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Collaborative reasoning ah, is an approach we've developed
to ah, classroom instruction
ah, to make a big leap beyond the usual ways
of classroom discussion,
ah, which are ah, called discussion but are really
a question and answer session.
Well collaborative um, ah, reasoning is intending ah
to promote children's independent, creative
and critical thinking
and to be very personally engaging
ah, which a school is usual- often is not
ah, especially for ah,
children who haven't been very successful in school,
or children from um,
disadvantage minority groups or boys.
So this project has been running ah, for
ah, since the early 1990s, but ah, we
hit our stride in the late
ah, 1990s and now have a ah, a string of findings
that I think you'll find quite interesting.
Ah one is that ah, after participating in as few as 4
of these discussions,
of 15 or 20 minutes in length,
children consistently in now a total of um,
8 quasi-experiments,
write reflective essays
that contain better developed arguments, that is
arguments scored blind by our raters,
to contain more satisfactory arguments, counter arguments,
rebuttals, uses of text, ah, evidence.
And ah, we've done these studies here in Central Illinois.
Our original paper was ah, Reznick et al. 2001,
ah, we've extended theses studies to ah, China and Korea.
Ah, we had a 2008 publication by *** et al.
ah, called ah, "Collaborative Reasoning in China and Korea,"
where we show comparable results
ah, with ah, Chinese children,
including children from a ah, small village
ah, with ah, less- with ah parents
with low levels of education,
almost none of the parents were high school graduates.
Ah, another ah, finding from ah, this research
is enhanced motivation and interests.
Ah, we assessed that in ah, several different ways.
One is with um, ah, questioner a- ah emotion check lists.
We also have adults who don't know what's going on
ah, read engagement of children
in ah, various kinds of classroom activities-
always read en- engagement higher
during collaborative reasoning discussions.
A reference here would be our very recent paper by
***, Anderson and Nguyen-Jahiel.
Nguyen-Jahiel is the person who just called me on the phone.
Ah, [clears throat]
that's a really interesting study because ah, it involved
um, Spanish speaking children,
some of the immigrants, some of them born in the US
but with limited English, English language learners.
Ah, we expected to find ah, that ah we could make it-
give a big boost to the language development
of these children and indeed we did.
Ah, we were able to show ah, improved reading, writing,
listening, and speaking
with just 8 sessions of collaborative reasoning.
What else can I tell you?
We've learned a lot about um, ah, the ah, social process.
Ah, we ah, find ah, that
ah, good ideas once our strategies for arguing
introduced by innovative children,
ah in a- a discussion group
ah, will spread from child to child and occur
with increasing frequency.
Ah, this phenomenon has been studied by a sociologist
where it's called ah, such things as diffusion.
Ah, we ah, we're investigating it
on a micro-scale in classrooms
and we use the child friendly ah, phrase
a- the snowball phenomenon.
So the rolling snowball ah, gets ah, ah, momentum
and gains in size.
Ah, we find um,
ah, that children discussion participation ah, improves.
One reason it improves is that child leaders emerge.
Um, ah, [clears throat]
a paper about emergent child leadership
is by Li and others
ah, bears a 2007 publication date.
I should have given you the original
citation for the snowball phenomenon,
it's Anderson and others 2001.