Project Activities
The goal of this project is to iteratively develop and refine Quality Talk. The study will involve iterative development and a quasi-experimental pilot study in the final year. Fourth-grade teachers will participate in designing the mini-lessons, and fourth- and fifth-grade teachers will implement the intervention and provide feedback for refinement. In the third year, eight new teachers and their students will participate in the pilot study. Randomization to treatment or business-as-usual control will occur at the school level.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This study will be conducted in rural school districts in Pennsylvania.
Sample
Approximately 200 to 250 fourth- and fifth-grade students and their 14 teachers will participate in this study.
The Quality Talk intervention was conceptualized as a teacher professional development model to promote student-led classroom discussions that foster critical-analytic thinking and high-level comprehension. The final intervention will include instructional mini-lessons that directly address the necessary student discourse skills. Additionally, the model will be adapted for use with informational text. Mini-lessons will cover the following topics: authentic questions and uptake; analysis, generalization, and speculation questions; epistemic cognition; textual and extra-textual connections; elaborated explanations and reasoning words; and exploratory talk.
Research design and methods
This project involves iterative development and a quasi-experimental pilot study. During the first year, two fourth-grade teachers will build, implement, and refine the mini-lessons. The second year will include two fourth-grade teachers and two fifth-grade teachers and will involve two iterations and refinement of the intervention. In addition, during the second year, researchers will also examine the model in homogenous and heterogenous reading ability groups. The quasi-experimental pilot study will be conducted in the third year and will involve four fourth-grade teachers and four fifth-grade teachers and their students. Randomization to treatment and control will occur at the school level.
Control condition
The control condition will be a business-as-usual condition, and schools will be randomly assigned to either treatment or control.
Key measures
In order to make refinements to the intervention, each mini-lesson will be videotaped and analyzed for usability, feasibility, and fidelity. The Talk Assessment Tool for Teachers (TATT) will be used to analyze video recordings. Teachers will provide input regarding the intervention during monthly half-day workshops. Students' prior knowledge will be assessed using a short two-part researcher-designed assessment for each text used in the mini-lessons. A sentence verification task and a researcher-developed critical-analytic thinking assessment will be used to measure student comprehension. A persuasive essay task will be used as a distal comprehension task. Finally, the Teacher Knowledge of Quality Talk will be used to assess usability, feasibility, and fidelity in addition to the TATT.
Data analytic strategy
In order to determine whether revisions need to be made to the mini-lessons, researchers will identify changes in TATT ratings pre- and post-lesson using ordinal regression models. Researchers will assess whether or not the intervention is associated with improvements in student comprehension outcomes using a 2 (pre-test vs. post-test) x 2 (treatment vs. control) mixed analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) design. A separate ANCOVA will be used for each of the three high-level outcome variables: sentence verification task; persuasive essay task; and critical-analytic thinking assessment.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
The final product of this study will be the fully developed Quality Talk intervention, including lessons and instructional materials for fourth- and fifth-grade students. Peer-reviewed publications will also be produced.
Publications:
Journal article, monograph, or newsletter
Kosh, A. E., Greene, J. A., Murphy, P. K., Burdick, H., Firetto, C. M., & Elmore, J. (2018). Automated Scoring of Students’ Small‐Group Discussions to Assess Reading Ability. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 37(2), 20-34.
Murphy, P. K., Croninger, R. M., Baszczewski, S. E., & Tondreau, C. L. (2022). Enacting Quality Talk discussions about text: From knowing the model to navigating the dynamics of dialogic classroom culture. The Reading Teacher, 75(6), 717-731.
Murphy, P. K., Firetto, C. M., Wei, L., Li, M., and Croninger, R. M. (2016). What REALLY Works: Optimizing Classroom Discussions to Promote Comprehension and Critical-Analytic Thinking. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1): 27-35.
Murphy, P. K., Greene, J. A., Firetto, C. M., Croninger, R. M., Duke, R. F., Li, M., & Lobczowski, N. G. (2022). Examining the effects of quality talk discussions on 4th-and 5th-grade students’ high-level comprehension of text. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 71, 102099.
Murphy, P. K., Greene, J. A., Firetto, C. M., Hendrick, B. D., Li, M., Montalbano, C., & Wei, L. (2018). Quality Talk: Developing students’ discourse to promote high-level comprehension. American Educational Research Journal, 55(5), 1113-1160.
Murphy, P. K., & Quality Talk Team. (2021). From Theoretical Roots to Empirical Outcomes: The Interdisciplinary Foundations of Quality Talk in Taiwan. The Theory and Practice of Group Discussion with Quality Talk, 1-21.
Wei, L., Firetto, C. M., Murphy, P. K., Li, M., Greene, J. A., & Croninger, R. M. (2019). Facilitating fourth-grade students’ written argumentation: The use of an argumentation graphic organizer. The Journal of Educational Research, 112(5), 627-639.
Wei, L., Murphy, P. K., & Firetto, C. M. (2018). How can teachers facilitate productive small-group talk? An integrated taxonomy of teacher discourse moves. The Elementary School Journal, 118(4), 578-609.
Related projects
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
