In the film's most moving scene a high-school teacher discoursing on "Moby-Dick" to his enthralled students speaks eloquently about 19th-century whaling, Herman Melville's troubled life, the working class and the tragic hero in literature.
The Classroom Discourse Analysis Tool (CDAT) is not meant to evaluate teachers' classroom discourse, but to reveal (a) teachers' discourse patterns with the lens of scientific reasoning and inquiry and (b) levels of students' engagement in the classroom discourse.
However, few have focused on how teachers' discourse strategy can be used in more specific ways to build subject-specialized genres of the discipline, such as scientific explanation.
The possible implications of CDAT analysis are to explore the relationships between teachers' discourse patterns and students' achievement along with changes in their reasoning skills.
The most possible implications of CDAT analysis is, first, to explore the relationships between teachers' discourse patterns and students' achievement along with changes in their reasoning skills.
First, to build predictive validity, the relationship between the disclosed teachers' discourse patterns by CDAT coding and students' learning outcomes needs to be studied.
Second, with the quantitative data produced by CDAT analysis (i.e., LOD, the numbers of reasoning components used, levels of teacher feedback), various relationships between teachers' discourse patterns and other intended outcomes in a PD project.
The individual indicator and overall ratings of EQUIP and TIR by the two coaches were compared with the results of CDAT coding of the same teacher classroom discourse by the authors, to see if they supported the same interpretation of teachers' discourse patterns.
For this study, inter-rater agreement is considered a better fit because the CDAT coding is more likely to reflect the teachers' discourse characteristics rather than a rater's opinion about the relative levels of performance.
Although teachers' questions, prompts, and feedback have significant effects on students conceptual understanding and reasoning skills (Duschl and Gitomer 1997; Hardy et al. 2010; Nystrand and Gamoran 1991), characteristics of teachers' discourse and how they affect classroom discourse to be scientific need to be studied more.
