The Role of Classroom Discussion

Abstract

Past research has shown that students in schools with greater levels of open classroom discussion, have more positive attitudes toward other groups and hold more democratic attitudes. Students do not learn citizenry only by knowledge acquisition; school practices such as classroom discussion foster critical thinking, help students to understand others and reduce closed-mindedness. Students with a higher exposure to classroom discussion were hypothesized to display more tolerant attitudes to other groups and hold more egalitarian values in general. The analytical strategy in this chapter uses a three-level path analysis with support for equal rights for women, for all ethnic/racial groups and for immigrants as outcomes. Appropriate variable centering and random intercepts for schools and countries enabled relationships between classroom discussion and the outcomes to be determined. Open classroom discussion was found to be positively related to egalitarian values across all samples, accounting for 5 to 8% of school variance, depending on the outcome.

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