Nystrand

As I've read through educational research articles over the past week, I've been frustrated by the fact, which has been mentioned in class, that researchers predominantly seek to affirm their research question. Whatever the research question, whether it's looking for a cause and effect or a correlation, it would do the educational field just as much service to show that something does not work as to show that something does work. For this reason, I feel grateful for education researchers like Martin Nystrand, who has suggested, in response to the current policy climate of calling for evidence-based, scripted, pedagogical practices, that these very scripts be researched for their effectiveness. In "Research on the Role of Classroom Discourse As It Affects Reading Comprehension," Nystrand reviews discourse literature in the United States in the last century and a half, and concludes that classroom discourse influences student learning in positive yet indirect ways. He posits that researchers should study how these currently popularized pedagogical scripts affect classroom discourse, one assumption being that if an evidence-based script adversely affects classroom discourse, then, perhaps, this script does not truly improve student outcomes/achievement. Obviously, the other assumption is that the script does indeed improve student performance. Let's start seeing some of that research!