The activities involved in coding conversation sequences and the lack of attention given to their systematic validation within the field of speech communication are discussed in this paper. The paper first reviews briefly the assumptions underlying relational coding and the implications of viewing these activities as practical accomplishments. It…

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a comparative morphology of groups which would be applicable to the whole of social scientific research. The key to the morphological classes suggested is not a focus on the group system itself but on its relationship with the next higher system--the group system's environment. The information exchange…

A classroom observation procedure for recording and quantifying complex, sequential interactions between subject and teacher or peers has been developed. Two instruments, used in tandem, test hypotheses concerning the consistency of the subject's interactions. The Sequential Record, which is used to record observation, is analyzed for repetitious…

The use of Kruskal's nonmetric multidimensional scaling model for analysis of classroom interaction data is discussed. Four distance models are proposed which lead to multidimensional representation of single sequences, sets of sequences, and behavior categories using symmetric and conditional proximity options of the model. Results of application…

Persons interested in examining and improving instruction in the schools have long been aware of the need for more objective techniques to examine instructional processes. Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories provide an objective technique appropriate for studying the verbal, student-teacher interaction in classrooms; it can be applied in…

Describes a method with data analyzed from two lessons on the quantitative assessment of content structure in classroom dialogue. Kinetic structure analysis was used and the fundamental coefficient of structure was calculated for each lesson. The method should provide new directions for looking at verbal interaction in classrooms. (PS)

In this paper we propose that Interaction Analysis studies, which focus on the process-product relationship between types of teacher--student interactions and learning outcomes, present only part of the learning picture. Clearly, not all teacher?student interaction patterns are equally effective for students at different ages and stages of…

The coming era of Web 2.0 focuses on users' active online participation and interaction. Among such interactive media, the blog is one representative tool of online knowledge construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the behavioral patterns and the depth of knowledge construction when using blogs for teachers' professional development.…

This study aims to translate tenets of social constructivism into practice via a scaffolded modality of learning. It is hypothesized that hermeneutical nature of passage interpretation could create "affordances", Van Lier's (2000) term, or "interactional opportunities" which are psycholinguistically and developmentally valuable…

Second grade children were pretested for the ability to conserve, after which conservers were paired with nonconservers. Pairs were then instructed to resolve their opposing answers on the conservation tasks. (JMB)

A review of the literature on reciprocal self-disclosure indicates that scholars have limited their investigations to one aspect of disclosure--intimacy--while recent research suggests that disclosure is a multidimensional phenomenon. A study was conducted to assess the possibility of reciprocation of intimacy, amount, and valence (positive or…

A model that depicts communication as a dynamic ongoing phenomenon is presented in this paper. The key elements of the described model are: environmental factors, actor/auditor, image, perception, messages, channels, intrapersonal feedback, and consensus of meaning. An axiomatic basis is provided for each variable to serve as rules of…

This paper proposes a general principle of topic resources as a key principle of conversation. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the notion of cohesion as a condition in which interactants perceive that their utterances are related to one another and presents the "given-new" strategy (in which the interactants…

A study was conducted to identify the independent and conjoint influence of attitude similarity and initial interactions on interpersonal attraction to relative strangers. The 124 college students who were participants in the study were informed that they would be working on a project with either an attitudinally similar or dissimilar stranger…

This study observed the communication behavior within ad hoc and established groups and compared the two types of groups on several indexes of interaction patterns. Ad hoc groups were individuals who had no in-group activity with each other prior to the experiment. Established groups were individuals who had nine 50-minute sessions of ingroup…