10/25/2022
By James Nehring

The School of Education invites you to attend an Ed.D. Dissertation Defense by Jose Reyes on “The Question Formulation Technique as a Tool for Making Sense of Literary and Informational Texts.”

Date: Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022
Time: 3:20 p.m.
Location: This will be a virtual dissertation defense via Zoom. Those interested in attending should contact james_nehring@uml.edu to request access to the Zoom link.

Dissertation Chair: James Nehring, Ed.D., Professor, School of Education, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Dissertation Committee:

  • Michaela Colombo, Ed.D., Professor Emerita, School of Education, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Kaitlyn Angulo, Ed.D., Scholar in Practice, School of Education, Assistant Principal, Nashoba Regional School
    District, Bolton, Massachusetts

Abstract:
The new wave of quasi-national English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, Science, and History curriculum standards that have been developed since 2010 place strong emphasis on inquiry. Collectively, these frameworks’ foreground traits such as independence and curiosity, which are associated with college and career readiness. The authoritarian and monological culture of schooling, however, is not conducive to developing these traits. Even though teachers generally recognize the importance of discussion, a key component in the development of independence and curiosity, it rarely occurs in practice. In addition, students do not ask many questions because teachers’ questions dominate classroom discourse. This imbalance between teacher and student talk and questions creates a “hierarchy of success and failure” (Rose & Martin, 2012, p. 9) and constitutes a metaphorical border that restricts access to learning for nondominant groups (Gutierrez & Larson, 1994). This study explored how the Question Formulation Technique protocol (Rothstein & Santana, 2011) might potentially disrupt the monological discourse patterns and power dynamics that are typical of classrooms at Spring Public Schools, a diverse, mid-sized district, by providing the opportunity for students to generate questions, tap into their funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2006; Moll et al., 1992) and build envisionments (“the world of understanding a particular person has at a given point in time”; Langer, 2011, p. 10) of literary and informational texts. Teachers and students from one seventh-grade ELA class, one sophomore ELA class, and one sophomore Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History class participated in this study. The quality of the discussions and envisionment-building was higher in the two sophomore classes, where the teachers used more explicit framing moves during the QFT and post-QFT discussion. With few notable exceptions, students were not observed tapping into their funds of knowledge. Results from this study suggest that framing moves play an important role in allowing students to build envisionments and tap into funds of knowledge during discussions of literary or informational texts.