Science Teachers’ Discursive Moves Following Unintended Student Responses to Their Question of Higher Cognitive Demand

Abstract

When students provide unintended responses to cognitively demanding questions, science teachers may face a challenge of how to sustain the cognitive trajectory of the interaction without reverting to an authoritative stance. In this qualitative single case study, we examined the discursive moves employed by three experienced Life Sciences secondary school teachers in South Africa when students provided unintended responses to questions pitched at higher levels of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. Drawing on video recordings of eight lessons, 12 interaction episodes were identified and analysed using an integrated framework comprising the Initiation–Response–Feedback pattern, the revised Bloom’s taxonomy and Hardman’s student talk move categories. Three categories of teacher discursive moves were inductively derived: pressing moves, escalating moves and interaction-regulating moves. One move, elaborating, was categorised as ‘other’. These moves were used by the teachers to sustain the interaction. However, we also found a recurring pattern where the teachers bypassed student-generated questions in favour of the teacher’s original line of inquiry. Interaction-regulating moves played an important role in opening, sustaining and closing interaction episodes. The findings highlight the need for teacher education to support teachers not only in maintaining cognitive demand during classroom interaction, but also in creating opportunities for deeper conceptual exploration through student contributions.