Student participation as the focus of action research

Vol.20,No.2(2015)
Studia paedagogica

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse changes in participation of students in classroom discourse which arose due to their teachers' involvement in an action research project on implementation of principles of dialogic teaching. Participation is operationalized as: (i) an amount of time during which students speak; (ii) an opportunity given to students to produce more complex utterances; (iii) a triadic interaction, which means spontaneous communication between more participants than one teacher and one student. Using quantitative analysis, we show that student participation was significantly strengthened in all of the above-mentioned parameters in the classes under observation. Finally, we use qualitative analysis to identify mechanisms that lead to this result.

Keywords:
classroom discourse; dialogic education; student participation; action research
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