Interaction Geography: Classroom Discussions
The interactive visualization and figures on this page use interaction geography to visually explore classroom discussions in different ways, revisiting a famous example in teacher education known as the case of Sean Numbers from the work of renown teacher educator Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball.
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Shapiro, B.R., & Garner, B. (2021). Classroom Interaction Geography: Visualizing Space & Time in Classroom Interaction. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 54(5), 769-783. PDF
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Data for Sean Numbers is used with special permission from Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball and University of Michigan, see Sean Numbers-Ofala.
Data from the 1999 TIMSS VIdeo Study is publicly available at the following link. The TIMSS 1999 Video Study is a follow-up and expansion of the TIMSS 1995 Video Study of mathematics teaching. Larger and more ambitious than the first, the 1999 study investigated eighth-grade science as well as mathematics, expanded the number of countries from three to seven, and included more countries with relatively high achievement on TIMSS assessments in comparison to the United States.
The figure below shows screenshots from the interactive visualization that compare student and teacher movement and conversation during a classroom discussion. Figure 2A superimposes the teacher’s movement in purple over the movement of four focal students (in gray) who move or speak during the class discussion. Figure 2B shows the teacher’s movement, but also includes each of her conversation turns, represented as purple bars along her movement path in the floor plan and space-time views. Each bar corresponds to an utterance, indicating when and where she spoke; the height of each bar indicates the length (in words) of each turn of talk. Similarly, Figures 2C-F show the movement and conversation of the four focal students — Sean, Mei, Cassandra, and Nathan.
