ABSTRACT
In our research, we define productive academic talk as talk that is inclusive and advances the participants’ sense making of scientific phenomena and/or their solutions to an engineering design problem. We are investigating productive academic talk in a third-grade (in the United States) classroom in an under-resourced school that is challenged to meet the academic needs of its students. We share data collected in the context of project-based science and engineering teaching as the students designed, constructed, tested, and redesigned toys, informed by investigations and readings designed to support their growing understanding of force and motion. The data include: observations, interviews, student artefacts, and assessments. Analyses reveal the multiple purposes that talk served as well as the interplay of factors that contributed to and inhibited productive academic talk. These factors included: the groupings of the students, the specific nature of the task, the teachers’ moves, and the tools to which students had access (including a digital application that enabled student pairs to collaborate in the design and animation of a model of their toys). We discuss the implications in terms of classroom culture as well as curricular and pedagogical supports.
