Student Thought and Classroom Language: Investigating the Connection

Alina Reznitskaya

I propose to conduct an empirical investigation of the connections between 1) specific features of group interactions experienced by elementary school students and 2) individual student performance on multiple measures of argumentation. The study is designed to test increasingly influential, yet under-researched, theoretical assumptions regarding the role social interaction plays in individual learning. Processes of instruction and related outcomes will be examined concurrently, resulting in a comprehensive picture of argumentation development.Argument Schema Theory (AST) will guide the proposed investigation. AST refines social learning models by integrating them with schema theory, an independent theoretical tradition. AST will be examined in the context of Philosophy for Children (P4C), an alternative educational environment that places social interaction at the center of its pedagogy.The study will use pairwise random assignment to allocate classrooms to two treatment conditions: P4C and traditional instruction. Three discussions will be videotaped in participating classrooms at three time intervals. Numerical summaries of process variables will be generated from the analysis of discussion transcripts. Outcome variables will be extracted from pre- and post-intervention performance on individual argumentation tasks. The relationship between process and outcome variables will be examined through the use of regression-based techniques.

About Alina Reznitskaya

Alina Reznitskaya was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her first career in the US was in business. After working as an auditor for the Chicago Board of Trade, she returned to school to pursue a degree in educational psychology. Reznitskaya received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She then spent one year working as a post-doctoral associate at Yale University. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey where she teaches graduate courses in quantitative research and educational measurement. Her research investigates educational environments that promote the development of argumentation and reasoning.