s going to happen to Miss Stephanie and her

kids now? Authentic student question, uptake, elicitsspeculation. DIALOGIC VALUE = 12

266 kids now? (Q33)267 Teacher: I don’t know … that’s a good question! I don’t what’s268 going to happen to all those (cute little) kids …269 Student: Oh, no. (???) call her.270 Students: (Laughing, overlapping brief comments).271 Teacher: I don’t know. It’s … it’s interesting speculation. We272 don’t know what happens with the Ewell family because of273 course now they’re all orphans. As Anna says, maybe274 they’ll get a good father for a change.275 Students: (multiple brief overlapping comments).276 Teacher: (Laughing) Who knows, somebody might want (Stephanie’s277 kids). (3) I want to hold those two last questions for278 Monday because I want to start you in your small groups.279 Now I’m going to put you in small groups to talk about280 the big issues that will pull the book together, rather281 than giving you a test on it. So each group will be282 responsible for one big question, and I’ll ask you to283 maybe talk about that question in your groups. Put your284 responses on an overhead transparency, and then explain285 what you came up with to the rest of us on Monday. This286 big issue, this topic that you discuss in your small287 group will be what you write your essay on. So do as288 well as you can in your groups, because then you’ll have289 more material to go on later (on the) essay.

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An example of a dialogic spell. In contrast to this recitation on the MagnaCarta, we now examine a dialogic spell in the context of a ninth-grade English les-son on To Kill a Mockingbird. Table 5 juxtaposes a full transcript with the completelist of questions coded using CLASS; Figure 2 shows the questions plot, which se-quentially plots the dialogic values of the questions over the course of the session.

In this lesson, students have just completed a quiz, and the teacher opens thefloor to student reactions and questions. The session clearly distinguishes itselffrom the review of the Magna Carta in that it is prompted by a student’s curiosity.He is quickly joined by several other students, frequently without teacherprompting. The teacher’s role is mainly one of directing conversational “traffic,”focusing issues, and guiding students through the text to answer their own ques-tions. The exchange quickly evolves into a discussion lasting more than 15 min.The teacher wraps up the discussion by instructing them on their next tasks insmall groups where, as in the preceding whole-class discussion, they are to grapplewith big issues, figuring out an interpretation of the novel that can form the basisfor an essay assignment. The focus of this dialogic exchange, starting with home-work reading and extending through discussion and essay writing, is high-levelcomprehension. If, in Lotman’s (1988, 1990) terms, the emphasis of the mono-logic lesson on the Magna Carta is “accurate transmission of information,” the ori-entation here is toward the text as a “thinking device.”

Our initial explorations suggested that some of the ways teachers seek to kindledialogic interaction include (a) asking authentic questions, which value and elicitstudent ideas and not just mastery of information, (b) practicing uptake, in whichteachers ask students follow-up questions to pursue points and lines of inquiry in-troduced by students, and (c) using high-level evaluation to valorize students’ re-sponses (cf. Rex & McEachen, 1999), allowing their ideas and responses to influ-ence the direction of discussion. Also important is the development of long-term“ethos” (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001; Kachur & Prendergast, 1997; Langer,1999): If the majority of lessons are in recitation mode, it is difficult to initiate adiscussion. Conversely, where dialogue is more the norm, discussion may eruptdespite the teacher’s plans. As we note earlier, discourse has inertia, and theconversants quickly develop expectations about how to comport themselves.

Construct validity. As the lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird shows, engagedstudent questions can be pivotal to the character and course of classroom dis-course, especially when the teacher responds by opening the floor to other stu-dents’ comments and questions. When this happens, classroom discourse is trans-formed into a dialogic spell. Is not the use of the same variables (authenticquestions, uptake, etc.) to specify both our key construct (dialogic spell) and ourpredictors of the construct (dialogic bids) tautologic? The important point here isthat dialogic spells represent concentrations or concatenations of dialogic vari-ables, and that these clusters are qualitatively different from the individual predic-

172 NYSTRAND ET AL.

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tors: If dialogic spells represent an “ignition” of teacher–student interaction,dialogic bids may be thought of as “kindling” generating “sparks” that increase theodds of ignition; but the sparks, until ignition, are not “the fire.”

To examine this issue, we provide two sets of analyses to assess the validity ofour measure of dialogic spells. In order to test the internal consistencies of ourscale and measurement of dialogic spells, we first conducted a simple analysis ofvariance (ANOVA) contrasting mean dialogic densities within and outsidedialogic spells. As a second check, we contrast results of event history analyses ofdialogic shifts with results from parallel analyses of two empirically related, albeittheoretical distinct, outcomes—discussions and student questions.

To support our construct distinguishing dialogic and monologic spells, wetested their respective dialogic densities in our entire data set using ANOVA. Themean density inside all dialogic spells was 6.35 inside, 2.35 outside, a ratio ofnearly 3:1, consistent with our expectations. A simple ANOVA yielded a statisti-cally significant difference in mean densities for dialogic and monologic spells (F= 4,307; df = 33,967). It is also interesting to find that far more questions occurredoutside dialogic spells than within them: 30,381 questions occurred outsidedialogic spells, and 3,588 questions occurred inside dialogic spells. These resultsclearly support the case that our dialogic spell construct results in distinctions thatare inherently meaningful.


FIGURE 2 Question plot for highly interactive lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird: lesson withdialogic spell. Questions are noted with letter codes based on the Dialogic Value Scale shown inTable 3; student questions are noted in upper case.

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Event History Models

We examine three outcomes in our event history analyses: dialogic spells, studentquestions, and open discussion. As noted, our theoretical arguments lead us to ex-pect that the general classroom conditions promoting dialogic spells, student ques-tions, and discussion will be similar; nevertheless, these three outcomes differ inimportant ways. Thus, we expect open discussion to be less predictably structuredthan dialogic spells, and we expect dialogic spells to occur much less frequentlythan student questions.

We defined the onset of a dialogic spell in the manner described earlier, when weobserve a student question followed subsequently (although not necessarily imme-diately) by two more student questions. We defined discussion operationally as thefree (unprescripted) exchange of information among at least three students and theteacher that lasted at least a half-minute during a classroom instructional episode.Student questions were identified similarly using a dummy variable that indicatedwhether a question was posed by the teacher or by a student. Our definition of adialogic spell is more complicated and is given later after we review the substantivecontent provided by the questions in our data. All three outcomes (dialogic spells,student questions, and discussion) are thus defined at the level of instructional epi-sodes. Our event history analyses focus on the timing of these three outcomes withinan instructional episodes. We define timing in terms of the number of questions thathave gone by at a given point in an episode, not in terms of the time elapsed since thestart of the episode. Thus, in a classroom lesson, the teacher might pose three ques-tions (interspersed with three student answers), at which point a student might ask aquestion. For our student question outcome, the relevant “timing” of classroomevents thus consists of three teacher questions, followed by the outcome of inter-est—a student question. The timing of our other outcomes is defined similarly.

Our main analyses employ event history techniques (Cox & Oakes, 1984; Tuma& Hannan, 1984) to uncover the conditions that lead to the emergence of dialogicspells, student questions, and discussion. Event history analysis is a recently devel-oped quantitative technique for investigating the causes (antecedents) and results(consequences) of events. Known by a variety of names, it is an important method-ology in many disciplines, including

1. Survival analysis in biostatistics (to study demographic changes, espe-cially death).

2. Failure time analysis in engineering (to study product failure).3. Durationanalysis ineconomics(toinvestigatewhat leadstounemployment).4. Event history analysis in sociology (to assess the causes of marriage and di-

vorce [Hannan et al., 1977]; job mobility [Felmlee, 1982; Sørensen & Tuma,1981; Tuma, 1976]; childbirth; infant mortality [Russell & Hammerslough,1983]; rate of premarital birth [Wu & Martinson, 1993; Wu, 1996]; contex-

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tual effects on student attention [Felmlee & Eder, 1983]); law enforcement(to assess arrests, convictions, jail sentences, and recidivism [Rossi, Berk, &Lenihan, 1980]); political science (to assess changes in city government[Knoke,1982];political timing[Box-Steffensmeier,Arnold,&Zorn,1997];and the political effects of economic crises (Gasiorowski, 1995]); interna-tional relations (to analyze the causes of revolutions, wars, and internationalconflicts).

In each case, longitudinal data are investigated using multivariate, regression-likemethods to specify and estimate the sources of heterogeneity affecting hypothe-sized changes.

Sociologists studying education often examine continuous outcomes such asyears of schooling completed. Given such an outcome, statistical methods such asordinary least-squares regression are commonly used to examine the effects ofcovariates on variation across individuals in such an outcome. By contrast, the out-comes in this article are binary in nature—whether (and when) a dialogic spell,student question, or discussion spell has occurred in a given classroom episode. Ifour research had sought merely to determine whether a dialogic spell, studentquestion, or discussion is observed in a given classroom episode, statistical tech-niques such as logistic or probit regression methods would be appropriate. But asnoted previously, our analytic focus here concerns not only whether particular out-comes are observed to have emerged within a given classroom episode, but also thetiming of such outcomes. Indeed, our theoretical discussion in some sense privi-leges the latter issue—just when dialogic discourse, student questions, or discus-sion emerges—given our theoretical focus on how discourse unfolds within theclassroom.

Our focus on these two aspects—both whether and when a binary outcome isobserved—requires the extension of more familiar methods such as logistic re-gression techniques. Consider the analogous issue of human mortality, in whichthe researcher is interested in both whether and when the event (i.e., death) is ob-served. In principle, death can occur at any given instant; hence, though the out-come of interest can be represented by a binary variable (for example, 0 represent-ing the status “alive” and 1 representing the status “dead”), the timing of this eventwill typically be captured by a continuous variable such as age in years, months,days, and so on. Similarly for our data, a dialogic spell, student question, or discus-sion may emerge at any point in a given instructional episode. Thus, in formalterms, the data needed to represent these outcomes consist of two pieces of infor-mation—a binary variable indicating whether or not the event of interest has oc-curred during the period of observation, and a continuous variable either giving thetiming of the event or the so-called “censoring” time for cases for which the eventhas not occurred, where the censoring time records the amount of time elapsed.Thus, in the case of human mortality, some individuals will be observed to have


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died during the period of observation, in which case the event (say, coded as “1”)and the age at death will be recorded; for other individuals, death will not yet haveoccurred, in which case the lack of the event (coded, say, as “0”) and age at last ob-servation will be recorded.

In a logistic regression framework, the statistical outcome of interest is theso-called log odds, log(p/1 – p), giving the natural logarithm of the probability ofthe event divided by the probability that the event has not occurred. To model hu-man mortality, it is necessary to extend this notion to all possible ages at whichdeath can occur—in effect, an infinite sequence of log odds. The result for mortal-ity is what demographers and statisticians term the age-specific mortality rate—arate describing the force of mortality at any age t, where age is understood as a con-tinuous variable taking positive values. A typical empirical result in human popu-lations is that the mortality rate is high during infancy; declines through childhood,adolescence, and early adulthood; and rises again during the later adult years.Note, in addition, that the mortality rate can only take nonnegative values—themortality rate is typically positive, although it could in principle decline to zero atsome ages.

In our study, the outcomes are formally similar to mortality in that we are inter-ested in the timing and occurrence of a binary outcome—when and whether adialogic spell, student question, or discussion occurs in a given classroom episode.Our analyses employ continuous time hazard regression methods, which assumethat the underlying time dimension is a continuous quantity (see Appendix).

STATIC AND DYNAMIC VARIABLES

A particular advantage of these models is that one can investigate covariates thatcapture any aspect of a classroom’s history prior to time t; in particular, covariatesneed not be static, but may themselves vary with time. We exploit this aspect byemploying a number of variables that capture ebbs and flows in classroom dis-course. We thus investigated two general categories of covariate effects: (a) staticvariables, related to both teacher and school characteristics and such backgroundfactors as SES, gender, race, ethnicity, and class size, as well as average levels ofstudent achievement within the classroom; and (b) dynamic variables, which varyboth within and across lessons within our classroom observations.

We investigated the effects of class and teacher characteristics for two reasons.First, to obtain unbiased estimates of dynamic variables, it is necessary to controlfor potentially confounding static variables. Second, because structural andcompositional variables such as track, SES, gender, race, and ethnicity have beenshown globally to affect classroom discourse (Gamoran & Nystrand, 1991;Nystrand, 1997), we sought to explicate the mechanism of these effects as we fo-cused on unfolding classroom discourse.

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Weinvestigated thedynamiceffectsofdiscoursebecauseof its tendencies towardcoherence and inertia: Once in motion, discourse tends to maintain both genre andtopic unless the speaker or writer somehow signals a shift (Nystrand, 1986). Theseshifts can range from the explicit (e.g., “Now I’d like to talk about something a littledifferent”) to the implicit (e.g., indenting to indicate a new paragraph [cf. Rodgers,1966]). In classroom discourse, one might well expect that, the longer recitation isunderway, the more difficult it might be to shift to more dialogic patterns of interac-tion; and in this study we examined the inertia of classroom discourse in two ways:by measuring the effects of immediately previous discourse on subsequent dis-course in the same instructional episode, and by modeling (via the baseline hazard)the propensity for the outcome to occur as the episode unfolds.

RESULTS

The Classroom as a Context for Discourse

Are dialogic spells a common occurrence? Prior research, including previous anal-yses of our own data, led us to suggest that dialogic discourse is rare, and our newanalyses confirm this expectation. In 1,151 instructional episodes that we observedin eighth- and ninth-grade English and social studies classes, only 66 episodes(6.69%) had even one dialogic spell—1,074 episodes (93.31%) involved nodialogic spells, whereas 7 episodes had two, and 4 episodes had three. Table 6 sum-marizes these findings. How are differences among classrooms related to the oc-currence of dialogic spells?

Grade and Subject Differences

The proportion of episodes with at least one dialogic spell was about 50% higher insocial studies than in English classes, as indicated in Table 6. The proportion ofdialogic spells per episode was about twice as high in eighth-grade classes as inninth-grade classes. Table 7 summarizes this finding.


TABLE 6Number of Dialogic Spells per Episode by Subject

Spells per Episode Total EpisodesWith at Least One

Dialogic Spell

TotalNumber ofEpisodes

%Dialogic

SpellsSubject 0 1 2 3

Social studies 520 39 6 4 49 569 8.61%English 554 27 1 0 28 582 4.81%Total 1,074 66 7 4 77 1,151 6.69%

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Dialogic Spells and Tracking

Although monologic instruction was evident in urban, suburban, and rural publicand parochial schools, the most monologic lessons by far were in low track classes.Indeed, the most striking finding in our study is the virtual absence of dialogicspells in low track classes: only 2 dialogic spells in the 197 instructional episodeswe observed (see Table 8), no doubt a result of emphasis on skill development andtest questions about prior reading, both negative predictors of dialogic discourse.

Dialogic Spells Versus Discussion

Despite considerable lip service among teachers to “discussion,” we found littlediscussion in any classes in the sense of an open and in-depth exchange of ideas.This is most unfortunate given that our previous studies found strong associationsbetween discussion and student achievement (Nystrand, 1997; Nystrand &Gamoran, 1991a). What most teachers in our study called “discussion” was, in thewords of one teacher, “question–answer discussion”—that is, some version of rec-itation. By any standard, discussion was infrequent, only slightly more frequentthan dialogic spells. In social studies, for example, whereas 91.39% of all episodesinvolved no dialogic spells, 90.33% had no discussion. In English, the figures weresimilar: Whereas 95.15% of all episodes had no dialogic spells, 91.24% had nodiscussion (see Table 9).

On average, discussion in English took 50 s per class in eighth grade and lessthan 15 s in ninth grade. Average time for discussion in social studies was 42 s ineighth grade and 31.2 s in ninth grade. In eighth-grade English classes, 20.7%spent 1 min or more on average; only 2 classes of the 58 regularly involved 7 min ormore. In ninth-grade English classes, only 5.6% had more than a minute daily;only 1 class of the 58 averaged more than 2 min. Discussion occupied nearly twiceas much time in high-track classes than low.

To examine the relationship between discussion (open-ended conversationalexchange of ideas largely absent of questions) and dialogic spells (characterizedby engaged student questions and an absence of teacher test questions), wecross-tabulated their occurrences in our data set (see Table 10). Of 1,561 episodes

178 NYSTRAND ET AL.

TABLE 7Number of Dialogic Spells per Episode by Grade

Spells Per Episode Total EpisodesWith at Least One

Dialogic Spell


%Dialogic

SpellsGrade 0 1 2 3

Eighth 464 42 4 3 49 513 9.55%Ninth 610 24 3 1 28 638 4.39%Total 1,074 66 7 4 77 1,151 6.69%

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we observed, about 79% had neither discussion nor dialogic shifts, and only about2% had both. Among episodes with dialogic spells, 14.38%1 also had discussion,whereas, among episodes without dialogic spells, the occurrence of discussion was7.51%.2 Among episodes that had discussion, 24.77%3 also had dialogic spells;among those without discussion, only 13.73%4 had dialogic spells. Thus, discus-sion and dialogic spells tend to co-occur, though the overlap is not complete; theresults capture distinct, though overlapping, phenomena.

The Evolving Nature of Classroom Discourse

To examine the unfolding of classroom discourse, we used event history tech-niques to model the emergence of three types of sequences embedded in classroomdiscourse: dialogic spells, student questions, and discussion. In our event-history


1This percentage was computed by dividing the percentage of dialogic spells with discussion(2.11%) by the total percentage of dialogic spells (12.56% + 2.11%).

2This percentage was computed by dividing the percentage of episodes with discussion but withoutdialogic spells (6.41%) by the total percentage of episodes without dialogic spells (78.92% + 6.41%).

3This percentage was computed by dividing the percentage of episodes with dialogic spells withdiscussion (6.41%) by the total percentage of episodes with discussion (6.41% + 2.11%).

4This percentage was computed by dividing the percentage of episodes with dialogic shifts but with-out discussion (12.56%) by the total percentage of episodes without discussion (78.92% + 12.56%).

TABLE 8Number of Dialogic Spells per Episode by Track

Spells Per Episode Total Episodes Withat Least One

Dialogic Spell


%Dialogic

SpellsTrack 0 1 2 3

Low 195 2 0 0 2 197 1.02%Regular 425 20 2 2 24 449 5.35%High 161 12 1 0 13 174 7.47%Other 293 32 4 2 38 331 11.48%Total 1,074 66 7 4 77 1,151 6.69%

TABLE 9Discussion and Dialogic Spells (Descriptive Statistics)

Subject


Episodes WithNo Dialogic

Spells

EpisodesWith No

Discussion

% EpisodesWith No

Dialogic Spells

% LessonsWith No

Discussion

Social studies 569 520 514 91.39% 90.33%English 582 554 531 95.19% 91.24%Total 1,151 1,074 1,045 93.31% 90.79%

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models, we examined the effects of both fixed attributes of classrooms, teachers,and schools (e.g., class mean SES, teacher experience, school urbanicity) and dy-namic elements of classroom discourse (e.g., authentic questions, uptake,high-level evaluation, cognitive level of questions). Models that included our dy-namic measures of classroom discourse were estimated twice: once with our dy-namic measures of classroom discourse specified in terms of the cumulative num-ber of each type of question prior to that point in time (e.g., in assessing the rate ofthe outcome at question t, how many authentic questions have occurred prior tothis question), and a second time with the dynamic predictors specified as movingaverages over the five questions prior to this point (e.g., what proportion of the pre-vious five questions were authentic?). Since our theory is unclear on whether theepisode as a whole leads up to the events in which we are interested, or whetherevents reflect only the most recent past, we adopted both approaches in our analy-ses. The goal of these analyses is to identify the conditions—both static and dy-namic—under which dialogic spells, student questions, and discussion are mostlikely to occur.

What Promotes Dialogic Spells?

The first column of Table 11 examines associations between the static attributes ofclasses, teachers, and schools, and the rate of transitions into a dialogic spell.Dialogic spells are more likely to occur in smaller classes, those of higher averageSES, and in social studies as opposed to English classes. Consistent with thebivariate descriptive results, dialogic spells are least likely to occur in low-trackclasses.5 Unexpectedly, dialogic spells are also less likely in classes with higher

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TABLE 10Cross Tabulation of Dialogic Spells and Discussion

Discussion

Dialogic Spells No Yes Total episodes

No 78.92% 6.41% 1,332Yes 12.56% 2.11% 229Total episodes 1,428 133 1,561

Note. Percentages are computed as a proportion of 1,561 total episodes observed.

5Dialogic spells are also more likely to occur in “other” tracks than in regular tracks (the omittedcategory). Although it is tempting to ascribe the effect of “other” track levels to heterogeneity of stu-dents in such classes, unfortunately this category reflects a mixed bag of classes that includedmixed-ability classes, school-within-school classes, and classes in smaller schools (which were morelikely to be mixed for their schools but relatively homogeneous compared to the sample as a whole), soit is difficult to feel confident in such an interpretation.

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average fall writing scores. We scrutinized this association for possible collinearitywith tracking, but found that the negative association between average fall writingscores and dialogic spells held for all tracks. Thus, dialogic spells occur less oftenin lower tracks; but within tracks, classes with higher average writing performanceexhibit fewer dialogic spells. This may indicate a tradeoff between an emphasis onwritten and oral performance.

Thenegativeassociationbetween low-trackclassesanddialogic spells isparticu-larlysignificant in lightofearlieranalysesof thesedata,whichshowedthatauthenticquestions and uptake (two key features of dialogic discourse) were about equallycommon in high- and low-track classes (Gamoran et al., 1995; Nystrand, 1997). In


TABLE 11Event History Analysis of Transitions Into a Dialogic Spell Using a CoxModel With Fixed, Cumulative Time Varying Covariates, and Moving

Average Time Varying Covariates

Model 1: FixedVariables

Model 2: Fixed +Cumulative Variables

Model 3: Fixed +Moving Averages

Static variablesClass characteristics

Class SES 1.01*** (.27) .52 (.28) .56* (.28)Class size –.03* (.01) –.03* (.01) –.02 (.01)Grade (1 = ninth) –.20 (.18) –.57** (.19) –.30 (.20)Subject (1 = English) –.47** (.15) –.51** (.16) –.47** (.15)

TrackLow track –.71* (.29) –.68* (.29) –.40 (.29)High track .38 (.23) .31 (.21) .24 (.21)Other track .56* (.20) .16 (.20) .08 (.21)

% African American .85 (.94) .12 (.91) –.99 (1.00)% Hispanic .01 (.87) –.25 (.87) 1.01 (.87)% Female .70 (.52) 1.71** (.54) .94 (.56)Fall writing score –.46** (.16) –.40* (.16) –.38* (.17)Teacher characteristics

Sex (1 = female) .10 (.15) .20 (.15) .34* (.15)Years teaching –.01 (.01) –.01 (.01) .00 (.01)

School characteristicsCatholic –.26 (.23) –.43 (.24) –.06 (.24)Urban .14 (.10) .05 (.10) –.01 (.10)Rural –.25 (.36) –.52 (.35) –.24 (.37)

Dynamic variablesAuthentic questions .04* (.01) .19 (.13)Student questions .54*** (.04) 5.49*** (.33)Uptake .06* (.02) .39 (.26)High-level evaluation .08 (.10) –.77 (.87)High cognitive level .00 (.02) .09 (.11)

Note. Standard errors in parentheses.*p < .05. **p < .005. ***p < .0005 (two-tailed).

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additional analyses of variances we conducted (results not shown), we found, notsurprisingly, that thedensityofauthenticquestionsanduptake issignificantlyhigherin dialogic spells than in monologic spells. This suggests that, although high- andlow-track classes have roughly similar aggregate distributions of authentic ques-tions and uptake, there are significant differences by track with respect to the cluster-ing of such questions within dialogic spells, with authentic questions and uptaketending to be relatively dispersed in low-track classes, and more likely to be struc-tured systematically within dialogic spells in high-track classes.

In the second column of Table 11, we introduce our dynamic measures of in-struction into the analysis. Here the effects of the dynamic variables are cumula-tive, so that we are asking whether the cumulative number of authentic questions,student questions, uptake, high-level evaluations, and questions with high cogni-tive level at any given moment in an instructional episode is associated with thesubsequent onset of a dialogic spell. Thus, if dialogic spells emerge as aconsequence of dialogic bids by teachers or students, we should find positive asso-ciations between cumulative features of previous questions and the subsequentemergence of dialogic discourse. Conversely, if dialogic spells are random with re-spect to the cumulative features of previous questions, no such associations shouldappear. The results of this model indicate that our cumulative measures of authen-tic questions, student questions, and uptake are in indeed associated with the sub-sequent onset of a dialogic spell. The effect of student questions is particularlynoteworthy, with one student question raising the rate of onset of a dialogic spellby 72%6 relative to instructional episodes in which no student question is ob-served. Note, moreover, that these models specify multiplicative (and hence non-linear) effects of our cumulative measures; hence, our estimates imply, ceteris pari-bus, that the rate of a dialogic spell is 194% higher7 in classroom episodes in whichtwo student questions are observed relative to those in which no such questions areobserved. Two other of our dialogic bid measures, authentic questions and uptake,have significant effects in Model 2. Thus, the effect of one prior authentic questionraises the rate of onset of a dialogic spell by 4%,8 whereas the effect of, for exam-ple, five prior authentic questions raises the rate of onset by 22%.9 Similarly, the ef-fect of one prior instance of uptake raises the rate of onset of a dialogic spell by6%,10 whereas the effect of, for example, four prior instances of uptake raises therate of onset by 27%.11

In the third column, we estimate a similar model except that the dynamic predic-tors consist of our moving average measures, defined over the previous five ques-

182 NYSTRAND ET AL.

6100*[exp(.54) – 1] = 71.6.7100*[exp(2 * .54) – 1] = 194.5.8100*[exp(.04) – 1] = 4.08.9100*[exp(5 * .04) – 1] = 22.14.10100*[exp(.06) – 1] = 6.18.11100*[exp(4 * .06) – 1] = 27.12.

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tions, instead of cumulatively over the entire episode. Note that our moving averagemeasures can assume only six possible values (0, .2, .4, .6, .8, and 1.0) in contrastwith our cumulative measures, which can assume any nonnegative integer value.These differences are reflected in the parameter estimates, which differ by an orderof magnitude for our dynamic measures in the last two columns of Table 11.

Two findings in Model 3 are particularly salient. First, once again student ques-tions are strongly associated with the onset of dialogic spells, with the occurrenceof one student question in the last five questions raising the rate of a dialogic spellby 200%12 relative to an instructional episode in which no student question is ob-served in the last five questions. Authentic questions and uptake have positive co-efficients but, unlike Model 2, they are not statistically significant. Second, the co-efficient for low track, which was –.71 and –.68 in Models 1 and 2, declines inmagnitude to –.40 in Model 3 and is no longer statistically significant. This findingprovides an important clue about why dialogic discourse is so rare in low-trackclasses, suggesting that clusters of student questions (i.e., the occurrence of stu-dent questions within a five-question sequence), which, according to Model 3,show a large and significant association with the onset of a dialogic spell, are rarelyfound in low-track classes.

When Do Students Ask Questions?

If student questions are important for spurring dialogic discourse, what factorsmight, in turn, lead students to ask questions within a classroom setting? We ad-dress this issue in Table 12, which estimates models similar to those of Table 11 butwith student questions as the dependent variable. Model 1 yields a similar patternof findings as in the analogous model in Table 11, including negative coefficientsfor both low-track classes and average fall writing score. Student questions are alsoless likely to occur in classes with more experienced teachers, although the effectis small, with one additional year of experience decreasing the rate of student ques-tions by about 1%.13

In Model 2, we see that cumulative rates of authentic questions, uptake, andhigh-level evaluation are all powerfully associated with student questions. Note thattheeffect forquestionsofhighcognitive level,whichwasclose tozero inTable11fordialogic spells, is negative and statistically significant for student questions in Table12. These findings point to a potential tension within classrooms: While studentquestions appear to spur the onset of dialogic discourse within instructional settings,challenging teacher questions (that is, those posed at high cognitive levels) may posea barrier to active student participation in classroom discourse (via student ques-tions) by reinforcing the voice of the instructor as dominant and authoritative,


12100*[exp(.2 * 5.49) – 1] = 99.8.13exp(–.01) = .99.

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though just how this might play out in any given case would seem to depend on howthe teacher handles student responses to such questions.

In Model 2 in Table 12, the effect of an authentic question is .03; hence, oneprior authentic question raises the rate of onset of a student question by 3%,14

whereas, for example, six prior authentic questions would raise the rate of onset by20%.15 The effect of uptake is .05; hence, one prior instance of uptake raises therate of onset by 5%,16 whereas 10 prior instances of uptake would raise the rate by65%.17 We observe the largest magnitude effect (.12) for high-level evaluation;hence, one prior instance of high-level evaluation raises the rate of onset by 13%,18

whereas three prior instances of high-level evaluation would raise the rate by43%.19 Finally, high cognitive level has a negative effect (–.03); hence, one priorinstance of high cognitive level lowers the rate of onset by 3%,20 whereas, for ex-ample, six prior instances of high cognitive level would lower the rate by 16%.21

Model 3 yields similar results for effects on student questions when the predic-tors are specified as moving averages rather than in a cumulative fashion. As in Ta-ble 11, the most notable difference between Models 2 and 3 is that the negative co-efficient for low track declines in magnitude (from –.37 to –.22) and is notstatistically significant in Model 3. This pattern is consistent with our hypothesisthat classroom discourse is more responsive to local, as opposed to more aggre-gate, aspects of the evolving character of classroom discourse, and that these dif-ferences may better capture observed differences between low- and regular-trackclasses.

In Table 12, Model 3, the estimated coefficient for high-level evaluation is .51; asingle instance would increase the probability of eliciting a student question in thesubsequent five questions by 11%,22 two instances of high-level evaluation wouldincrease the probability by 23%,23 three instances by 36%,24 and so forth.

What Brings on Discussion?

Finally, we ask what features of schools, classes, teachers, and classroom inter-action precipitate discussion during classroom instruction. Recall that we em-

184 NYSTRAND ET AL.

14100*[exp(.03) – 1] = 3.05.15100*[exp(6 * .03) – 1] = 19.72.16100*[exp(.05) – 1] = 5.13.17100*[exp(10 * .05) – 1] = 64.87.18100*[exp(.12) – 1] = 12.75.19100*[exp(3 * .12) – 1] = 43.33.20100*[exp(-.03) – 1] = –2.96.21100*[exp(6 * –.03) – 1] = 16.5.22100*[exp(.2 * .51) – 1] = 10.74.23100*[exp(.4 * .51) – 1] = 22.63.24100*[exp(.6 * .51) – 1] = 35.80.

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ploy a rather specific operational definition of discussion—the unprescriptedexchange of ideas among students and the teacher—as opposed to more com-mon question–answer recitation. The models portrayed in Table 13 are essen-tially the same as those in Tables 11 and 12, with our dynamic measures ofclassroom instruction calculated in terms of the questions that occurred prior towhen discussion began, rather than prior to the question that signaled the be-ginning of a dialogic spell (in Table 11) or a question asked by a student (inTable 12).

In contrast to the results of Tables 11 and 12, none of the fixed attributes ofclasses, teachers, or schools in Table 13 is significantly associated with the onset ofa discussion spell. The coefficient for low track, which has the largest association


TABLE 12Event History Analysis of Transitions Into Students Asking Questions,

Using a Cox Model With Fixed, Cumulative Time-Varying Covariates, andMoving Average Time-Varying Covariates


Model 2: Fixed +Cumulative Variables

Model 3: Fixed +Moving Averages


Class SES .54*** (.12) .51*** (.12) .42*** (.12)Class size .02** (.01) –.02** (.01) –.02*** (.01)Grade (1 = ninth) .02 (.08) –.08 (.08) –.27** (.08)Subject (1 = English) .19** (.06) –.15* (.06) –.13* (.06)

TrackLow track –.39** (.12) –.37** (.12) –.22 (.12)High track .11 (.10) .15 (.09) .18 (.09)Other track .32*** (.08) .33*** (.08) .27** (.08)

% African American –.02 (.40) .10 (.40) .50 (.39)% Hispanic .46 (.36) .39 (.36) –.12 (.36)% Female .22 (.23) .10 (.23) –.38 (.23)Fall writing score –.21** (.07) .00 (1.00) .00 (1.00)Teacher characteristics

Sex (1 = female) .06 (.06) .04 (.06) .04 (.06)Years teaching –.01* (.00) –.01* (.00) .00 (.00)

School characteristicsCatholic –.16 (.10) –.20* (.10) –.21* (.10)Urban .05 (.04) .07 (.04) .15** (.05)Rural –.16 (.15) –.11 (.15) .06 (.15)

Dynamic variablesAuthentic questions .03*** (.01) .96*** (.04)Uptake .05*** (.01) 1.05*** (.09)High-level evaluation .12** (.04) .51* (.24)High cognitive level –.03*** (.01) –.37*** (.04)


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with discussion is (–1.97), not statistically significant, probably reflecting thegreater variability of discussion within low-track classes as well as the relative dif-ficulty of estimating this effect given that discussion occurs relatively infrequentlyin instructional settings, let alone those within low track classes. The results fromModel 2, which adds cumulative indicators of dynamic variables as additional pre-dictors, show effects that are generally in the expected direction, but which are notsignificant coefficients. Only in Model 3, which focuses on whether or not a dis-cussion occurs subsequent to each successive set of five questions, do we find sig-

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TABLE 13Event History Analysis of Transitions Into a Discussion Spell, Using a Cox

Model With Fixed, Cumulative Time-Varying Covariates, and MovingAverage Time-Varying Covariates


Model 2: Fixed +CumulativeVariables

Model 3: FixedVariables + Moving

Averages


Class SES –.18 (.75) –.45 (.78) –.62 (.79)Class size –.03 (.03) –.04 (.03) –.05 (.03)Grade (1 = ninth) .51 (.48) .41 (.51) –.01 (.51)Subject (1 = English) –.25 (.36) –.52 (.38) –.42 (.37)

TrackLow track –1.97 (1.10) –1.99 (1.11) –2.05 (1.11)High track –.14 (.59) –.10 (.52) –.08 (.53)Other track .02 (.50) –.09 (.49) –.20 (.50)

% African American 1.28 (2.19) 1.64 (2.16) 2.11 (2.20)% Hispanic .01 (2.05) –.07 (2.08) –.22 (2.04)% Female 1.04 (1.36) .91 (1.43) .18 (1.48)Fall writing score .39 (.45) .52 (.46) .61 (.45)Teacher characteristics

Sex (1 = female) .23 (.36) .23 (.38) .23 (.38)Years teaching –.01 (.02) –.01 (.02) –.01 (.02)

School characteristicsCatholic .17 (.57) .35 (.59) .21 (.57)Urban .32 (.30) .30 (.31) .37 (.31)Rural –.50 (1.00) –.32 (1.03) –.19 (1.03)

Dynamic variablesAuthentic questions .01 (.02) .43 (.29)Student questions .08 (.05) 1.38* (.70)Uptake .04 (.03) 2.02*** (.55)High-level evaluation .06 (.15) –.37 (2.02)High cognitive level .04 (.03) .60* (.24)


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nificant predictors. Here, as in previous tables, the results imply that discussion oc-curs more in response to proximal features of discourse—more likely to occurwhen immediately preceded by high proportions of student questions, uptake, andquestions with high cognitive demands. Cognitive level thus exerts two competinginfluences on discussion, with a positive direct impact counterbalanced by a nega-tive indirect effect via its negative impact on student questions (see Table 12),which is to say, challenging teacher questions often stimulate discussion at thesame time they tend to discourage student questions.

A Dynamic Model of Unfolding Classroom Discourse

In Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, dialogically organized instruction makes public spacefor student responses, eliciting and accommodating the differing values, beliefs,and perspectives of the conversants, and ideally including the voices of differentclasses, races, ages, and genders. Dialogically organized instruction is fueled bysuch pluralism and heteroglossia, and the extent of social interaction clearlyshapes both instruction and learning. To the extent that classroom interaction isdialogic, the balance of discourse is symmetrical so that the teacher’s voice is butone voice among many, albeit a critically important one. Yet repeated empiricalfindings that monologic discourse is prevalent across American classrooms—ourprevious studies, for example, found that 85% of the classes we observed were de-voted to some combination of preplanned lecture, recitation, and seatwork(Nystrand, 1997; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991a)—clearly suggest that monologicdiscourse dominates within classrooms. Indeed, the force of monologic discoursewithin the classroom exerts considerable inertia so that classroom interaction tendsto continue in direction and character unless someone, invariably the teacher,counteracts this force, either directly by doing something, or indirectly by allowinga shift to occur. Sequences of dialogic whole classroom discourse take three essen-tial forms distinguished by the role played by the teacher.

Teacher moves: Priming the possibilities for dialogic discourse. Teachershave a number of options for overcoming the monologic inertia of normal class-room discourse. They can act in direct ways to shift classroom discourse frommonologic to dialogic patterns with little or no transition, for example, by posing aparticularly timely or provocative question. But a shift from monologic to dialogicdiscourse can also be foreshadowed in indirect ways, for example by the teacher’srepeated efforts to elicit student contributions that lay the ground for such a shift.The dialogic bids include actively welcoming and soliciting student ideas and ob-servations by following up their responses, and opening the floor to students byasking questions that do not have predetermined answers. Teachers may also breakthe mold by deliberately withholding or skipping their evaluation of students’ re-


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sponses, for example, allowing a student remark to substitute for their evaluation,and encouraging students to respond to each other. All these moves “kindle” thepossibilities of discussion and substantive interaction. All such efforts are bids fordialogicality, and each such bid, our study shows, increases the probability ofdialogic interaction cumulatively.

Student moves: Engaged response. Recitation patterns can also breakdown when students take up these bids by freely voicing their own ideas andasking engaged questions. If appropriate teacher moves provide the “kindling”for dialogic interaction, such key student moves provide the “spark.” Studentquestions about the content of instruction, for example, heighten the dialogic po-tential of classroom discourse, and they are an important source of dialogic bidsin their own right.25 Unlike teachers, students don’t ask questions when they al-ready know the answer, but instead typically pose questions eliciting additionalinformation and/or clarifying something the teacher has said. And because stu-dents’ questions follow up something someone else has said, they especiallyhave the power to enhance the dialogicality of classroom discourse when theteacher, rather than answering the question and quickly getting back to the les-son plan, allows classroom talk to move in directions prompted by the question.As a consequence, we might expect students, as well as the teacher, to play keyroles in initiating sequences of dialogic discourse. Clusters of student questionsespecially, we find, carry dialogic weight, even when interrupted by teacherquestions, indicating movement away from recitation and test questions to moresubstantively interactive dialogic discourse.

Ignition: Discussion. When conditions are right, especially including stu-dent uptake of dialogic bids offered by the teacher, the result is a critical discoursemass that yields open discussion in which teachers and their students work out un-derstandings face-to-face—the quintessential form of dialogic interaction. Whenthis happens, the teacher’s role is limited mainly to getting and then keeping theball rolling, leaving it to students to make most of the substantive observations.Discussion tends to be marked by the absence of questions, either by teacher orstudents, except for purposes of clarification. Discussion is not about the transmis-sion and recitation of information; the teacher’s role is not mainly that of asking

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25Wells (personal communication, December 24, 2000) notes that a “fairly common type of studentbid in the DICEP (Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project) data takes the form of thestudent first bidding for a turn and then, when given the floor, giving some information—experience,opinion, conjecture—that s/he thinks is relevant to the topic under discussion. The onus is then on theteacher to respond with uptake and encouragement of further development of the student’s sub-topic.”For more on DICEP, see http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:8000/WebZ/html/homeframe.html:sessionid=0?style=rss:next=html/homeframe.html:bad=html/homeframe.html

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questions to see how much students knew and to go over the points they did not yetunderstand. Instead, discussion is about figuring things out—in face-to-face dis-cussion, teacher and students together.

The following brief, transcribed excerpt from a ninth-grade English lesson onMark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, illustrates the three phases ofthis model of dialogic interaction. The teacher (a) primes the possibilitiesdialogically by inviting students to speculate about possible examples of racism inthe novel. Soon after, (b) an engaged student wonders if Twain was merely beinghistorically accurate, not racist, when he referred to “niggers”: “Isn’t [Twain] be-ing historically accurate when he says ‘those niggers’?” asks Sam. “So why is itracist?” This in turn gives way to (c) an open discussion of racism in The Adven-tures of Huckleberry Finn:

(a) Teacher move dialogically priming the possibility for discussion

Ms. Turner: Can you recall things from Huck Finn that, um, seemed racist toyou?

Tasha: Miss Watson’s, that guy she’s always calling ‘Miss Watson’snigger.’

Ms. Turner: Ok. Jim?Jim: Well, they sell the slaves. Also, they said in one part, ‘fetch in the

nigger.’Ms. Turner: [Yeah

Jim: [and it’s like, you know, it’s like you’re saying to a dog, ‘Here,boy.’

Ms. Turner: Right—‘We fetched in the niggers to have prayers.’ Yeah, that’sin probably the first couple of pages. Good. Sam?

(b) Engaged student response

Sam: Isn’t he being historically accurate when he says ‘those niggers’?Ms. Turner: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Sam: So why is it racist?Ms. Turner: Well this—that’s kind of what I was trying to bring out on the

first day—is that Twain is really just trying to mirror the society,and especially the society of Missouri at the time, but Twain isusing the word rather sarcastically. I mean, you’re right, he’s be-ing historically accurate, but he’s also trying to make a point, um,about the different people who are saying things like that. Howdid that make you guys feel, I mean what was your gut reaction toall that? Linda?

Linda: Ashamed.Ms. Turner: In what way?

(c) Ignition: Discussion

Linda: That the one that it was for was wanted to believe that it wassomething else.


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Cassie: Everyone claims it’s so historical, you can find that anywhere‘nigger,’you know, you just hear that and people always think it’sso historical.

Ms. Turner: Like, oh, we wouldn’t do that anymore.Cassie: Yeah, like oh, we’re not primitive. You know, and it’s not, I mean,

everybody does that, all the time. Well, not everybody, but peo-ple, people do that people can’t get in[to] apartment buildings be-cause they’re black.

Ms. Turner: Um-hm.Jim: They can’t go to certain stores because they’re black, or they’re

arrested because they’re black. You know, it’s just, I mean, every-body is always saying how historical it is, and it’s right here, andit’s right now.

Here we can see that, metaphorically, getting a discussion going is a little likebuilding a fire: With enough kindling of the right sort, accompanied by patience, andalong with the spark of student engagement, ignition is possible, though perhaps noton teachers’ first or second try (see Marshall, Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995, for ex-amination of the challenges teachers must overcome to get discussion going).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Current understanding of instructional processes and classroom discourse hasbeen shaped, on the one hand, by quantitative studies that have isolated globalcharacteristics of effective classroom discourse and, on the other, by case studiesthat have provided accounts and analyses of numerous individual lessons. Eachkind of research has idiosyncratic limitations. On the one hand, the individual na-ture of case studies makes it difficult to generalize beyond the individual cases,which consequently limits the use of such studies to investigate the general effectsof classroom discourse on student learning. On the other hand, the abstracting anddecontextualizing character of statistical studies identifying (and reifying) globalcharacteristics of effective classroom discourse, even when associations withachievement are demonstrated, makes it difficult to understand the structure of theevent and to know how to implement the findings. Nevertheless, traditional ap-proaches to the study of schools have, as a result, tended to neglect what is intu-itively important about the classroom environment, which is that skilled teachersenliven the learning experience by engaging their students in active inquiry, in con-trast to the more typical teaching environment, which is characterized by rotememorization and recitation of instructional materials.

We argue that our findings provide tentative but intriguing clues about what ed-ucators might take as factors important to incorporate into their teaching. In ourown previous research, for example, we have concluded that teachers will do well

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to ask their students authentic questions. Yet this kind of advice, sound as it maybe, has limitations for teachers who must figure out how and when best to do it.What has been missing is a general understanding of how effective classroom dis-course unfolds, how it is initiated, and just what the teacher’s role is in shaping it.By applying methods of event history analysis to a rich and extensive data set, weboth address these issues and demonstrate the value of time-sensitive quantitativemethods for research on both discourse and instruction.

As an example of what our dynamic analysis revealed that the static analysisobscured, consider the case of instruction in low-track classes. Previously, we re-ported that authentic questions and uptake occurred with similar frequency inhigh- and low-track classes. This study does not contradict that finding, but itshows that the pattern and clustering of authentic questions, uptake, and other ele-ments of dialogic instruction are much less likely to occur as a sequence inlow-track classes. Moreover, student questions, which help precipitate dialogicspells and which are themselves important elements of dialogic spells, occur infre-quently in low-track classes. Examination of global characteristics of discourseobscured these crucial findings, since it is the patterning and sequencing of theseelements, not their global averages, which appear important to classroom dis-course.

These findings are consistent with our prior theoretical conceptualization ofclassroominstruction,which is that instruction isbest thoughtofnot in termsofwhatteachers do to students, but what teachers and students do together (Nystrand &Gamoran, 1991). Our findings in this article reaffirm this perspective. In the past, wesupported our view by showing that rates of off-task behavior were higher, and ratesof completing assignments were lower in low-track classes; this was part of the rea-son for achievement disadvantages of low-track students. This article complementsthose findings by showing that rates of student questions are also lower in low-trackclasses. Yet we are emphatically not saying that low-track students are “at fault” fortheir own disadvantages, nor are we “blaming” teachers for the low achievement oflow-track students. Nevertheless, our results emphasize the importance of under-standing teacher and student behaviors, as reflected in the questions they pose, as adynamic process. Our event history analyses show how the absence of student ques-tions in low-trackclasses fails toprecipitatedialogic spells, andat thesame timehowthe absence of clusters of dialogic teacher questions inhibits the emergence of stu-dent questions. In low-track classes, therefore, neither teachers nor students tend tooffer dialogic bids, and hence monologic forms of discourse predominate in thesetracks to an even greater degree than in other tracks.

Although classroom discourse is the principal medium of learning inschool—Cazden (1988) calls it “the language of learning”—teachers rarely payattention to how they structure it. Understandably, they focus mainly on whatthey are teaching and what their students are learning; at best, awareness ofclassroom discourse itself is subsidiary. Our findings suggests that this is unfor-


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tunate since the structure, quality, and flow of classroom discourse are all likelyto affect what students learn and how well they learn it. Yet, at present, teacherspossess little systematic information about these connections, in part becausepast research has often been inattentive to the role of discourse in learning. Ourwork addresses this issue in several ways, by modeling the pulse of classroomdiscourse and assessing the role of authentic questions, student questions, anduptake, for example, in terms of their cumulative and proximal role in structur-ing the foundation for dialogic zones of interaction. Student–teacher interac-tion—indeed even individual teacher questions—have their roots in previous in-teractions, with current interactions carrying implications for subsequent ones.Understanding how classroom discourse unfolds and their constitutive role in theprocess, thus, may help teachers gain informed control over how they interactwith students and how they might create instructional settings that both engagestudents and foster learning.

Since its inception in the 1970s, discourse analysis has been an exclusive zoneof qualitative research. Indeed, for many, “quantitative discourse analysis” is anoxymoron; a recent review of qualitative and quantitative methods in discourse re-search (Lazaraton, 2002) reports, “Remarkably, it was impossible to locate a pub-lished applied linguistics study which claims to be both discourse analytic andquantitative in nature” (p. 34). We believe that discourse event history analysis, us-ing naturalistic, observational data, may change this state of affairs. Though per-haps less nuanced than conversation analysis (CA), event history analysis is wellsuited, like CA, to investigating the dynamics of unfolding discourse. Its promise,demonstrated in our study examining discourse as an evolving process while as-sessing the effects of hypothesized variables on this unfolding process, resides inits power to analyze large numbers of conversant interactions with attention to con-textual factors, on the one hand, and dynamic patterning of unfolding discourse, onthe other, systematically contrasting both macro- and microsocial effects.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research in this study was supported by two awards from the U.S. Depart-ment of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement: Datawere collected during 1986 through 1989 at the National Research Center on Ef-fective Secondary Schools, and were supported by a grant from the Office of Ed-ucational Research and Improvement (Award G–008690007–89); the study re-ported here is based partly on results from that study and were reported inNystrand (1997), Nystrand and Gamoran (1991), and Gamoran and Nystrand(1991). Data analysis for the study reported here was conducted during 1997through 1999 at the National Research Center on English Learning and Achieve-ment and was supported by a grant from the Office of Educational Research and

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Improvement (Award R305A60005). However, the views expressed herein arethose of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the supportingagencies. James Fehrenbacher provided computer programming used to weightquestions and display question plots. The authors appreciate the comments ofArthur Applebee, David Bloome, Samantha Caughlan, Cecilia Ford, GeorgeHillocks, Douglas Maynard, and Gordon Wells.

Wu was a National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement(CELA) researcher at the time of the study. Both Long and Zeiser were researchassistants at the time of the study.

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APPENDIX

Our analyses employ continuous time even history regression methods, which as-sume that the underlying time dimension is a continuous quantity. We define keyquantities of interest under this assumption. Let T denote the random variable giv-ing the time of the event for a given case and let t denote the range of times duringwhich the case might be observed. Note then that the period corresponding to t < Treflects times prior to the event of interest, while the period characterized by t ≥ Treflects times after the event has occurred.

A key quantity of interest, which forms the outcome to be modeled in a hazardregression, is the hazard rate. It is defined by

whereε is taken tobeasmallpositivequantity.Thenumerator inEquation1gives theprobability that the event occurs for a given case during the interval between t and t +ε, given that the case has not yet experienced the event of interest, that is, that T, thetimeof theevent, isgreater than t, the timeatwhichweevaluate thevalueofλ(t).Thisprobability in Equation 1 is divided by ε, which is taken to be a positive quantity;hence, a hazard rate refers to a probability per unit time. Because time is assumed tobe a continuous quantity, it follows that both t and λ(t) can take an infinite number ofvalues. As a result, a necessary aspect of Equation 1 is the limit over ε, which allowsλ(t) to be defined over all possible values of t.

The quantity λ(t) functions as the dependent variable in our analyses, in muchthe same way as the quantity log(p/1 – p) is the outcome of interest in a logistic re-gression. As noted earlier, we operationalize ”time” in our analyses by notingwhere in a sequence of questions a dialogic spell, student question, or discussionemerges. Then, under these assumptions, our main analytic object is to identify theantecedents of dialogic spells, student questions, and discussions, examining, forexample, how teacher questions are involved in the emergence of these outcomes.To do so, we introduce covariates that capture the role of teacher questions, wherethe effect of teacher questions is allowed to increase (or decrease) the rate at which

196 NYSTRAND ET AL.

0

Pr ( | )(t) = lim (1)

t T t T t

ε

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a dialogic spell, student question, or discussion emerges. We employ a standardproportional hazard specification to incorporate the effects of our covariates. Moreformally, let t = 1, … J index questions within an instructional episode and let λ de-note the rate at which dialogic spells, discussion spells, or spells of consecutivestudent questions are generated. Then a proportional hazard specification specifiesthe rate at which such spells are generated as:

λ(t) = λ 0(t) exp(β 1 x1(t) + β 2 x2 + … + β k(t)xk) (2)

The model in Equation 2 contains a baseline rate, λ 0(t), analogous to the mor-tality rate for a reference group of individuals or to the intercept in a linear or logis-tic regression model. (Recall that the intercept in a linear or logistic regression re-fers to the group of individuals for whom all values of the covariates are zero—forexample, White males born between 1940 and 1944 with 12 years of schoolingcompleted. This is true as well for the baseline hazard rate, λ 0(t), except that thisquantity is permitted to vary with time—for example, the age-specific mortalityrate for White males born between 1940 and 1945 with 12 years of schooling com-pleted.) Because we lack theory on how λ 0(t) might vary across an instructionalepisode, we use a model developed by Cox (1972), which makes only weak as-sumptions about the functional form for the quantity λ 0(t), and use Cox’s methodof partial likelihood (Cox, 1972; Cox & Oakes, 1984) to estimate these models.Note also that in Equation 2, we have written x1(t) to emphasize that the predictorcovariates can be time-varying.

The specification in Equation 2 is termed a proportional hazard model becausecovariates have so-called proportional effects on the hazard rate λ(t). To see this,suppose that x1 is a dummy variable equal to 1 for ninth-grade classes and 0 foreighth-grade classes. Then holding constant all other covariates in the model, λ(t)for ninth-grade classes will be given by

λ (9th grade)(t) = λ 0 exp(β1*1)

whereas that for eighth-grade classes will be given by

λ(8th grade)(t) = λ0 exp(β1*0)

Note that the ratio of these two terms is given by

hence, under this specification, ninth-grade classes will differ from eighth-gradeclasses by the quantity exp(β1). In particular, note negative values of β1 imply thatexp(β1) < 1, whereas positive values of β1 imply that exp(β1) > 1; similarly, β1 = 0implies that exp(β1) = 1, because the corresponding rates for the two groups areequal.


1(9th grade)( )

exp( )(8th grade)( )

t

t

λ βλ

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To see this concretely, suppose that the outcome is the rate for the transition to adialogic spell and that β1 has a positive effect estimated as 0.2. Then β1 = 0.2 corre-sponds to exp(0.2) = 1.22, which translated into words states that the rate ofdialogic spells is 22% higher in ninth-grade classes than in eighth-grade classes, inwhich 22% = 100% × [exp(0.2) – 1]. Conversely, suppose that β1 has a negative ef-fect estimated as –0.2. Then β1 = –0.2 corresponds to exp(–0.2) = 0.82, whichtranslated into words states that the rate of dialogic spells is 18% lower inninth-grade classes than in eighth-grade classes, in which –18% = 100% ×[exp(–0.2) – 1].

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