Middle and high school students' perceptions of how they experience text-based discussions: A multicase study

Our multicase study supports the importance of listening to students. Their words suggest much about their social lives and histories in and out of school, their insights into classroom talk about texts, and their understanding of their own roles as participants in small- and large-group discussions. They know each others' roles, too, and hold each other accountable for fairness in their participation. Students expect to learn from discussions and are quite disappointed when a discussion is designed in a way that seems less than productive to them. As we listened to their words, we realized how helpful their comments were to our own perceptions of textbased discussions and, in a larger sense, to our understandings of negotiation, position, and ways of participating. We realized too that we wanted to hear more, and we plan more studies to do so.