Abstract
The purpose of this research was to examine the nature of scheduled teacher-student writing conferences with confident and less confident students. The participants of the study were fifth-graders from a public elementary school in the Southeastern United States. The guiding assumptions of this study were 1) the nature of conferences can be investigated by focusing on the length, number and functions of questions asked, content of the discussion (ideas/mechanics), participants’ roles and praise statements; and 2) the nature of student participation during conferences varies based on their level of perceived self-efficacy. A qualitative study design involving multiple case studies was used. Data were collected in both classrooms using the pre-and post Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (Pajares, Miller, & Johnson, 1999) as adapted from Shell, Murphy, & Bruning (1989), as well as students’ written performance scores from students’ writing samples, audio and video-taped teacher-student writing conferences, audio-taped interviews with teachers and students, and field observations. Collected evidence was described and interpreted using qualitative methods. Qualitative data that came from the analyses of recorded writing conferences also presented that conferences of students with higher and lower levels of self-efficacy differed in terms of focus, ownership, conference agenda, turn taking, frequency of talk, numbers and functions of the questions asked, numbers of praise statements provided by the teacher, and amount of outside interruptions. This study has implications for practitioners and researchers.
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