As standardized tests receive more critical scrutiny and fall into more disfavor, members of the educational community search for alternative measures of assessing schooling and learning. If one of the goals of education in a democracy is to encourage students to express, develop and share ideas, the discussion setting is a logical arena in which to investigate and evaluate learning and teaching. Although the data generated from examining teacher-student discourse may fit less neatly into traditional patterns of evaluation, it is suggested in this paper that such discourse can provide pertinent information about teaching styles and student learning which cannot be gleaned from standardized tests. (Author)