Teachers’ Discourse Strategies for Supporting LearningThrough InquiryWilliam A. Sandoval, Kenneth DaniszewskiUniversity of California, Los AngelesJames P. Spillane, Brian J. ReiserNorthwestern UniversityPresented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research AssociationMontreal, April 19-23, 1999Session: “Staging, Sustaining, and Establishing Norms:Characterizing How Science Teachers Facilitate Inquiry”Chairs: Iris Tabak & Ben Loh, Northwestern UniversityThis work was funded in part by a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation’sCognitive Studies of Educational Practice, to Brian J. Reiser and James P. Spillane. Thefindings and conclusions reported here represent the opinions of the authors, and donot necessarily reflect the views of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. We thank allthe members of the BGuILE project for their contributions to this work, especially IrisTabak, TJ Leone, and Richard Leider. We are grateful to Hyeok Hsun and Shaziti Amanfor their help in conducting classroom observations. We especially thank DavidGoodspeed, Jim Burnside, and their students for their enthusiastic participation. Wealso thank Yasmin Kafai, Cynthia Ching, Brian Foley, and Noel Enyedy for helpfuldiscussions of this data.ABSTRACTInquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different fromtypical didactic science instruction. Two of the central challenges in teaching sciencethrough inquiry are that a) students’ inquiry must productively engage them inexploration and reasoning about central issues in the domain; and b) students need tobe able to generalize such specific inquiry experiences to broader, formal domaintheories. These challenges reflect a tension in inquiry-based science learning betweenstudents’ inquiry goals and instructional goals that students master formal domainconcepts and theories. This paper explores how two teachers concurrently enacting thesame inquiry-based unit on evolution structure activity and discourse in their classroomactivities to connect students’ computer-based inquiry experiences to formal domaintheories. our analyses shows that each teacher uses whole-class discussions as a majorvehicle for connecting students’ understanding to formal domain theories. Each teacher,however, structures the discourse in their discussions quite differently. We interpretthese differences as each teacher navigating a set of trade-offs to balance, on the onehand, opportunities for students’ to actively develop their own understandings, and onthe other, their concerns that students’ develop normative understandings of the theoryof natural selection. We identify several dimensions of trade-offs and suggest how eachof these teachers’ choices on these dimensions shapes discourse, and thus students’opportunities for learning, within their classrooms.Teachers’ discourse strategies 1INTRODUCTIONInquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different fromtypical didactic science instruction. Two of the central challenges in teaching sciencethrough inquiry are that a) students’ inquiry must productively engage them inexploration and reasoning about central issues in the domain; and b) students need tobe able to generalize such specific inquiry experiences to broader, formal domaintheories. These challenges reflect a tension in inquiry-based science learning betweenstudents’ inquiry goals and instructional goals that students master formal domainconcepts and theories (Hammer, 1997; Lampert, 1995). Over the last few years, theBGuILE project has been developing software-based guided inquiry environments toproductively engage high school students’ explorations into key concepts of evolutionby natural selection (Sandoval & Reiser, 1998; Tabak, Smith, Sandoval, & Reiser, 1996).These software learning environments guide students in productive investigation ofkey evolutionary principles.This paper examines the efforts of two teachers to address the second challengementioned above, connecting students’ inquiry experiences to broader concepts in thedomain of evolutionary biology, when enacting a BGuILE unit on evolution. This unit isfocused on developing both students’ understanding of evolution by natural selectionand their abilities to construct and evaluate scientific explanations (Sandoval & Reiser,1997). A guiding premise of this work is that students’ inquiry experiences must bewoven into the regular fabric of classroom activity, by enabling teachers to transformclassroom activities that they already use to teach evolution (Tabak & Reiser, 1997a).The idea is to encourage teachers to create a culture of inquiry that permeates all of theactivities in their classrooms.We focus our examination of these teachers’ practice around three questions. First, whatkinds of activities do these teachers use surrounding students’ inquiry experiences tosupport their abstraction of a general understanding of the theory of evolution, and ofscientific argumentation? More crucially, how are such activities structured to supportthese generalizations, and to sustain a “culture of inquiry” in the classroom? Second,how do teachers structure classroom discourse within these activities, and how dodiscourse patterns affect students’ opportunities to learn? We are especially interestedTeachers’ discourse strategies 2to identify specific discourse strategies (Gumperz, 1982) that teachers use to shapediscourse during classroom activities and document how teachers’ discourse strategiesaffect how students participate and what they say. Our third broad question is to askhow activity structures and discourse strategies are related. How does the structure of aparticular activity constrain or afford different discourse strategies? Alternatively,discourse strategies may be idiosyncratic to each teacher, across whatever activitystructures they use in their classrooms.We argue that in striving to connect students’ inquiry to formal science theories,teachers must negotiate a series of trade-offs regarding the kinds of activities they selectto supplement inquiry (e.g., labs, discussions). These trade-offs include the way theystructure these activities with respect to student participation and the content of theactivity, and the extent to which their own discourse strategies support a stance ofinquiry and active construction of scientific knowledge versus an orientation towardcontent mastery. Below, we briefly