Measuring adaptive teaching in classroom discourse: Effects on student learning in elementary science education

Abstract

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Adaptive teaching is considered fundamental to teaching quality and student learning. It describes teachers’ practices of adjusting their instruction to students’ diverse needs and levels of understanding. Adaptive teaching on a micro level has also been labeled as contingent support and has been shown to be effective in one-to-one and small-group settings. In the literature, the interplay of teachers’ diagnostic strategies and instructional prompts aiming at tailored support are emphasized. Our study adds to this research by presenting a reliable measurement approach to adaptive classroom discourse in elementary science which includes a global index and the single indices of diagnostic strategies, instructional support, and student understanding. Applying this coding scheme, we investigate whether N = 17 teachers’ adaptive classroom discourse predicts N = 341 elementary school students’ conceptual understanding of “floating and sinking” on two posttests. In multilevel regression analyses, adaptive classroom discourse was shown to be effective for long-term student learning in the final posttest, while no significant effects were found for the intermediate posttest. Further, the single index of diagnostic strategies in classroom discourse contributed to long-term conceptual restructuring. Overall, teachers rarely acted adaptively which points to the relevance of teacher professional development.

Keywords

• adaptive teaching
• contingent support
• science education
• classroom discourse
• coding scheme