CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

This paper reports on an analysis of some manifest, surface and verbal characteristics of the classroom behaviors of students and teachers in the first, sixth, and eleventh grades of urban Missouri schools selected for their composition relative to black and white population. Findings indicate that: (1) on the average verbal participation by students increased from the first grade to the sixth grade, but decreased from the sixth grade to the eleventh grade; (2) sim-tar results mere found for the average length of individual student utterances; (3) the percentage and length group responses decreased with increasing grade level; (4) students in first and sixth grade lover class classrooms said less overall and had shorter utterances than did students for those grades in middle class classrooms; (5) in contrast, black eleventh grade students said more and at greater length than did white eleventh grade students; (6) for first and sixth grades, fewer multi-person responses occurred in the middle class classrooms than in the lover class ones; and (7) in these two grade levels, teachers in the lover class classrooms showed less lexical diversity than teachers in corresponding middle class classrooms. (Author/TA