Teacher, text, and inquiry science: Mediating instructional conversations on content, reasoning, and informational text.

This dissertation is a case study of an accomplished elementary teacher and her fourth grade students as they work in an inquiry science environment using a text in the form of a scientist's notebook. The text was specifically designed to interplay with students' first-hand investigations. It is a descriptive study of the instructional moves and decisions of this teacher as she negotiated the competing goals of learning how to read informational text, learning science content, and engaging in scientific reasoning. The goal is to provide research on the mediation of text that is discipline specific and designed to complement a first-hand inquiry in the context of an elementary classroom. Although the focus of the study is on the teacher's instructional moves, it is impossible to talk about teacher mediation without discussing the kinds of challenges her students experience in learning from the text. Earlier research with the notebook texts on the topic of light (Cutter, Vincent, Magnusson & Palincsar, 2001; Ford, 1999; Palincsar, Magnusson & Hapgood, 2001) captured the role of the teacher in mediating interactions with text. Findings related to the role of teachers were: (1) teachers help to make explicit connections between the texts and students' first hand experiences, and (2) teachers guide and shape discussions in multiple ways (e.g. modeling their thinking about the scientist's questions, procedures, data and claims) (Magnusson & Palincsar, 2004). It is hoped that this dissertation will extend and add to what we know about teacher mediation of these texts, especially the mediation of features such as figures and tables. Findings of the study include the type of learning community that facilitated instructional goals, the content and reasoning opportunities that were taken up or omitted, and the teacher's instructional moves that supported learning from informational text.PhDEducationReading instructionScience educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125798/2/3224666.pd