The Ever with LA condition significantly influenced two outcomes: Requesting Reasoning and Percent Productivity.
In addition, an LA requesting reasoning was significantly more likely to elicit student reasoning than any other LA statement (p < 0.05, Mann-Whitney U test; Figure 3).
The number of speakers was a significant predictor of higher use of Requesting Information and Requesting Reasoning, and Group ID significantly predicted higher use of Exchange of Quality Reasoning and Requesting Feedback (all shown in Table 6).
These authors found that "direct teaching" (our Providing Reasoning category) was much less successful at getting students to generate warrants than "probing and clarifying" interactions (our Prompting Question and Requesting Reasoning categories).
To understand more about the nature of student discussion, we characterized each transcript, using seven global codes that reveal how students use reasoning and questioning: Exchange of Quality Reasoning, Reasoning about Multiple Answers, Hedging a Reason, using Analogy or Example, Requesting Information, Requesting Reasoning, and Requesting Feedback (each described in detail in Table 3).
Groups who regularly worked with an LA were 2.5 times more likely to use Requesting Reasoning, all else being equal, and had a higher Percent Productivity (71%) than those who did not interact with LAs (59%; Table 5).
Questioning was used in almost every discussion, and the three types of questions we coded were frequently used in combination: 94% of discussions included more than one type of question, with Requesting Information the most common, followed by Requesting Feedback, and then Requesting Reasoning (Table 4).
When considering a subset of the discussions (only the groups who had a chance to interact with an LA; Table 6), the number of speakers predicted only higher use of requesting information and requesting reasoning but did not have a significant impact on any other characteristics.
"What about you?" "A")., then a direct request for reasoning ("Why did you think it was C?"), and a statement of a reasoning that sometimes included a request for feedback ("It is A because of [reasoning statement], right?").
Finally, the least common LA interaction beside simple acknowledgment was directly requesting students' reasoning.
