Wait Time in Mathematics Teaching

Definition

Research on the effects of the amount of time teachers wait for student responses after asking a question.

Characteristics

Research in this area began in the 1960s in the science education field (Rowe and Hurd 1966) and asked the question of what connections there might be between the time teachers wait after asking a question and the cognitive level of students’ responses. Tobin (1986) found, in a scientific study set in a whole-class mathematics instructional setting, that there were improvements in teachers’ and students’ discourse, including length of student responses, as well as higher mathematics achievement with increased wait time. More recently, the encouragement to teachers to wait longer than the typical 1s (though not more than 5, according to Tobin (1986), as advantages are lost) has gained further prominence by being seen as a key element of formative assessment (Black et al. 2002). Future research questions include research on gender- or other group-specific...