good-practice-in-science-teaching-what-research-has-to-say

146 MARIA EVAGOROU AND JONATHAN OSBORNE
Authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing
it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no
spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal
consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either
totally affirm it, or totally reject it.
The latter phenomenon is particularly apparent in students’ response to science
as can be seen from the following excerpt (Osborne and Collins, 2001,
p. 452):
Cheryl : ...so when they teach you science, you know that this is it, okay
There is nothing, you can’t prove it wrong.
Leena : In what way does that make it different to other subjects though
Shakira : I mean, you just have to accept the facts, don’t you
Dialogic interaction, in contrast, is the normal kind of daily discourse we experience.
Its use provides a means for the students to work collaboratively in
developing their knowledge. As Alexander (2004, p. 34) states, discussion is
‘the exchange of ideas with a view of sharing information and solving problems’
and dialogue is about ‘achieving common understanding through structured
and cumulative questioning’. As he argues, ‘Discussion and dialogue are
the rarest yet the most cognitively potent elements in the basic repertoire of
classroom talk’ (2005, p. 30). Mercer and Littleton (2007, p. 25), who have
investigated collaborative classroom talk, argue that it is ‘more than children
working together ...participants are engaged in a coordinated, continuing attempt
to solve a problem or in some other way construct common knowledge’.
And indeed, their research on the use of small group discussions in the teaching
of science in primary schools has shown that it develops both students’
knowledge and student reasoning (Mercer et al., 2004).
Findings from previous studies in the UK have also shown that wellstructured
oral and collaborative activities ‘maintain children’s time on task
more consistently than do solitary written and text-based task’ (Alexander,
2004, p. 14) and when engaged in dialogic teaching, the learners develop interactive
skills such as listening, responding, asking questions, presenting and
evaluating ideas (Alexander, 2004). Other studies (Azmitia and Montgomery,
1993) show that the quality of the children’s dialogue is a significant predictor
of their problem-solving abilities, a finding that suggests that improving
the quality of the dialogic interaction can also improve students’ learning. In
higher education, too, there is good evidence that disrupting the traditional
lecture format with small group discussions of the lecture material leads to
enhanced understanding (Smith et al., 2009). Given the body of evidence for
its value, however, why is it such a minimal feature of science classrooms
First, the technique is unfamiliar and challenging and its use unsettles
teachers’ sense of competence and confidence, particularly when the use of