Authors: Mitchell J. Nathan and Suyeon Kim

July 2007, 33 pp.

Abstract: This descriptive study analyzes instructional conversation in a middle school mathematics class. We set out to investigate how teachers regulate student participation in classroom discussions and how this regulation affects students’ mathematical talk and conceptual reasoning. We examined the cognitive complexity of the teacher’s elicitations — questions and provocative statements — intended to invite student participation.

We found that the teacher systematically regulated the cognitive complexity of his elicitations in response to students’ responses. Teacher elicitation strategies scaffolded students’ classroom participation and mental processing in a manner that helped them advance from the factual-knowledge level to the metaprocessing level of mathematical discourse. This work suggests that teachers can promote students’ higher-level cognitive reasoning through metaprocess elicitations and that participants in reform classrooms need to co-construct common ground.

Keywords: socially mediated learning, feedback, mathematics education, discourse processes

Read the full working paper: Regulation of Teacher Elicitations and the Impact on Student Participation and Cognition (PDF)