Reasoning as a scientist: ways of helping children to use language to learn science

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Pupil grouping and organisation of classes
Science
Speaking and Listening
Thinking skills

What was the "Thinking Together" Programme?

The project used a programme of twelve lesson plans called ‘Thinking Together’ (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2004; Dawes & Sams, 2004) designed to raise children’s awareness of spoken language, group discussion skills and effective ways of working together and apply these to the study of science and other curriculum subjects. This programme is based on the researchers’ previous work, and focuses on the development of “Exploratory Talk”, an explicit collaborative style of reasoning. All of the twelve lessons involve a teacher led introduction, a group discussion and a plenary session. The first five lessons are aimed at raising children’s awareness of how talk could be used for working together and establishing a set of ground rules for discussion that will generate talk of an “exploratory” kind. The other lessons encourage children to apply these developing discussion skills to the study of science, mathematics and other subjects. In the project, each of the science lessons applied a specific talk skill and targeted a specific scientific concept. Group activities involved the use of educational software called Science Explorer (Granada).

The ground rules established in each class encourage children to:

share all relevant information;
invite everyone to contribute to the discussion;
respect and consider all ideas;
make reasons clear;
negotiate challenges and alternatives; and
seek to reach agreement before acting.

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Research Home Themes \| Find digests \| About the digests resources glossary researchers contact TRIPS Introduction How did pupils benefit from the talk and reasoning strategy? How did the pupils' talk change? How does working collaboratively lead to better understanding? What was the "Thinking Together" Programme? How were pupils encouraged to "Think Together"? What is the theory behind the "Thinking Together" programme? How was the study carried out? What are the implications of this research? Where can I find out more? Send us your feedback Collated digests To view/remove/add notes and save your collated digests click here Get Word Reader Reasoning as a scientist: ways of helping children to use language to learn science This digest found in Pupil grouping and organisation of classes Science Speaking and Listening Thinking skills Send to a friend Word doc 70KB Printer friendly Collate for later What was the "Thinking Together" Programme? The project used a programme of twelve lesson plans called ‘Thinking Together’ (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2004; Dawes & Sams, 2004) designed to raise children’s awareness of spoken language, group discussion skills and effective ways of working together and apply these to the study of science and other curriculum subjects. This programme is based on the researchers’ previous work, and focuses on the development of “Exploratory Talk”, an explicit collaborative style of reasoning. All of the twelve lessons involve a teacher led introduction, a group discussion and a plenary session. The first five lessons are aimed at raising children’s awareness of how talk could be used for working together and establishing a set of ground rules for discussion that will generate talk of an “exploratory” kind. The other lessons encourage children to apply these developing discussion skills to the study of science, mathematics and other subjects. In the project, each of the science lessons applied a specific talk skill and targeted a specific scientific concept. Group activities involved the use of educational software called Science Explorer (Granada). The ground rules established in each class encourage children to: share all relevant information; invite everyone to contribute to the discussion; respect and consider all ideas; make reasons clear; negotiate challenges and alternatives; and seek to reach agreement before acting.