ABSTRACT
During discussions, students and teacher interact with one another by listening, thinking, and sharing. As the participants discuss a topic, they think about different points of view and new information. Although discussion is a useful instructional strategy to help students learn in any content area, its dependence on social interactions and participation also encourages students to “learn how to talk” with others. This is a powerful skill for citizens in a democracy, where one of the many roles is a willingness and ability to interact with others on matters of common concern (Engle & Ochoa, 1988; Gross & Zeleny, 1958; Hess, 2000; Parker, 1996). Contradicting this positive view of discussion, however, are research ndings that suggest it is rarely used in America’s classrooms. Recitation persists in classrooms, despite its frequent criticisms (Cazden, 1988; Goodlad, 1984; Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969; Stodolsky, Ferguson, & Wimpelberg, 1981), and despite the fact that teachers claim to use discussion frequently. As an example, researchers have observed that a teacher talked for 87.8% of the class period during the portion of the lesson he claimed used discussion (Swift & Gooding, 1983). Before exploring discussion further, it is important to briey clarify the difference between classroom discussion and recitation. Recitation and discussion are two methods of instruction with different characteristics. Recitation is characterized (Bellack, Kliebard, Hyman, & Smith, 1966; Gall & Gall, 1990; Wilen & White, 1991) as a teacher-dominated classroom activity, typically entailing an interaction pattern between teacher and student similar to:
teacher-initiated statement/question ¤ student response ¤ teacher feedback/evaluation
Good (1983) denes recitation as a “traditional learning exercise and teaching procedure in which students repeat orally or explain material learned by individual study or previously presented by the teacher and in response to questions raised by the teacher” (p. 478). In contrast to this, Wilen and White (1991) dene discussion as a “structured conversation in which participants work cooperatively to present, examine, compare, and understand often diverse views about an academic topic or issue” (p. 492).
