Abstract

When an instructor repeats or "revoices" the words or ideas that a student has just said, what is the instructor's goal? What results can this tactic bring? In order to lay the groundwork for a broader investigation of these questions, video recordings were viewed of one-on-one interviews of students populating a discussion-based modern physics-like course taken by non-physics science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors at a medium-sized public university. This work focuses on a one particular interview which reveals several functions of this revoicing technique. For the interview in question, revoicing instances were identified and put into three inflection type categories: declarative, interrogative, and ambiguous. The types of student responses to each instance were then identified and categorized by the level of student engagement they represented. Student engagement level was then compared for the various inflection types of the revoicing instances. It was found that interrogative revoicing had a higher likelihood of resulting in a response with a high level of student engagement, whereas declarative revoicing resulted more often in a response with a low level of student engagement. In the future, additional interviews from the data set can be analyzed to determine if this same pattern of engagement level holds for other students.

Advisor

Thomas Brown

Committee Member

Jorge Méndez

Committee Member

Andrew Roberts

Date of Degree

2019

Language

english

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

College

Science, Engineering and Technology

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Rights Statement

In Copyright