The roles of teachers and types of questions in the science classroom : A study of communication patterns in high school level biology lessons

Abstract: Teacher-student communication in the classroom is crucial for effective student learning and a teacher can play different roles by asking related questions. Teachers use of the right questions at the right moment stimulates and invites the students to have a closer look, reinvestigate or revisit the problem. The teachers play various roles while asking the questions to continue the classroom discourse. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate various roles of a high school teacher in a science classroom discourse. The study also pursued how these roles are related to the types of questions asked by the teacher during classroom communication. A framework, constructed by Chen and his colleagues, has been used to categorize types of teachers’ roles to find the relationship between the roles of the teachers and the types of questions asked in a science class.  A case study has been presented in this report with observations from two high school level biology lessons.  Both audio and video recording were deployed to capture the lessons as well as a notebook was maintained. These recordings have been transcribed for a qualitative data analysis. In this study, five types of questions have been observed in two biology lessons: concept, confirmation, remembering, challenging and encouraging. Furthermore, based on Chen and his colleagues Framework, only three roles of the teacher was found: dispenser, coach, and participant. The findings revealed that the concept, confirmation and remembering types of questions are related to the teacher role as dispenser, the challenging types of questions are related to the role as coach and encouraging type of questions are related to the teacher’s participant role. The teacher acted mostly as a dispenser in the classroom discourses. There were some rooms where the teacher might exercise more as a coach and participant to improve the classroom interaction. No connection between the content of the questions and the role of the teachers was found from the observations. Therefore, this study suggests that further research should be continued with a broader scope to analyze the teachers’ questioning roles, its relationship with the content of the questions and its impact to promote student learning.